Me watching all my favourites getting knocked out.

This recap smells of Italy.

Plate to the Future

The last half of the remaining contestants had a very eclectic vision of their futures: Munopa wants to open a Culinary Safari Lodge (meat source unspecified), Sophie continues to perform table magic with vegetables and Harry wants to be a very onenote vigilante

it’s hardly Batman. However we do have a constant in that Olivia just wants as many people as possible to know that she’s Italian

her being Italian is the Desmond to my Daniel Faraday

I’m going through a Lost renaissance right now and I’ve decided that the MasterChef contestants that would be the most beneficial to my survival in the same circumstances are Olivia because I think we’d survive by insistence alone, Harry the Vigilante Fishmonger, Gon for the same reasons Ian Somerhalder was there…, Fay because she’s a Financial Consultant and somebody has to be “talkin’ ’bout tha numbas!” and of course Naomi because I think she looks so much like Gretchen Grundler from Recess that she’d be able to figure everything out

and my role in this branching Lost timeline is that I like to think I’m a Sun Kwon but deep down I know I’m the duality of Nikki and Paulo having one episode, getting bitten by a spider and being buried alive. Or I’m Vincent the Labrador and I just periodically walk out of the jungle with a niknak in my mouth when the writers needed an easy way for the characters to find something.

At some point I have to actually talk about the food I guess, so we’ll start with Harry who the judges deemed the best of the day with his perfectly cooked Dover Sole which he’d served with a Beurre Blanc, Pommes Anna and a Braised Leek

it’s an extremely good dish with some well done classic cookery but I think my dish of the day was definitely Sophie pulling a Bree van der Kamp in season 4 of Desperate Housewives and creating a fake belly

my immediate reaction to “TVP” was “The Vampire Piaries?!” – I need to stop consuming deep dives into late 2000s teen dramas on YouTube, my entire inner monologue is now just Jenny Nicholson and Mike’s Mic arguing in snappy bon mots. It of course stands for Textured Vegetable Protein and Sophie’s Vegan Pork Belly Ramen looked really delicious

and the fact she’d both pulled a belly AND her own noodles out of the ether was really the ultimate death knell for Gon who was committing the crime of using packet noodles

which would maybe have been less questionable if you could really tell what he’d spent the hour and 45 minutes doing because it’s not like he was knitting prawns of out Textured Vegetable Protein. And on top of that, his Pad Thai Goong was just a very dry affair

Gon wasn’t the only one with saucy woes as Naomi’s Beef Cheek Gravy wasn’t so much a sauce as it was a gloop

which left the judges a little disappointed that they couldn’t coat the entirety of her dish in it to feel anything at all

it was still a pretty good plate of food – her roast potatoes looked phenomenal and she’d cooked the beef fillet exceptionally well

however the Beef Cheek Tartlet and her Carrot Puree were lacking in seasoning.

Trevor was also in a bit of danger with his Brill being slightly overcooked

however the rest of his dish was really well received and I think what’s mostly going for Trevor is that it’s very easy to give someone a journey narrative when their opening gambit was Bangers and Mash

he’s literally a perfect MasterChef contestant – so much so that I’m beginning to think it’s he who was grown in the lab for the express purpose of competing on the show and not FILTHY RINGER! Munopa who had also gone for a fish dish – opting for Sea Bass in a Mussel and Champagne Sauce

I’m not sure how this quite pertains to her wanting to open a luxury safari lodge dining experience in famously landlocked Zimbabwe but we can work out the logistics of the fish procurrence with that devilishly handsome and completely anonymous masked fishmonger later. The only aspect of Munopa’s dish that was really criticised was that the spring salad was rather unnecessary, but it’s always better to be told you did too much than too little.

The last of the main courses was from Olivia who had made Parmesan-filled Ravioli in a Beef Bourguignon Sauce

I’m so excited for Olivia to have spent the entire competition cooking extremely good Italian food and for her to wildly pivot to an entire menu of Mexican Botanas dishes in the final for absolutely no reason at all.

