Screaming, crying, throwing up.
Have you ever wondered how many times 1 man can invite an avocado to the wrong party?
Cloche Course
Well, after a couple of weeks of being lulled into a false sense of security by the first two heats with nobody making any absolute disasters, it turns out third time’s the chaotic charm because oh what nightmares this week’s quintet of celebrities managed to make in only 60 minutes of television. I mean, I expected it from Kirsty Gallacher who is known to put carrots in a paella and has somehow managed to evade being cancelled for it
she makes Jamie Oliver look positively Valencian.
Sadly they hadn’t tempted the Spanish Inquisition to pass judgement on her but giving her carrots and instead it was lemons for her, in what was a misguided effort at trying to make someone make a dessert as Kirsty would spend the majority of the challenges talking about how she likes to cook healthy food. Naturally this meant we ended up with an endive salad with a lemon dressing, somehow exhibiting less cookery than Chris Eubank boiling a butternut in butter for an hour
and Kirsty had to learn the hard way that one does not win friends with salad as the only positive critique she got was from John describing it as “a nice collection of things” like a parent congratulating their child on a makeshift nature table consisting of a stone from the driveway, a manky pigeon feather and a lichen covered stick.
The salad did mean that Gregg was a little ravenous which was probably fortunate for CLARKE BLOODY PETERS as Gregg wolfed down what was eventually revealed to be a Buddha Bowl
I think Clarke did the best he could with his mystery ingredient which was Banana Blossom – a vegan fish alternative. I wouldn’t have known what to do with it either so frying it in soy sauce and then burying it beneath anything and everything he could grab from the larder was as good a tactic as any. John wasn’t convinced, Gregg however did eat every scrap of it, which probably isn’t the greatest compliment because he did the same for Lesley Joseph’s Fish and E-Coli Vegetables
Lesley had drawn this week’s short straw and was thus given a whole fish which was viscerally beheaded in a manner of brutality I haven’t seen since I watched Saw
and instead of promptly throwing the poor fish’s head in the bin (or making a stock from it) she left it on the board to wallow in its own misery as she cut some tomatoes
John refused to eat said tomatoes, whether Gregg ate them in order to make up for the void that Kirsty’s salad left can only be discerned by John’s slightly concerned look as Gregg declared that he’d eaten the whole plate
after 17 years I imagine you eventually build up an iron stomach – I’m 90% sure the cure to any amount of illnesses may be found in the Gregg Wallace’s gastric acid.
While we’re on Lesley Joseph, whoever made the editing decision to do the staggered punch in on a cast photo of Lesley Joseph like she was the victim on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries needs to explain themself to me
WHY? THE SHOW HAS NEVER DONE THAT TO ANYONE ELSE!
Jimmy Bullard had ended up with Goat’s Cheese and there are two things you can do with Goat’s Cheese on MasterChef – you can make a Goat’s Cheese and Caramelised Red Onion Tart or you can make a baked goat’s cheese salad. Jimmy Bullard however was going rogue and doing neither of those things. Having clearly looked up how to make Moules Mariniere prior to the series and hoping he would be able to drag himself through at least one episode off of that he was making Mussels with White Wine and Goat’s Cheese Sauce
JAIL. HE DIDN’T EVEN MAKE THEM CHIPS! He just melted goat’s cheese into wine! I don’t care how well cooked those mussels were, the thought of a slowly congealing goat’s cheese sauce clinging to the mussel shells is deeply upsetting.
Lastly we have Richard Blackwood who eagerly proclaimed himself to be a good cook because he can cook a piece of tuna to a higher quality than the prison system. Sucks to be him though because he wasn’t given a piece of tuna and was instead having to deal with a pork fillet, which meant he defaulted to the one other thing he knows how to make: Coleslaw. Given the general quality of coleslaws over the last few days, I’m just glad he didn’t fry the cabbage. But I do also love that he clearly didn’t know how to make mayonnaise so his coleslaw was just carrots and cabbage dressed in honey. As for the pork, he had battered that and seasoned it with chilli for a shallow fry and it’s something of a miracle he didn’t burn the place down given that at some point he somehow stuck his planning sheet to the bottom of his pan
but he managed to plate up a dish eventually which alongside the pork and not-really-coleslaw-coleslaw included some roasted peppers, an unwanted avocado and some even more unwanted mashed potato
in his favour is the fact he cooked the pork really well. Going against him is just about everything else – putting mashed potato and avocado on the same plate feels like something that should end in a prison sentence. I guess he could put his tuna cooking skills to the test then.
