The man was too stunned to speak.

I can hold a waffle sandwich while I recap.

It’s Getting Hot In Here

As ever, the second stage of the heat starts with the Mystery Box Challenge, this week unveiling a wealth of chillies and spices

which Tom decidedly to immediately eat because nothing has apparently taught him that sticking mystery ingredients in your mouth can backfire tremendously…

but don’t worry, this time he was taking precautions as he handled baby’s First Adventures In Spice: a single dried birds eye chilli like it was the Guatemalan Insanity Pepper

and it went about as well as you can imagine it did for Tom (and the milk budget)

the milk isn’t even the whitest thing in this picture.

So while Tom sat in the corner rocking and hallucinating a wise spirit guide tortoise who would ultimately prove no help at all to his MasterChef pilgrimage, Nitin was running around the larder defaulting to the tried and true Celebrity MasterChef tactic of Three Things and a Flatbread. However, there’s a new judge in town and he’s Scary and Italian so your end of the week leftovers are not going to cut it

and all he took from the warning that a bag of nuts, salsa and a flatbread is not actually a real plate of food, was to to put it in bowls

but on top of it being just an unscattered collection of bits, his use of spices was a little too timid and reserved, which was a disappointment from Nitin after his success with spicing in the first round of the competition.

Nitin’s extra 10 minutes had given enough time for Tom to somewhat recover and having felt the cold hand of death but moments ago was seemingly not convinced of his own mortality anymore

you nibble one chilli and suddenly you think you can fight a woman who can famously bench press an entire American fridge freezer? Luckily for him and every bone in his body, Emily eventually relented on her need for mince

and with his pity mince and barely still functioning hand-eye coordination he was going to try and muddle his way through a chilli con carne…

don’t worry, you can balance the accidental tablespoon of paprika (an accurate amount of paprika) with an inexperienced eyeballing of chilli powder

it’s Birdbox rules – Tom got a glimpse of some sort of unimaginable cosmic horror and you too, Giorgio Locatelli, must gaze upon it and weep

and despite the fact and and Grace lost roughly 90% of their taste bud functionality to Tom’s Certified Five Alarm Chilli, Giorgio’s biggest issue was the fact it looked a bit like something you serve to a moderately pampered labradoodle

the floor manager doing a sharp cough just off screen to let Giorgio know to tone it down, they cannot afford another workplace bullying scandal to rock the BBC

so it’s salt, SALT is the problem

and he was going to call Tom’s bluff by forcing him to eat the chilli he clearly hadn’t taste tested since he dropped an entire nuclear warhead’s worth of chilli powder in there

and on top of the Chilli con Canine being mostly just a mouthful of dried spices, his rice was also too stodgy

HOWEVER! To his credit, it did at least still look like rice which is more than can be said for Donna who was just mashing a rice-like paste into a bowl

Grace and Giorgio spent so much time worrying about the entire Scotch Bonnet chilli that she’d pureed into that they didn’t expect a truly all time great instalment of How Badly Can Celebrities From Light Entertainment Screw Up Rice [working title]

I’ve been cooking for maybe 20ish years now and I am yet to manage to turn rice into an object capable of blunt force trauma – I am genuinely curious as to how you even manage it! Maybe we pivot from the Giorgio Masterclasses being “Pasta Every Which Way” to “A Beginner’s Guide to Basmati Rice”?
Donna’s rice may have been turned into a material that could revolutionise loft insulation forever, but the accompanying monkfish was lovely!

and monkfish is difficult to cook – even in really nice restaurants I’ve had it served overdone and slightly cottony. It’s one thing I really won’t cook for myself – I say as though I can afford to buy myself monkfish on the regular even if I wanted to! It’s salmon on an occasional Wednesday if I’m feeling even slightly nouveau riche.

