I want every part of this outfit explained to me individually.

Tragedy!

The Fame Games

For the first challenge of Finals Week, the remaining 5 celebrities all had to cook dishes inspired by a well known chef. With the doors of the culinary spectrum flung open wide, an entire world of culinary geniuses to choose from we somehow ended up with a pair of overlapping James Martins and then most of the other choices were the usual suspects: Craig opting for Yotam Ottolenghi while H threw popping candy at 15kgs of cake, did some jazz hands and shouted “HESTON BLUMENTHAL!”.

The only celeb opting for someone I didn’t actually know was Vito who was going for Italian MasterChef judge and hoarder of vowels, Antonino Cannavacciuolo

I was a little worried when Vito said his dish was something of a reinvented parmigiana. The worry stemming mostly from the fact Edith Bowman got eliminated for her parmigiana being “low effort”. However, as I said, this wasn’t an ordinary parmigiana. This was a Super Parmigiana as Vito shoved every Italian ingredient he could possibly think of into his tiny little dish

he might as well have just shoved an entire calzone into the middle of it as an extra little surprise. There might not have been a hidden pizza, but there were some mini focaccia breads which definitely make for a better accompaniment than Edith Bowman serving her parmigiana with a deep-fried twig

John and Gegg both really loved the mutant Everything Parmigiana and were really impressed with the layering of everything in the mass grave of anything tangentially Italian

I guess there are layers?

Over with the Duelling James Martins, the weapons of choice were of course Things You’d Find on a Gastro Pub’s Sunday Lunch Menu for £200, Alex. Harry going for Lamb Cutlets and Dolphin Noise Potatoes

and really pushing the boat out by choosing to actually serve his food with a sauce, MY GOD GUYS WE’VE DONE IT, THEY’VE FINALLY GOT THROUGH TO THE CELEBRITIES!

as uninspiring and boring as it is, it was a really well cooked plate of food. Or at least everything was spot on except for the carrots which were just glorified baby food

John, by the time any of you are done with H’s cake, you might need that Wiltshire Farm Foods Grade 5 Puree.

Rochenda’s dish had a few sources of inspiration. Most notable was her father-in-law, Bob, and his practice of making a curry and then serving it with battered cod he’d bought from the chippie

I love him, he sounds amazing.
Then she’d just had to sort of tack on James Martin as an afterthought because Bob is sadly not famous despite clearly being a mastermind and Google made her do it after a cursory search for “easy fish curry”. She pulled it off though and surprised John with how well she’d managed to present it despite presentation never having been an issue for Rochenda

with H having Augustus Gloop’d himself by the end of this challenge

the series is now very much Rochenda’s to lose. She’s by far and away the most accomplished and diverse cook of the bunch – she hasn’t had a single misstep whereas the others all seem to teeter on the edge of disaster at all times.

The last of the main courses was Craig and his Yotam Ottolenghi inspired lamb dish which he’d served butterflied and alongside some really good looking hummus, cumin flatbreads and za’atar potatoes

I would absolutely order this as soon as I saw it on any menu – I’m not even the biggest lamb fan but it really did sound gorgeous. The only problem was that he’d forgotten to put the fresh herbs into his slaw which obviously wasn’t enough to send him home for but did give John and Gregg something to pretend put him in as much danger as H yassifying Ms. Trunchbull’s Chocolate Cake

nothing about this even remotely suggests Heston Blumenthal? It’s just a chocolate cake with Popping Candy? No secondary flavour. No unusual presentation. No ill-advised deployment of a mollusc. It’s just a very silly cake that looks like it would get you eliminated in the first week of Bake Off. What happened, H?

A Famous Chef Inspired Dish:
1. BOB THE MASTERMIND
2. Vito’s Everything Parmigiana
3. Craig’s Stray Herbs
4. Harry’s Lamb and Baby Food
5. The Yassification of Bruce Bogtrotter’s Greatest Moment

I’ll go put on my clown makeup because I’ve been calling H the inevitable winner for all of Semi-finals week. I didn’t see the cake plot twist coming and thus he’s the first finalist eliminated

I’d bet a decent amount of money that if anyone can overcome the Dancing On Ice blacklisting from Strictly, it’ll be H.

Train, Train, Go Away

With the celebs whittled down to the Final Four it is of course time for the Wildly Impractical Catering Challenge! This year’s glorified Total Wipeout Obstacle Course of a location being the British Pullman train. Which of course means it’s a very special Gregg’s Flatcap Episode

somehow this didn’t end up being quite as chaotic as watching a drag queen trying to wheel a trolley laden with a 5 foot croquembouche across a cobbled courtyard while wearing 4 inch heels. In fact it was positively restrained by comparison. Only some of the cooking was going to be done on the train because they did get 2 hours of pre-train prepwork, which was most fortunate for Harry because I’m not sure how long he’d have lasted if he’d had to fillet his 6 halibut while suffering from travel sickness

he was doing the fish course, which was a halibut risotto that Vito had assumed the role of head chef from John Freeman for

Vito had instead found himself preparing 200 tomatoes for a starter that the British Pullman is apparently too posh to call a Tom-Tarte-o Tatin

my absolute favourite thing about this ENTIRE menu was how many of the diners, who were regularly travellers on the luxury moving restaurant or members of staff (sorry waiters, you’re not special enough, I guess), all said “I’m not a fan of <ingredient> but I liked this!” or “I was surprised the flavours worked”. Can you imagine sitting down in a restaurant, reading the menu and hating the sound of everything you’re about to be served and not being able to leave because you’re travelling at 90mph? Baby, that’s a high-speed hostage situation

I didn’t watch Nightsleeper, did it involve someone being forced to eat halibut risotto against their will before they reached Euston station?

Harry’s biggest achievement was undoubtedly managing to not be sick everywhere during this challenge but he’d also cooked his risotto and halibut perfectly so that’s nice.

Rochenda was on mains which was a Lamb and Fondant Potato dish. She was having to do the most on-train cooking. Whereas Vito was just baking his tarte tatins and Harry was reheating risotto and flash frying fish, she was searing and roasting rather large of chunks of lamb

her lamb cookery went perfectly fine. The fondant potatoes were more of a journey as she seemed to determined to turn them into some sort of explosive

but once they’d diffused that particular bomb threat, she’d served a good if slightly disappointing looking main course (no fault of her own)

it just doesn’t strike me as being particularly luxurious given that seems to be the Pullman Train’s WHOLE thing?

As for Craig’s dessert, it was the typical mousse affair – his biggest trial was trying to quennell whipped cream while moving at 90mph which didn’t come across as nearly death defying as I think the show was hoping

I know the train is obviously limited about what they can serve because the catering department is a glorified shoebox but… I wish the food wasn’t telling us that. This just looked so… meh?

And so, we move ever closer to the actual final, where one of our remaining 4 will be ditched: