It’s all gone a bit Line of Duty on Celebrity MasterChef.

All together now! RAAAAAAWHIDE!

Up In The Pair

In this week’s Pairs Challenge the teams were made up of Wynne & Sam and Jamelia & Locky’s Wandering Attention Span

with these hard fought battles within battles within melees within fracases being contested over Central European cuisine – Wynne talking Samantha through Schnitzel and Spaetzle while Jamelia had to do her best to not pelt the back of Locky’s head with pierogies as he went a bit Pie-rogue-y

I have disparaged the pairs challenge in the past (and I will continue to in the future) but perhaps it was maybe worth it just to see Jamelia spiral into her villain arc as Locky maybe listened to half of anything she said before the cymbal clapping monkey in his head started playing the Rawhide theme tune again

but you know, given that Jamelia came away from the challenge ready to give the ~Menansists~ something to really worry about, their dishes weren’t all too dissimilar

the main difference was the fact Jamelia had Pierogis while Locky had a bowl of Cornish Pasty Soup because he hadn’t had enough time to roll his pasta thin enough which was surprising given the amount of time spent singing the Rawhide theme tune

but he had also been delayed because he’d turned his whisk into a 5 car pileup of pierogi dough

and so while Jamelia’s pierogies tasted great, they mostly praised her for having the patience of a saint

to which I question, WHICH SAINT?

I mean, I guess St. Paul wasn’t great and there was St. Julian the Hospitaller and his bird-footed wife…

St. Julian was basically Goldilocks for 4th century Roman Catholics.

Sam and Wynne worked a little more smoothly with one another through their Schnitzel preparations, although they still had something in common with The Civil War Twins on the other side of the kitchen, which was doing awful things with dough – not that they were meant to be doing ANYTHING with dough

she was meant to be making a batter but Wynne’s accent was getting in the way (allegedly)

They did at least manage to course correct Sam’s turn down Pasta Avenue and their dishes were pretty similar save for the questionable pink colour of Sam’s caper sauce

and of course there was the fact you could have used Sam’s schnitzel to play a game of Schnitzel Othello as once you flipped it over, it was more than a little burnt

I will commend her for the flagrancy of the deception attempt while Gregg was standing directly behind her.

A Kerth Warning

Apparently Jamelia’s threats to never work with men again didn’t fall on deaf ears as the teams we re-split up along the gender lines

Jamelia and Sam were off to Luca, an Italian restaurant owned by Not Duncan James

while Wynne and Locky were sent to develop their own personal traumas at Fenchurch under the supervision of Kerth Gumbs and Kerth Gumbs’s Hat

Wynne kind of fell apart a bit under the stress of the professional kitchen and could not for the life of himself keep track of his duck arithmatic

not that having some “spare duck” on standby was unjustified given that Wynne was prone to incinerating it

the comedic timing of that duck bursting into flames behind Wynne as he talked about not wanting it to could have won awards at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Given that Wynne’s “spare duck” was about £30 worth of “spare duck” -I think Kurth was justifiably a little bit upset, although that was nothing compared to the fact Locky was serving up choking hazards

FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF HIS FACE!
To be fair though, I’m not entirely sure I would have been surprised to find a piece of a clingfilm in a plate of food that was served up like it was a high school science experiment

I cannot believe there are high end chefs still using dry ice in the year of our Lord and Saviour Jamelia 2023. Can you all stop it?

Given that Locky hasn’t coped with process at the best of times, he did do remarkably well in this challenge considering he was having to make like an octopus and manage 8 pans

(the other two are just really, really tiny) and rather appropriately the dish did also involve him having to wrestle an octopus

so while Locky developed a deep-rooted fear of octopi and joined a Clingfilm support group with Liam

Wynne was having to desperately suppress his flight response every time the printer printed off another order meaning he had to do more duck maths

to be fair, I have that response every time I have to do regular maths.

