I am going to be making an 8 part true crime podcast about this man that was always just slightly out of focus.

Michael, if you’re out there, please come home.

Inventing Your Frustrations

This episode is a good example of providing everyone with the ingredients to make at least 2 basic dishes and then throwing in one culinary pipe bomb and watching at least 1 person go up in flames

this episode the contestants were given Broccoli and Stilton Cheese as well as chicken breast, lemon and garlic with the ingredient they weren’t meant to even look at being an orange

despite the option to make a middlingly fine Broccoli and Stilton Soup being right there, nobody dared go that simple – this is MASTERCHEF FOR GOD’S SAKE! So instead Canadian Scott decided to stuff his chicken brief with broccoli florets and stilton like a sort of unconstructed soup

and because they had to hedge their bets on someone amongst this episode’s cacophony of misguided culinary ambition, Gregg desperately tried to compliment him on the broccoli and stilton combination while John tried not to laugh

Scott was not the only one to stuff their chicken breast as Angela, who is 2005 made corporeal

had lofty ambitions of making a Chicken Kyiv. The problem was the only kyiv ingredients she had were a chicken breast and garlic so she improvised with Stilton and Sesame Oil

meaning what she had actually served up was just chicken oilier than a cheap cologne seller stuffed with rapidly congealing blue cheese which she assures us was a message from God

Gregg was perfectly happy to convert and worship at the Altar of Chinese Stilton and declared it the best plate of food they’d had this episode. This was less a testament to Angela’s cooking and more an indication of everyone else’s level failure. For John however, it was on sight with Angela

2005 John Torode was but a wig short of being a drag queen. It was always a reading challenge for him.

The only person to fall foul of the orange was Amelia who made an orange juice and garlic marinade for the chicken and completely failed to heed the warning of John standing in the corner singing “Orange and Chicken” in the voice of a haunted doll from a Blumhouse horror movie. She did at least end up with a plate of food that looked normal and didn’t have stilton cheese leaking from every orifice

but that did belie the fact that the taste of pure fresh orange juice and garlic would set your mind on fire

she was under no impression she was hanging around and we stan a self-aware queen. Sam however fried his chicken breast in soy sauce, steamed his broccoli and called it a day with a level of pride and confidence that nobody should ever possess

he seemed to have misunderstood the assignment and believed if you finished before the 30 minutes was up, you could just summon Gregg to eat it

now with 15 minutes to add to his dish he could’ve done any number of things. He instead chose to cover it with a bowl and do nothing else, which I guess is better than stuffing it with stilton cheese.
Sam truly deserves a Victoria Cross in the IDGAF War. But to be fair, while Sam was an easy elimination, Henry who would eventually go through to the next round hadn’t done a great deal more except sprinkle some fried onion around his chicken and broccoli and call it a Salsa

it’s not really a meal but I can forgive it for it will not surprise anyone to know that I love Henry with my entire heart

what can I say, my type is anxious men who look like birds.

Lastly we have Michael who went on quite the emotional rollercoaster as he places a completely unseasoned chicken breast on a funeral pyre of carrots and onions and chucked it into the oven

he took one look at what he’d done and was filled with such a deep cosmic horror that he had no choice but to run away

he didn’t even turn the oven off – he just threw his apron down and skedaddled like it was his own personal Sodom and Gomorrah, which may or may not have been incredibly ironic given his profession

There wasn’t even an attempt to get him to stay, they just let him flee into the glaring daylight to become one of the official MasterChef Cryptids alongside the Mince Stuffed Mushrooms and the “Professional Diner, Gregg Wallace” chyron

I’m sure he takes the record for the shortest amount of screentime a contestant has ever had at just 53 seconds.

An Invention Test Ranking
1. Michael’s Non-existent Chicken
2. Angela’s Chinese Stilton According to Gregg
3. Henry’s Druidic Circle of Fried Onions
4. Amelia, I Think You Were Done Dirty
5. Scott’s Unconstructed Soup Stuffed Chicken
6. Sam’s IDGAF Chicken
7. Angela’s Chinese Stilton According to Me

Given that Michael had self-yeeted, they only had to eliminate two contestants. Sam was the obvious goner because he’d spent more time trying to trick Gregg into eating his chicken early than actually cooking anything. I honestly thought Amelia should’ve been spared and a coin should’ve been tossed to decide whether Scott or Angela had committed the greater against stuffed chicken. However, Amelia did also zest a lemon in a way that would make even Richard Blackwood raise an eyebrow

they were right, she deserved to go.