An Under The Cloche Dish Ranking
- Honestly Nobody.
Oh-No-Miyaki
For this week’s Street Food Challenge the celebrities were having to try and identify the ingredients of and cook Okonomiyaki and part of the challenge would be trying not to laugh as John Torode made the word about 3 syllables more than it needed to be
and while most of them sat there scratching their heads and merely listing as many brassican vegetables as they could in 10 minutes, Lesley was pulling a Mel Blatt and boasting that she knew exactly what Okonomiyaki was because her son is a Japanese scholar, so she was at something of an advantage as she’s had the authentic thing before – this didn’t however stop her from loading it up with oregano and somehow mistaking white cabbage for chicken
but despite that, she did get praised for having the best pancake of the bunch, which wasn’t really high praise given that Richard Blackwood almost tried to bake a pancake in the oven using a roasting tin
and Clarke Peters had forgone the egg and merely tried to fry flour and potato in increasing amounts of oil
all of which resulted in a pancake he described as “looking like a pokemon” and perhaps I’m failing the culinary Rorschach Test because all I’m seeing is an Eldritch Wasteland
needless to say nobody really wanted to eat it, least of all Gregg who was already pushing his luck having eaten Lesley’s Fish Gut Tomatoes
but a judging contract is a judging contract and he and John just had to grin and bare it, much to Clarke’s own horror
and the verdict was that it was pretty much inedible, which wasn’t ultimately a surprise given that his identifying of the ingredients had mostly resulted in him repeatedly writing “potato” like he was having a breakdown in the Overlook Hotel. But they liked his oddly mayonnaise.
Sadly Gregg had managed to stop Richard from attempting to bake a pancake – the things I would have given to see that result. And for someone that seemed to be toeing the line of chaos for the entire challenge, his Okonomiyaki wasn’t too bad looking
fortunately for John and Gregg there was no avocado on the ingredient trays despite Richard sending out another invite to an unwanted advocado [sic]
also a big fan of the Dan Quayle spelling of Potato and the very sporadic use of capitalisation – he was just super excited about the egg, the garlic and the non-existent avocado (that’s my Holy Trinity).
His pancake, while sadly not baked, still wasn’t quite right as he had layered the potato on the batter which had created a sort of Mashed Potato Pizza, which is a horror on par with None Pizza Left Beef and imaginably on the menu of some cursed abomination of a pizzaria somewhere.
We weren’t completely robbed of baked pancakes though as despite Gregg’s best efforts to get her to not put her pancake in the oven, Kirsty still put her pancake in the oven, making what was more akin to a Frittata
it was more of a case of “out of sight, out of mind” with her, as she pulled a similar trick with her sliced pork belly – just shoving slices of it under her what-we-shall-generously-call-an-okonomiyaki like a Looney Tunes character sweeping things under the rug
she had done quite well in terms of identifying ingredients though but the dish still wasn’t quite right with the pancake being a little too dense.
Jimmy Bullard didn’t do too badly in the end either, and was the only celebrity to treat us to a perfect pancake flip
which was made all the more impressive as next to him was Clarke Peters trying in vain to flip his concoction of flour, potato and oil. The only thing really going against Jimmy’s plated up Okonomiyaki was the fact he was incredibly ungenerous with his toppings
I am however choosing to believe that he ate most of them, but John and Gregg were still pretty happy with the quality of his pancake, praising the fluffiness of it.
