I'm currently over halfway through Yakitate Japan, an adorable (and strange) cooking manga that some friends recommended to me ages ago. I began to watch the anime a few years back, but got frustrated with my slow connection's effect on my download speed and gave up just a few episodes in. Though it's pretty repetetive (behold, my Japan #xx has upset the expected victor and I have come from behind to win my baking contest!), it's also cute, funny and full of interesting information about food, cooking, and Japan. It also makes me crave bread. It even makes me miss cooking and baking, which is something I haven't done in years! It's a little heavy in puns (though the translators go to great lengths to explain the puns a lot of them really don't translate, which is a shame) but I enjoy the humor nonetheless. I also find a lot of humor just in the format - normally I read violent manga where the "battles" are physical ones. It makes me smile to see the same level of competition applied to baking. I remember the concept seeming a bit silly to me when I first heard about the anime, but competetive and "reality" cooking shows have truly exploded as a popular television genre here in the U.S. in the last few years, so the entire concept seems a lot more plausible to me now. Not to mention the baking competitions I used to watch on the Food Network before I stopped subscribing to cable.
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