Brekkie-ing The Ice

The original Professional Kitchen Challenges really are fascinating – we’re never going to return to a point where they’re proudly showing industrial sized tins of Baked Beans from unknown brand names

this time they were doing a breakfast service at the Cock Tavern where Scott would be shackled to the omelette station

and Henry would be cooking eggs that looked like a gore scene from a Cronenberg movie

and while he happily hummed the theme tune from The Fly, he left plenty of half finished breakfasts lying around for head chef and icon, Carmen, to find and sort out for him

and while Carmen put Henry on the naughty step and took one of his gold star stickers away, Angela served as dog’s body as she picked up Henry’s slack and really thrived going on to be deemed the most employable. However Scott has the job from November through December

Ho! Ho! Ho! I’ve got the perfect gift for you

from jolly Old St. Nick himself!

A Two Course Race

Nowadays you cannot go a single episode of MasterChef without someone mentioning they like fusion food because they once rubbed paprika on a roast chicken. In 2005, the very idea of fusion food was something of a taboo

I suppose 20 years of being exposed to the some of the most questionable examples of fusion food (OH, I HOPE I ONE DAY GET TO MR. TANDOORI SUSHI) is probably the best cure. Also, nowadays “fusion food” means something completely different because in 2005, Angela’s controversial fusion dish was Chinese spiced duck on a bed of peppers

the real fusion was the fact Angela called it “Thai duck”, John called it “Chinese Duck” and India Fisher went for the lesser-spotted catch all “Asiatic Duck”. The dish was also introduced by India as “another Angela Original” with an incredibly heavy sigh because it had had to follow another hall of famer for Most Insane Plate of Food as Angela dared to ponder “What if I just served the sweaty warm salad you get in an Indian Take-away?”

nothing can beat Angela describing how she’d scooped out the innards of her tomato and stuffed it with mozzarella while just about doing jazz hands when she says “and it’s warm!” as John looked at her like a parent watching their child’s 16th failed attempt at a cartwheel

before being possessed by the spirit of Coco Chanel and telling Angela to take at least 5 intrusive thoughts out before setting foot in a kitchen ever again

Angela would walk away from this critique believing she still had a 50% chance of being the winner of this episode. Which honestly, slay, women should have more blind confidence.

With Angela not winning friends with tepid salad, it was down to Henry and Scott. The latter obviously winning because John and Gregg had seemingly forgotten Henry even existed as they started LOUDLY gossiping about him right in front of him

the palpable feeling of “Should I even continue?” that emanated from Henry in this moment was just about nuclear. He did end up powering through being the proverbial chopped liver. Not that his food was particularly ambitious having started with perfectly fine wild mushrooms on toast

followed by a main course of sea bass en papillote that he hadn’t even bothered to take out of the tin foil, presumably in the slight hope Gregg and John might get a scrap in their fillings

the fish was beautifully cooked but his vegetables and white wine he’d cooked it with weren’t cooked out enough.

Scott proved to be defenceless against the urge to stuff chicken with cheese but this time, having been given free rein, he was shoving three different kinds into a chicken leg served alongside a pair of potato… things(?) that bare more similarities to the Pokemon Goomy than a pile of potatoes ever should

2005 was also a time when you could just say literally anything as Scott declared that chicken legs were an underappreciated cut of meat. Gregg wasn’t entirely convinced by his cheesey appreciation of the chicken but they liked the technical skill and the fact there was no broccoli being forced into the chicken either.

Scott was the only one that went with a dessert, his being a Sabayon laced with frangelico which had Gregg reminiscing about his days drinking Amaretto Frappes until someone emasculated him

RIP Sigmund Freud, you would’ve loved Gregg Wallace.

Scott’s sabayon ended up being a roaring success

it wasn’t hard for it to be declared the best dish of the episode given what it was up against.

A Two Course Menu Ranking:
1. A Horrible Tart’s Sabayon
2. Just OK Mushrooms on Toast
3. Chicken and Goomy Potatoes
4. Henry’s Sea Bass en Booby Trapped
5. Angela’s Original Anonymous Asian Duck
6. You Don’t Win Friends With Tepid Salad

The honour of going through did go to Scott who had to go through the distinctly mid-2000s event of calling your family to tell them the good news on your tinny little Nokia phone

and while that jubilation went on, Angela looked like an X-factor contestant who’s about to pick a fight with Louis Walsh

she could’ve been the MasterChef AbLisa.

Next Time on MasterChef: Hide The Banana!