And that’s a threat, Marchand.

Celebrities and Gravy continues to be the most turbulent relationship in the world.

Too Cloche for Comfort

I really do think this would’ve made a better first heat – last week seemed a little low energy and a bit of a slog whereas this week’s personalities feel much more dynamic. And by “personalities” I do mean Harry’s pecs

slightly disappointed he’s not using his stage name, Nitro. H from Steps has just given in to forever being known as H from Steps, stop pretending you’re too good for it! But I suppose that does also mean that this attempt at a Pear Pie won’t haunt his television career because it’ll always be Harry’s Pear Pie and not Nitro’s Pear Pie

this might be one of the funniest plates of food someone has ever served on MasterChef because the execution is just… so not an actual plate of food. It’s just stewed pears sitting in extremely undercooked pastry with ice cream that’s barely anything more than very cold custard. And it’s not for a lack of trying, he seemed to be genuinely trying very hard and having a great time.

While Harry got on with making a vague concept of a dessert, the others were all on main courses. Although I do think John and Gregg could’ve convinced Chloe Burrows quite easily that her duck breasts were actually fruit and tricked her into making a duck cheesecake. Instead they just played a game of Old MacDonald’s Farm

Chloe is this year’s Compulsory Love Islander – she now hosts a podcast that promises interviews with celebrities dishing gossip. I had a scroll through their archives and… did not recognise a single name so to me it’s basically overhearing someone bitching about their coworkers on the bus

but she’s getting good numbers and I didn’t see any sponsorships for Better Help so good for her. My expectations for influencer podcasts-that-are-actually-just-YouTube-shows are on the floor.

Chloe wasn’t planning on being overly ambitious with her duck and by that I mean it was the Celebrity MasterChef 3 Things on a Plate Special

which of course left John and Gregg begging for a sauce – the funniest part of which was Gregg telling her to just mix jam into stock and Chloe being utterly repulsed by the concept

it is the only time we managed to see her eyes, her eyelids have more muscle power than Harry. I don’t know how the eyelash extension girlies do it.

Joining Chloe in the realms of not quite knowing what to do with poultry was Eshaan who got a bucket of chicken livers

and immediately tried to backwards engineer the Nando’s menu

this would ultimately boil down to Eshaan grabbing anything red and spicy and throwing it into a blender like Mojo Jojo making the Rowdyruff Boys – who I just found out have a very complicated resurrection lore and were made in a prison toilet like contraband moonshine?????

there’s just something very funny about reading about the Powerpuff Girls murdering people who are canonically children.

Anyway, Eshaan’s toilet bowl and Chemical X Nando’s chicken livers looked perfectly fine, even if they did singe the nose hairs of anyone that got within 15 paces of them

but unfortunately they were a little raw in the middle

but at least he’d also made his own flatbread to have something to fall back on as showing a little more skill.

While Chloe pondered the differences between fish and ducks

it was actually Danielle who got to dramatically reveal a massive plaice that barely managed to fit under her cloche

I think a flatfish would be my personal nightmare to have to prepare – I wouldn’t even know where to start and like Danielle probably would’ve done my best to just ignore it for as long as possible

plaice are the post-5pm emails of the fish world. You better believe I’m only answering that at 9am tomorrow no matter how many exclamation marks and capital letters URGENT you put in the subject line, babe.

Her biggest mistake was believing that cooking asparagus could demand enough of her time as she whacked it in the oven to roast it for about half an hour in what was essentially a recreation of the Game of Thrones finale

the asparagus may have been immolated by genetically induced madness, but John and Gregg were both quite happy with the cooking of her fish if you ignored that it very much looked like it had been equally burnt.

Lastly we have Rochenda Sandall who was introduced as the breakout star of Line of Duty. Not to demean her work on the show but that’s just not true when the icon that was Chloe Bishop being the personification of Robyn’s Dancing On My Own and Kate’s turtlenecks exist

Chloe could’ve solved the whole thing in one afternoon if ANYONE stopped to listen to her. I also realised how little impact Line of Duty actually left on me, I ADORED it as it aired but now I think the only things I remember are “Being a rat, ma’am” and Steve using a corkscrew to open screw top wine

this is my Game of Thrones Starbucks Cup.

Rochenda had found herself face to face with a Romanesco Cauliflower which she was quite happy about as she’s in the midst of trying to embrace vegetarianism

*pins it to the The Cloche Challenge is Rigged conspiracy board*

She did end up making the classic Cauliflower Steaks which is all you can really do to make a dish centred around a cauliflower. It did look pretty good in that sort of trendy café serving brunches that aren’t even vaguely brunches kind of way

Hey, if I can order a fish taco at 10:30 in the morning, I will gladly put up with your pretentions about coffee and the glare I get for putting a spoon of sugar in my 4 week slow roasted Nicaraguan bean cappuccino.