An Okonomiyaki Ranking
- Lesley’s Japanese Experience
- Jimmy’s Ungenerosity
- Crouching Kirsty, Hidden Bacon
- A Narrowly Avoided Baked Pancake
- Clarke Peters’s Eldritch Wasteland
Dinner Party
As ever we’re rounding off the first episode of the heat with a challenge to make the best dinner party dish they could – something we have seen Lesley Joseph attempt before when she hosted a Titanic themed dinner party on Come Dine With Me with sensitively named courses such as Leeky Potato Soup and Iceberg Pavlova
and a main course of Roasted Duck that involved her doing this
other highlights of the episode include Raef from The Apprentice being a celebrity, a mortified 5 piece orchestra sitting in her living room and Lesley Joseph wearing a captain’s hat crying tears of joy because everyone was actually able to eat her pavlova
sadly she wasn’t reviving the Titanic themed evening but was making the only dessert of the episode with her Tarte Tatin accompanied by a ladle of Brandy Whipped Cream
and if that wasn’t cream for you, they almost comedically zoomed out to reveal she had also served an entire jug of double cream
now THAT’S how you cater.
It was also a really well made tarte tatin – the pastry had crisped up nicely and the apples were soft, and it wasn’t a sodden mess! It was by far and away the best dish of the episode.
Lesley’s rapid improvement in quality sadly wasn’t to be mirrored by everyone else, although that does depend how you mark improvement because Richard hadn’t added an avocado to his dish this time and instead the oddest thing on his plate were the Honeyed Roast Potatoes which had caused John a great deal of anxiety
his Caribbean Spiced Lamb Chops went down a treat though and given the hit and miss nature of lamb and the fact he thought the pork was beef in the first round, he deserved the praise for cooking them this well
and John was just very thankful that the roast potatoes didn’t taste of honey
he was less enthusiastic about the fact Richard had served them completely dry lamb and vegetables with only the smallest ration of a chilli sauce to make up for it.
Kirsty and Clarke found them in a two horse race to do the worst things to rice that they possibly could – Kirsty going for the traditional and much beloved Rice Bludgeon
while Clarke went for a much more complex creation with his Vegetable Lasagne that was about as much as a Lasagne as Mel Blatt’s Open Concept Lasagne from last week’s quarterfinal. He was layering a variety of vegetables with “pulverised rice” and I still can’t quite work out if the rice was purposefully pulverised or if the script writer of the voice-over was being a shady little so-and-so. But the whole thing was accompanied by some extra roasted vegetables
as well as a “sauce” that was only a sauce in theory because in practice Clarke Peters seems to have invented a new state of matter and it’s going to be hard to beat it as the worst thing made on this series of Celebrity MasterChef but I welcome everyone to try
apparently it was going to be drizzled over the top and baked some more to tie everything together had he not forgotten the crucial ingredient that is ANY SORT OF MOISTURE.
But we still had the Not At All A Lasagne to look at which John turned out and proclaimed as “fascinating” like he had just discovered a new species of Galapagos Finch
it’s really hard to believe that someone didn’t at some point slip Clarke £50 to commit culinary seppuku because it’s kind of hard to afford to keep the guy who played Nelson Mandela twice around for more than one episode.
At least Kirsty had a fairly decent Thai Green Curry to soften the blow of her Rice Bludgeon
but Gregg and John weren’t going to go completely wanting for some decent rice because Jimmy served up a pretty good Pea and Mint Risotto topped with a fillet of fish
the only issue they had with the whole dish was the fact that he had put a little too much mint in the risotto, which is fair because he had put a whole mojito’s worth in there
and we are only but a few series away from someone making a Mojito Risotto (A Mojotto?) a reality.
A Dinner Party Dish Ranking
- Lesley’s Dinner Party Redemption
- A Virgin Mojotto
- Richard Blackwood’s Avocado Dry Spell
- Kirsty Gallacher’s Rice Bludgeon and Curry
- CLARKE PETERS, NO!
I really did think that given she had made a salad in the first round, a Japanese scented Frittata in the second and a rice bludgeon in the third that Kirsty would be the one to to be eliminated but that does all rather pale into insignificance when compared to Clarke Peters achieving the rare and presumed impossible Sauce Bludgeon, and kind of fairly, it was Clarke who was eliminated
I’m still not entirely convinced he didn’t do it on purpose.
and so, we’re down another celebrity
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