Maybe this time I’ll get a recap out on time. (she did not)

This recap is made out of leftover short rib.

The Line Goes Pop-Up

It was the turn of the second group of Knockout Weekees to take to BoxHall to decide who gets to make it to Semi-finals Week – I thought this WAS semi-final week but MasterChef: The Professionals is truly the show that just never ends! I am trapped in an endless cycle of cutting off one head only for three more episodes to grow, like Gareth trying to fry 200 pommes dauphines to order

and if that wasn’t self-punishment enough, he was roped in to emergency sandwich-building because Georgia, unable to pick 1 street food, opted to make 3

I think she needed a little bit more than an extra pair of arms, Sel had an entire bucket of arms

or at least she could’ve done with a two minute hug with Luke’s Emotional Support Garden Ornament Chicken

I *have* to imagine Luke brought that in himself because otherwise the reality is that these kitchens came fitted with metal-art chicken sculptures and not a mixer large enough to make enough choux pastry for 30 people…

suddenly realising why Anthony only gave everyone a single choux bun.

The general opinion of Georgia’s Yassification of the Olive Garden Tour of Italy Platter (for when you can’t decide between the Lasagne or the Fettuccine Alfredo) was that this is too much food

I THINK YOU’RE ALL COWARDS. But I do have to agree that she literally could’ve just made 90 of the suppli or 30 porchetta sandwiches and spared herself the humiliation of having an Emergency Gareth flown in

and having to throw Italian bits and pieces at a plate with Marcus and Monica haranguing her like a pair of Herring Gulls tag-teaming a cone of chips

she’s lucky this wasn’t an elimination round because she didn’t even get a compliment from the world’s most easily pleased man

nothing was funnier this round than everyone critiquing Mario’s dessert for being too sweet or not made correctly only to cut to Rizwan Ahmed having some sort of religious experience over how good he thought it was

Was it too much to ask him to just gas up Georgia’s pointless piece of flaccid aubergine a little bit?
Mario had done the only dessert – a Pionono served with saffron and Cardamom Creme Pat as well as a pot of Lavender Frozen Yoghurt

which in layman’s terms is “a bougie jam roly-poly kind of thing”

I believe there’s a compliment in there for those with the eyes to see it.

Mario was hoping that doing the only dessert would help him stand out but unfortunately he and the other three were all rather eclipsed by Gareth’s gourmet Cheesy Chips

he definitely did the best job of tapping into the ~spirit~ of MasterChef street-food where it’s something recognisable with a good twist fine dining nonsense – the fine dining nonsense being the admirable amount of butter

and I’m sure he won in a landslide vote not seen since George Washington ran unopposed in 1792

although I imagine there *might* have been 1 stray vote going somewhere….

which is a bit like if the electoral college representative of Kentucky tossed a vote to a really cool coyote he’d seen that morning.

I think Gareth’s biggest competition was probably Sel? But I might be biased because I am a Sel Stan and a sucker for a taco and my one little bit if Bad Ethics, As A Treat is ordering octopus whenever I can

if only he’d thought to call his Octopus Tacos “Octacos” (and most definitely NOT TacoPus..) he’d really have been tapping into the spirit of the street-food divine

just a portmanteau short of a perfection! I mean, there were also issues with his blue corn tacos that everyone thought were a bit chewy, but that was the least of Marcus’s worries because one taste of the scotch bonnet sauce and he was tasting sounds

and then making Marcus dunk his face into a bowl of jalapeno escabeche (a beautiful name for a baby boy) violates at least most of the Geneva Conventions regarding chemical warfare

Sel will unfortunately be missing the rest of the competition due to facing a criminal tribunal in The Hague. He’s in a queue…

Lastly we have Luke and his Pea Custard Tart with Harissa Lamb which I am yet to be convinced of as being “street-food”

I think it’s a very clever dish and one he can certainly be proud of and should keep in his arsenal going forward but who amongst us when given the chance to queue for any iteration of cheesy chips or the pea custard tart is choosing the tart? DON’T ANSWER THAT, I don’t want to be wrong.