A Cloche Dish Ranking:
1. Rochenda’s Trendy Not-Brunch-Brunch
2. I WILL DEFEND ESHAAN TO THE DEATH
3. Chloe’s Trifecta of Sauceless Adequacy
4. Harry’s Barely Real Pear Pie
5. Danielle’s Asparagus Funeral Pyre

Dinners and Losers

If Rochenda managing to identify a Romanesco Cauliflower hadn’t sent the fear of God into the other contestants, she wasn’t holding back in the Dinner Party Madness round

for her main course she was serving a Risotto alla Milanese with a fillet steak which amongst various chicken legs and a very unfortunate salmon, it was a bit like someone turning up to a school science fair populated by papier mache volcanoes with a fully functioning Tesla coil

and she would continue to shit on everyone’s baking soda and vinegar chemical reactions with her Madeleines and dipping sauces

now, I know what you’re thinking: “Ariadne, this is basically the exact same menu as Craig Doyle and you were mean to the nice man from morning telly!” Yeah but, Rochenda isn’t pretending to be a bad cook AND her laugh sounds like a geriatric rooster crowing its last cockledoodledoo. So… what do you expect from me, complete impartiality?

Harry and Eshaan were both cooking chicken – Harry going for a Jerk spicing and Eshaan opting for a Bengali wedding staple. Both had hits and misses, I think Eshaan’s was the most successful

the only problem was that Gregg Wallace continues to not fully understand how thigh meat works

I will die on a hill defending that as perfectly fine to eat – especially considering John’s similarly sized chicken leg that was cooked in the same pot, for the same amount of time was absolutely fine.

Harry had a little more difficulty fully selling his jerk chicken in a coconut sauce to John and Gregg

the sauce didn’t quite work and only served to wash out the jerk seasoning but the chicken was lovely

and he’d cooked his rice perfectly well which at this point in Celebrity MasterChef’s history is all you can really hope for.

The two of them did however both have stellar desserts – Eshaan rounding out his Bengali wedding menu with a bread and butter pudding that sounds absolutely divine

the ghee fried bread with saffron and rose water? I want all of it immediately. It was nice to see something we haven’t really seen on the show before. Harry’s dessert was a little more expected and potentially divisive because it was a stack of pancakes. However he had elevated it by making his own strawberry compote and redeeming his attempt at ice cream

it also came served with a very cute story about his daughter loving his pancakes so its 10s across the board

if they ever eliminate him I am going to be forced to write Nitro on MasterChef fanfiction. The twist in Chapter 3 is that he is actually three labradors in a trench coat.

Danielle was going for a standard roast dinner with extra MasterChef complications including pan-frying her lamb cutlets, making dauphinois potatoes, a parsnip puree and subjecting her carrots to a hate crime

the quest to get celebrities to serve anything with a sauce continues to be a case of squeezing water from a rock. Although, she would go on to serve vaguely custard flavoured water with her apple crumble

sadly she didn’t have enough money to fork out on the illicit tinned custard black market

but despite Gregg pouring what was almost certainly just egg flavoured milk onto his crumble, he claimed it worked

this is what wishing on the Monkey’s Paw for sauce ends up with, at some point you’ve just got to roll with it.

Lastly we have Chloe who had Googled “easy dinner party food” and called it quits on page 1 of BBC Good Food

and as a treat, she was giving John and Gregg their favourite: broccoli

big fan of her biggest take away from the first challenge being John saying “Your broccoli is well steamed” and not Gregg asking her to, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, make a sauce <3 <3 <3

The broccoli would continue to be the star of Chloe’s dishes as her brown rice was bland and her salmon had been partially immolated and teriyaki glaze reduced to jurassic era tar

but after a quick skin peel it was perfectly fine…(?????)

I THINK THE SALMON MIGHT DISAGREE. Even Chloe didn’t believe him

I think I love her? She’s gaslight, gatekeep, girlbossed her way into my heart.

The big issue would continue to be Chloe’s refusal to wrestle with the idea of serving anything with a sauce. However, one could argue that in the grand scheme of states of matter, technically Chloe’s brownie was just a sort of chocolate gravy struggling to keep the brownie charade going

and oh the confidence she had in this brownie…

she was preparing to enrol it at Westminster, sign it up for gymnastics classes to qualify for LA 2028 and send it back in time to kill Hitler. Sadly nobody told Chloe that 45 is greater than 30

the Chloe Burrows Experience may have been short, but what a ride it was

I fully support her and her ugly chocolate son.

A Dinner Party Dish Ranking:
1. Rochenda’s Milanese Suplex
2. Eshaan’s Marital Bread and Butter Pudding
3. Rochenda, They’re All Already Dead! (with dipping sauces!)
4. My Defense of Eshaan’s Chicken Can Only Get So Far
5. Harry’s Adorable Pancakes
6. At Least The Chicken Was Lovely
7. Danielle’s Crimes Against Carrots
8. Chloe’s Chocolate Gravy Charlatan
9. Danielle’s Crumble and Eggy Milk
10. Chloe’s Salmon Immolation

They tried their best to add jeopardy into who was going home but you knew Chloe was doomed the moment everyone had fun family anecdotes about their dishes while she just shrugged and said “Google made me do it”

it’s a pity she didn’t stay longer because I genuinely think she might have made Google’s AI Glue Pizza.

And so, another one bites the dust