Me hiding from my responsibilities.

This recap is in disguise.

Keeping It In The Family

In order to decide which five of our current seven contestant get to go be part of the fever dream that is both the spy-themed dinner and this community theatre production of Sappho’s James Bond

they would first have to make it through the obligatory challenge of making a dish inspired by someone special. The sources of inspiration for which are all incredibly normal as nobody swings completely wild with a cocktail inspired dessert while recanting a story about the drunk girl in the nightclub toilet that gave them really good advice or how Mr. Blobby showed what it truly means to be human and give in to the freedom of free will

Daniel would’ve Blobby’d and he would’ve Blobby’d HARD.

It was also a particularly good round, with only 2 or 3 technical missteps, the biggest probably being Frankie undercooking the rice for her Paella Arancini

a problem that could maybe have been solved had she not made them the size of standard issue competition dodgeballs (not that I’m complaining about a generous arancini, you keep doing you babe)

the source of inspiration for Frankie’s generous handful of balls was her husband who had proposed to her in Madrid which is why she’s making this Destination X clue of European miscellania (I am so excited for series 2, I hope they fix NOTHING)

she was serving her bowling ball of compacted rice with lemon gel and pepper drop peppers

the prawn and pepper garnish on the arancini making it look alarmingly similar to Grace’s comedy cocktail punchline

the dish did have some very good aspects to it – her prawn bisque was great and the actual flavour of her paella really packed a punch, you just unfortunately cannot beat a pie that looks like it was slammed into a paper bag by a woman called Sheila working in a Barnsley bakery that has a punny name like “Yorkshire Born and Bread”

you hardly need the powers of prophecy bestowed unto you from Apollo to know that the world’s most steak pie looking steak pie was made by Tony – inspired by his mother

the reason it looks a bit like it travelled to the MasterChef studio in Tony’s pocket on the way to t’mines in 1856 was that he’d covered the beef cheek filling while it was still warm, meaning the butter in the rough puff pastry top had begun to melt before it even hit the oven

but it only really affected the look of the top of the pie, the shortcrust pie case was fine and the bourguignon filling was tender and had great depth and if Tony ever makes a bad mashed potato it’ll be as calamitous an omen as the ravens leaving the Tower of London. Speaking of which, can someone check on those ravens because DIVA DOWN, THIS IS NOT A DRILL, THE DIVA IS DOWN

just as I thought I was on to a real winner with the Blog Favourite picks, Haugh and Dent decide to Ides of March one of them – was it because she stole the Kataifi pastry gimmick, Anna?

the issue of it being a very dry dish are completely fair – the rice and the mung dhal are maybe too similar in consistency to have with not a great deal of sauce and the pastry coated monkfish even if all of it was perfectly cooked on a technical level. Her dad would’ve loved it though, so… WHAT DO YOU KNOW HAUGH?

Kristen was having better success with the differing opinions between the judges and her family as she set about proving her husband wrong

her dish was a take on Sardines on Toast as her dad’s post-rugby meal of choice is nigh on identical to my Crisis Point Depression Dinner, right down to the Triangle of Legally Indistinct Cheese™

that’s not food, that’s a cry for help. But it is also a clever dish to take inspiration from because lets be honest, you can only really go up from a tin of John West Sardines and a Dairylea Triangle (her dad may have invented Girl Dinner)

it’s a deceptively simple looking dish but Kristen has such a good palate for pickles and dressings – I think a lot of people would struggle to make a dish with like 3 different pickled elements work as cohesively as she does.

As for Matt’s fish dish, he’d cooked Turbot and served it with a Smoked Kipper Butter Sauce and a side of Furikake Kouign-amann, which is a French bread and surprisingly not a Yugioh card

Turbot is not an easy fish to cook and he’d done it perfectly. It was a very accomplished example of fusion food, which Antos was also having great success with as he married the world’s most rectangular piece of roast chicken with a Chinese take-away

we’ve seen almost as many reinvented roast dinners as we have fish and chips wearing groucho glasses, but this was a particularly good example and I think does a good job of still feeling like a unique plate of food. I was also delighted because just as I thought the trend of erect root vegetables was dying out, Antos swooped in to preserve the tradition

it’s a dying artform like millwrighting and orrery making. Why aren’t we making more orreries?

Lastly we have Jhané who was taking inspiration from her mum

ok, that’s certainly one way of blaming her for the fact your plate of Ribs in XO Sauce and Crispy Rice Salad look like they flew into the studio off the back of a mesocyclonic supercell

it’s a thematically correct mess, ok? But for as much as it looks like the biannual clearing of the gutters, it tasted delicious and the ribs could not have been cooked better

I also enjoyed that while everyone got maybe 1 picture of their family members as inserts, Jhané was going to make you sit through the entire family photo album

oh, she was THAT diva.

