We’ll see if Eau de Foie Gras catches on.

Buckle your seatbelts, we’re in for some turbulence.

Toeing The Airline

In order to decide which of the five remaining celebs were going through to Finals Week they were having to design a tray of food befitting of the most luxurious airline, a challenge mandated by the annual trip to the BBC’s dressing up box

it’s sexy kissogram pilot on paper but novelty 1950s milkman in execution.
John and Gregg however weren’t the only ones playing dress up as Wynne came out looking a bit like a guy on a Britney Spears themed stag do had to be rescued by the RNLI after he drifted out to sea on a banana boat

his choice of costume being to really hammer home his lesson on how air travel works

and each part of his tray represented one of those core components – Wagyu Beef for the land, a Vietnamese dressed Oyster for the Sea and then he ran out of ideas and gave them a Roasted Plum Cheesecake-a-Cotta because… the sun is yellow?

there’s been more tenuous links to a theme in the past, but perhaps a few meringue clouds wouldn’t have gone amiss?

As with most of Wynne’s dishes everything was cooked perfectly, although I have to say I have watched far too much of The Last of Us to not be entirely put off by the cluster of mushrooms reaching out over the steak like the hand of zombie clawing its way out of a grave

Gregg however was focusing on the more poetic positives

that sentence did me irreparable psychic damage, and I can only think me furiously trying to hit the word count on a university essay did the same to my lecturers – Kristen, I am so sorry for every single word in that Glee essay. Still got 75 for it.

Sadly nobody else was dressing up, so it was mostly just a game of making the fanciest thing you possibly could, which for Max was just trying to find the singular biggest prawn he possibly could for his Thai themed tray of food

and in true Max style, it doesn’t look particularly pretty, one day he’ll learn how to make a dessert not look like a surgeon just removed it from your abdomen but today was not that day. Both John and Gregg did however enjoy the flavour of everything, but there were some technical faults in that his Curry had gone a very stodgy texture

and his coconut rice was a Russian Roulette of whether the grains were cooked or not, but it looked more like a pile of rice than most piles of rice on Celebrity MasterChef are ever afforded the dignity of

I do however think a bowl of rice and An Ambiguously Asian Salad™ weren’t the most ambitious of side dishes, and I think Luca very much had the same problem on a much more obvious scale

it’s not giving me Luxury Airline so much as it is the Gwyneth Paltrow Prison Experience where obviously the complete lack of vegetables is considered punishment enough for trying to ring one million dollars out of her over a fake skiing accident. I really did think John and Gregg would bring up the fact it could have done with something, ANYTHING, outside of the beige spectrum to liven the tray up, but they were perfectly happy with the singular piece of roasted guineafowl and tiny little bowl of equally tiny little potatoes. But they did get a whole cheesecake each so… you win some, you lose some. And by “lose” I do mean get scurvy at 30,000 feet.

What made Luca’s relegation of his potatoes to a side dish look even more egregious was the fact that Amy had served her Duck a l’Orange and Fondant Potatoes as a singular plate and then whacked a great big mushroom vol-au-vent on as a side dish for his trip through 70s nostalgia, which sadly didn’t include a fondue (even the 70s had *some* concerns for personal safety)

although I’m not sure we can call it a true tray of 70s nostalgia without including a Black Forest Gateau, but I also respect her for serving what essentially amounts to a packet of butterscotch flavoured Angel’s Delight on MasterChef and calling it luxury. AND SHE’S RIGHT.

If she had gone for the Black Forest Gateau, she too would have run into the turbulence of whether a piece of cake counts as an adequate dessert (it does not. I do not have time to explain) so unfortunately Marcus was having to run that gauntlet all alone on Uzumaki Airlines

although they didn’t get too far into the weeds of Cake Discourse because before that could scupper his chances, he suffered from some unfortunate pork insulation with his nduja-stuffed pork fillet being verifiably quite raw

but I was happy that we finally had someone using Nduja because I missed the truly upsetting phrase that is “spreadable salami”

it’s exactly what it is, but I can’t help but feel the entire Calabria region would prefer you didn’t say it like it’s a weird American convenience food that can’t legally be exported beyond the States.
But at least Marcus could fall back on the fact his side dish of gnocchi was very nice, and somehow more of a complete meal than Luca’s entire tray.

Lastly we have Jamelia whose storyline on the show has mostly been that she needs to stop presenting her food like it’s 7pm on a Wednesday evening and so she defaulted to the fanciest plate of food she’d seen in the competition so far and basically just remade the pasta dish she’d done in the professional kitchen challenge

she had at least made it a little bit of her own by filling it with Saltfish and giving it a distinctly Jamaican twist with her choices of spices and I think you’ll always get a few bonus points for making garlic bread, the food of the Gods.
Her dessert also sounded really interesting, a sort of Jamaican Cornmeal Porridge turned into a Creme Brulee

and I genuinely think it’s a concept she came up with on her own, or at least a cursory google search doesn’t throw up anything too obvious.

An Airline Food Tray Ranking:
1. Amy’s Nostalgia Airways
2. Jamelia’s Copyright Fraud Airlines
3. Wynne’s Land, Sea and The Undead
4. Luca’s Truly Beige British Airways
5. Max’s Thai Breaking Salad
6. Marcus’s Downward Spirals

Things were not looking for Max, which was to be expected after he somehow became The Blog Fav™, a title of condemnation more often than not, then Marcus threw him a lifeline as he crashed upon the jagged rocks of raw pork

I truly thought he was a deadcert for Finals Week, but I have to say it’s always just *a little bit* fun to see a bit of a ringer crash out at the benefit for someone who is technically middling and bizarrely charismatic.

And so, we have our… do we call them Finalists? Final Weekists? (This show…)

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