Things could not have been anymore different on the other side of town (nobody correct my limited understanding of London’s geography) as Jamelia received rave reviews for her pasta with people just about asking to meet the chef

and she was just generally having a great time living her Ratatouille fantasy

I can’t wait for her and Max George to spend the entirety of Semi-Finals Week starting up the Official MasterChef Culinary Cinema Discussion Group

everyone has to have watched Julie & Julia, Boiling Point and The Menu by next week. (The things I would give to hear Max George talk me through The Menu.)

Sam also didn’t do too badly and coped really well with what I thought was quite a big workload – she was having to prep a lot of Venison whereas Jamelia was mostly just having to boil pasta and plate things up in a neat enough pile, Sam had to cook venison sausages and grill venison loin to order

and as far as we saw, none of it was ever cooked badly and she only really needed a bit of supervision from Not Duncan James because she could be a little bit slow, and he needed to keep an eye on his cookware

this is why Sam had to go to Luca, Kerth could hardly afford to have Wynne wasting £30 of duck, let alone losing 8 tiny copper saucepans to Samantha Fox’s sticky fingers

how many tiny saucepans can your pockets hold?

Truck Sacked

For the first time in three weeks we have a Food Truck Challenge that didn’t explicitly give us a burger, although that does depend on how you answer John’s Philosophical Dumpling Quandary

because technically Jamelia was making a dumpling – deep-frying the dough and threatening us with a “chicken donut” but not in the unhinged way that Red’s True BBQ charges you £15.50 for this monstrosity

IT’S NOT GOOD and I defy anyone that ever orders it more than once for the novelty.
Jamelia’s was a much more sensible Curried Chicken Dumpling with a side of corn relish

and everyone was very much willing to queue up at Jam’s Dump Truck for it. (I made a typo there and I’m refusing to correct it.)

Locky was also going with chicken, mostly because he could coat it in yoghurt, shove it in the oven and forget about it for 20 minutes while he concentrated on making the one real technical feat of his dish – the flatbreads

I think it could have used a little something to make it just a touch more special – but you know, it was still more effort than somehow making the creation of two funnel cakes last a whole hour

don’t get me wrong, funnel cakes are great but funnel cakes do also only cost £2.50 at the travelling funfair which probably should have been ringing alarm bells long before she looked around and saw that Jamelia and Locky were both making their own breads and Wynne was having a crash course in basic crustacean anatomy

point to the ears of the lobster for me. I will wait.

Sam may have given us the first dessert of the Food Truck Challenge, but Wynne was the first to give us a full on Dessert Fake Out with his Lobster Cake and his Deconstructed Sushi Roll Ice Cream (with a tempura leek because Wales)

it is a dish I can only describe as being annoyingly clever, and I think Samantha would agree if the look she gave him as he paraded down the centre of the MasterChef kitchen singing a bespoke opera verse is anything to go by

never has someone grown this resentful of a funnel cake this quickly before – she will burn every single funfair to the ground. And you know, opera is great, but you have you got a gunshow?

thirst trap your way to the quarterfinals if you have to.

A Food Truck Dish Ranking
1. The Annoyingly Good Lobster Ice Cream Sushi
2. To Dumpling, Or Not To Dumpling? That is the Question
3. Marginally More Effort Than A Single Funnel Cake
4. Funnel Cakes £2.50ea (Chocolate Sauce 50p extra)

Nobody served up a bad plate of food in this round and I honestly thought we were in for another non-elimination which might have made me scream like Jamelia realising Locky was still busy rolling out Pierogi dough

but ultimately they decided that Sam’s Foxy Funnel Cakes were a little bit too low effort – even James Buckley put at least three things on a plate at any one given time

and she definitely wasn’t upset about the dipping sauce comments…

I know I say this a lot, but thank you so much for being patient and kind about the slightly wibbly wobbly publishing schedule – life is throwing me hell of a curveball and right now the blog feels like one of the things that’s really keeping me sane ❤️ (she says having read 6 articles about the worst things Catholic Saints have ever done.)

The third quarterfinal recap will be up tomorrow!

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