A Dish Inspired By Someone Special Ranking:
1. The Erect Root Vegetable Revival and Second Most Unique Rectangle
2. You’ve Activated my Furikake Kouign-amann Trap Card!
3. Kristen’s Husband Is Wrong
4. XOXO, Beef Shortrib
5. Emergency Pocket Pie
6. Sabina’s Curry, Endorsed By Dad™
7. Frankie Mixed Up Croquet and Croquettes

Given that the reasons for getting eliminated at this stage of the competition become increasingly more slight, it wasn’t really a surprise that something like undercooked rice (which was like 85% of her dish) was what did Frankie in in the end

I will miss her earring collection – an unsung hero of the competition.
Sabina and Tony were also facing the chop and on a fairly similar level so it could’ve gone either way. Ultimately, despite Tony’s more technical error I think they decided to keep him because as a concept his dish hung together a bit better – not that you can go wrong with Pie and Mash. So unfortunately, it’s the end of the line for Sabina who mothered to the very end

you’ll always be famous *to me*!

I Spy

“Oh god, another Professional Kitchen Challenge!” I bemoaned as a shot of Ruffles London came into shot

and little did I know that this would be my favourite half an hour of MasterChef since… well, maybe just since Michael looked Jay Rayner dead in the eyes and made him eat a lilac tortilla

and to be fair to Michael, I don’t know how much more insane his dabbling in the Eldritch was than the sentence “The scallop is turned into a secret agent” is

the whole dinner is a Spy themed celebration of the world of British espionage but very much tonally executed in the same vein as the song “God That’s Brilliant” from the musical Operation Mincemeat (go see it.) The spy theme continued with the guests who I thought were all going to be historians with maybe a token relative of Churchill being there to reminisce about… his signature musk?

and there were a couple of historians and experts but there were also bona fide former spies

I would’ve thought the first rule of Spy Club being to not talk about Spy Club would most likely follow you into retirement because surely you still know a lot of information you probably shouldn’t even with an insulation period? Imagine an appearance on MasterChef just to eat a covert scallop was what got you killed.We call that Jane Devonshiring.

The mastermind behind the menu was Mauro Colagreco

and he was FANTASTIC – he completely understood the tone that they were going for as only someone who opens their menu with a risotto at bootcamp ever could

I was so ready to be annoyed with him but he was so lovely – he was just there to scream “WOO!” every time someone sent a plate of food out to the dining room and bear hug them after the ordeal

instead, the tough love was coming from Penfold over here

the passive aggressive “I think” as Kristen’s beef goes up like a gender reveal party in California <3

to be fair, she was meant to be smoking it because her ribeye main course was themed around Winston Churchill’s Smoker’s Cough

so while Kristen and Mauro painstakingly recreate a facsimile of Churchill through the medium of an indoor barbecue, steak, hay and a roll of celeriac, over on Question Time they’ve drained another lake creating AI Churchill to debate feminism with Yassified Frida Kahlo… for some reason

hard to believe that this was made by the same broadcasting organisation that created the art that was Grace Dent and Anna Haugh having to deliver their judging asides through Venetian blind lighting

between that and the sound editors being delighted that they finally get to open the folder titled “Royalty Free James Bond Music Stings”, the entire team was very much feeling their cinematic oats.

In order to avoid Kristen dying in a literally beefy baptism by fire

they moved the beef into the oven, leaving her on safer ground than Jhané who was trapped in a bit more of a Roland Emmerich disaster movie than the elegant intensity of a film noir spy thriller

her big misstep leading to it all unravelling a little bit was that she had forgotten to skewer the lobster tails before cooking them so they are had curled back up, making it hard to deshell them – as helpfully explained to us by Anna would had managed to escape the Maltese Falcon lighting cupboard for a few minutes

as for the dish, it was called “Disguise and Intrigue” creating lots of theories about how you disguise a lobster

it turns out, a lot like a scallop

It’s like Mata Hari is in the room!
Not to suggest that Mauro was out of great ideas after Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Risotto but the next 2 dishes were just various pieces of shellfish in a disguise about as convincing as that BBC reporter who went undercover as an elderly woman and looked like bricky Michael Myers

but for all the stress that Jhané had felt in the kitchen, it ultimately hadn’t shown in the dish which was described pretty enthusiastically as being a “dream dish”

and to be fair “lobster beneath a blanket of bicoloured carrots” is the sort of dish that comes to you in dreams, much like Hoisin Duck Pizza and Scallops a la Lovecraft.

Our other incognito shellfish was being made by Antos who much like Kristen cooking beef under duress, was having to shuck scallops for the first time after years of falling asleep to those oyster shucking ASMR videos

he did a great job and didn’t seem to have any major hiccups with the dish, which also seemed to be the case of Tony who was being given the task of a Vesper Martini inspired dessert

it was really great to see Tony being challenged to do something requiring a lot of precise finesse and to see him do it all so well – I was worried that all Tony’s dishes thus far were a bit of the same level and note so I’m hoping this gives him the confidence to be a bit more… insane.

I’m sorry that I’m a bit behind on the recaps, we had lots of exciting family stuff happening over the last few days and I was having issue with video playback making the screenshotting process A CHORE. It’s all sorted now and I wish I could say that it had been a really complicated fix requiring an expert and not just making sure my earphones weren’t connected to both my laptop and my phone…