Lastly we have dessert from Victoria who was taking inspiration from Hull Fair

I don’t live in Hull so I thought this was going to be a sort of annual world food festival of some sort because you know, Hull was the City of Culture in 2017

Then Victoria started talking about hotdogs and candyfloss and it dawned on me that Hull Fair is a traveling funfair and not in fact a cultured gastronomic experience

I love her, she’s honestly iconic for this – spending a £20 allowance on like 2 rides of The Crazy Wave before wasting the rest of it on 75p bags of candyfloss and being violently sick in public was a seminal moment of my teenage years. I don’t care if Victoria’s metric ton of sugar in the shape of a Wacky Races dirigible was too sweet, it was charmingly silly

I got wildly distracted looking for that particular screenshot and ended up watching several episodes of Wacky Races and I NEED to draw your attention to Penelope Pitstop’s dashboard

Ah yes, Maslow’s Hierarchy of High Femme Needs.

A Future Signature Dish Ranking:
1. Pork Belly van der Kamp
2. The Masked Fishmonger
3. 🤌
4. Munopa’s Safari Sea Bass
5. Victoria’s Cheesecake Dirigible
6. Naomi’s Gloop Covered Beef
7. Trevor’s Slightly Less Than Brilliant Brill
8. Gon’s Goong’s a Goner

Gon was by far the easiest choice for elimination, his dish just hadn’t worked. However, even more egregious was the missed opportunity to say “Gon, you’re gone” – IS THIS AMETURE HOUR?

and with Harry and Sophie both serving extremely good plates of food, this left Munopa, Naomi, Trevor and Victoria as the choice for the next two to go home. Munopa was also safe as houses – that unnecessary salad wasn’t going to send her home. I think personally, I would have saved either Naomi or Victoria over Trevor however both of them ended up going home

I will never look a gift Trevor in the mouth, but I think I saw more worth saving in Naomi’s beef and Victoria’s cheesecake contraption.

What’s Your Anglesea?

For this lot’s first professional kitchen experience, they were off to Dovetale (a truly terrible restaurant name) where they cooked under the supervision of Tom Anglesea

and if you’re concerned about how Olivia, who like a shark needing to swim to live needs to mention she’s Italian to survive, would cope. Don’t worry, where there’s a will, there’s a way

she sadly had to stand looking contemplatively through the window watching Trevor get to make pasta for the first time

while she was stuck on the Obligatory Scallop Starter Station struggling to get to grip with mollusc maths

yeah, “miscounting” them

two for the diners, one for the chef, eh?

Also on starters was Sophie who was having a great time humbling Tom Anglesea who thought a savoury onion tarte tatin was a new and intriguing invention that he could debut at the 1964 New York World’s Fair

before Sophie gagged him a bit

and things would only get better for Sophie and much worse for Tom as he had CLEARLY overdone the example tarte tatin and nobody gave him a second take

don’t worry babe, you can hide your sins under a frisee salad

while Sophie’s first attempt looked spot on and perfectly caramelised

and having been put thoroughly in his place by accidentally picking an onion-based duel with a vegetarian (he’s got beef but she ain’t fucking scared of him), Tom was handing Munopa’s dessert training to Alex, The Best Souffle Maker in Mayfair^{[citation needed but I’ll still follow him into war and help him mutiny Dovetales]}

this was Munopa’s first dessert in the competition and they certainly weren’t easing her in with a Pistachio Souffle

I don’t know if a souffle’s difficulty has become more myth than actual fact but given there’s a 30% rate of someone on this show trying to sell an omelette in a cup as a souffle, Munopa did extraordinarily well and as far as we saw, she never had any that sunk or flopped.

As well as Trevor making the aforementioned Olivialess pasta, Harry was also on main courses and having his fishy life raft ripped away from him with a Lamb main course

he did very well, it was rather boring. Harry could very well win the whole thing but I need him to suffer just a little bit to feel like he earned it. Not a lot, just you know… puncture the fishmobile’s tyre or something.