An Unofficial Pop-up Dish Ranking:
1. Gareth’s Pomme Hydra
2. My staunch Defense of Sel’s OcTacos
3. Love, Love, Peas, Peas
4. Rizwan Ahmed’s Staunch Defense of Mario’s Dessert
5. Georgia’s Roman Street-food Was Not Built In A Day

Something that’s really funny about this whole process is that they don’t tell the winner that they don’t have to cook in the next round *at* BoxHall – they drag them all the way back to the MasterChef kitchen and tell them THERE. Were they concerned that Rizwan had been ballot stuffing in favour of that really cool metaphorical coyote? Divas, you didn’t *have* to make Gareth miss his kid’s birthday…

I hope you all felt as bad about this as I do for laughing as hard as I did over the “cucking” instead of “cooking”.

Fam, ILY

Like the previous episode, in order to save themselves from elimination the remaining four chefs had to lipsync for their lives create their version of a family favourite dish. And if you thought that maybe they’d have learned lessons in the previous round… NOPE

as a fellow Woman In A Rut™, I admire the dedication to refusing to embrace personal growth but diva, you struggled with 3 elements in the last round, DON’T ADD MORE!

the story behind it all is really sweet and the 100 year old family recipe book is a fascinating personal relic that she could ride all the way to the bank on this show – also, I’m glad her grandmother’s handwriting went fully appreciated

but there was nothing that really hung the ~assiette of granny~ together very well and she maybe could’ve just done the Creme Brulee and the Madeleines because as much as I love an Affogato, it didn’t add a huge amount of skill and the strawberry ice cream slammed betwixt a pair of meringues is… kind of a nothingness that I’m sure played to an audience better 100 odd years ago than it does now – they were still whipping out pineapples to impress the neighbours. Can you imagine if you confronted Georgia’s grandmother with Mario’s Cheesecake Ice Cream? It’d be crucifixes at dawn!

I want to make a point of WHY Mario was turning his baked cheesecake into ice cream, just on the off chance anyone from Bake Off is reading

DO YOU HEAR THAT?

I will be eternally angry about the Highly Decorated Basque Cheesecake In Less Than Three Hours Fiasco. The Basque Region gets to fire one (1) free missile at Berkshire in retaliation.
Mario’s biggest error in the challenge was forgetting that he was meant to be making a dessert for MasterChef and not a coastal town’s novelty gelateria where nobody cares that your cheesecake-flavoured ice cream tastes mostly of sugar and sits in your stomach like a cinderblock

HOW BIG WAS THIS SINGLE SCOOP OF ICE-CREAM?

I need something for scale, because Monica was acting like he’d served up a whole tub of Ben and Jerry’s to her???? Maybe they were overfaced because of Luke’s beef rationing making everything look bigger

you could build a man an entire harem of wives with how much short rib he’d left behind!

(friends fear she’s making biblical jokes again.)
Beyond Luke stuffing his pockets with embezzled short rib, his dish was near enough perfect – all it takes to convince me of that fact is this cheese pull

I am easily bought – all it takes is an ungodly amount of cheese or some mystifying tattoo choices

Sel can do no wrong in my eyes so long as that Cheshire Cat tat is grinning at me from beneath his collar. But maybe he also needs to take a government funded reeducation seminar on meat portions

at least everyone loved the salsa because they all got a bucket of that! I did think it was odd that they gave him a critique of it not being refined enough, I quite liked the presentation?

Marcus, this is how you ended up with an entire Timothee Chalamet of beef offcuts left behind!

A Family Favourite Dish Ranking:
1. Sel, you’re perfect, GET BEHIND ME!
2. Luke’s 3d6 of Beef Damage
3. The Ribs Left Behind
4. I Am A Nonsense Ice-cream Enjoyer, Sue Me
5. Georgia’s Polyptych of French Indecision

Ultimately Georgia and Mario made many of the same mistakes in this round that they did in the Pop-up Round – Georgia keeping just making picky bits for dinner (NO COMPLIMENTARY) and Mario’s never met an entire bag of sugar he didn’t want to funnel down your throat (kind of complimentary.)
Ultimately it was Mario going home, which I do think is a shame because I was really enjoying his showcase of Spanish cuisine

you were a really cool coyote.