Emily, having given away her mince to the poor and fortunate, initially pivoted to beef (unminced’s version)

and had begun to concoct an idea for Thai Beef and then I can only assume someone whispered to her “Diva, you literally made that in the first round, you HAVE to do something else.” so it was a mad dash back to the larder like she was competing on The Eliminator for a slab of fish

which she then turned into a Nebulously Thai Fish with Coconut Rice

it was very well received by the judges, who really complimented her on the balance of her spices and aromatics. More importantly, she’d also redeemed herself on the rice front by making rice that actually still looked like rice and not some sort of cudgel, lest we forget

and she wasn’t the only one out for some sort of redemption as Eric really wanted to have a better day in the kitchen than last week – and also earn his boy scout badge for cooking

he was back on much more comfortable ground as he returned to his soul food with Fried Chicken and Mashed Potato on a Pancake

I doubt it’s happening anytime soon but god would I love to do a food tour of America – nothing beats food that’s kind of just shrugging and saying “yeah, sure, why not?” That’s the real American Dream, baby!

An Unofficial Invention Test Dish Ranking:
1. “Sure, why not!”
2. Red Rice Redemption
3. Ignoring the Rice Paste Elephant In The Room
4. Three Bowls of Things and a Flatbread
5. Chilli-innit?

Eye on the Ball

This week’s celebrity guest judge was a twofer with Zoe Ball and Zoe Ball’s Extremely Cool Steel-tipped Boots That I Must Own IMMEDIATELY

I know it’s going to be another £550 jumper situation and there’s no chance they come in a size 9 wide-fit so please break it to me gently. When will the fashion industry properly cater to women with feet built like a camel’s

when nuclear summer comes around again and we’re suddenly a desert dwelling civilisation, YOU’LL ALL BE SORRY.

Her brief for the day was for everyone to make their Ultimate Pudding with a call for either the traditional or the completely bonkers you can only recreate when you don’t know how to use a waffle machine

and she would indeed be getting both ends of that dessert spectrum. The traditional coming from Donna Preston who came with one goal and that was to howl “spotted dick” to the moon as many times as she possibly could

and I do have to respect that! It was also a damn fine spotted dick – maybe paling slightly in comparison to the religious experience of The Savoy’s Spotted Dick

the only real detraction from the dish was the fact her custard didn’t really taste much of the Irish Cream she had promised, but given that she could’ve been serving them Bailey’s Scrambled Eggs, I think they should really count their blessings that they got actual custard at all

but while Grace and Giorgio nit-picked over finer details, Zoe was just there to cram as much of everything into her mouth as she could – even going to bat for Tommyinnit’s Anti-waffles

although, Grace had offered some praise too because Giorgio looked like he might explode if the force him to be in the presence of God’s least favourite waffles any longer

but y’know, given that videogame streamers subsist entirely on G-Fuel and accidentally saying slurs, it’s really not much of a compliment – but also, Tom, I really wouldn’t argue against it

because “I can hold it while I play Bejewelled Blitz” is the only nice thing anyone is going to say about this

“that’s a very thin waffle?” I hear you enquiring, and I’d like to correct you because it’s actually TWO very thin, not great, waffles!

my favourite part is when he started to try and spread chocolate sauce with the consistency of marmite onto his insubstantial communion wafer of a waffle

there has never been anyone more in the trenches and the trenches have never been deeper.

Tom wasn’t the only one having batter issues as Nitin’s cake mix began leaking out of the tins halfway through the baking process

and, not to start food discourse, because lord knows we’ve had QUITE enough of that recently – let us enjoy our weird beige food in peace and we won’t talk about the Cheesecake Factory menu, OK? Back to the point at hand: CAKE IS NOT A PUDDING

save it for Celebrity Bake Off, Ganatra!
He was doing his spin on a Victoria Sponge, except layering it with a mango compote, a rosewater cream and spicing the sponge with chilli and cardamom – taking a very TommyInnit approach to spices

the only part of the spicing that the judges had any issue with was the large slice of a birds eye chilli sitting on top of each slice like a bomb threat

there was also the slight issue of the fact that because he’d put the cream and compote on a still steaming cake, they were melting out the side – an issue for Giorgio and Grace only, Zoe Ball loves anything the texture of slop

one of the best puddings we got at junior school was a custard slice, except they came with this horrible custard skin on top that you’d have to peel off. However, there was one girl, Caitlin, who LOVED the custard skin so everyone sitting at her table would give it to her and she’d put some of them in her pockets and then eat her wad of pocket custard throughout the afternoon. Speaking of wads of custard, here’s Eric’s Banana Pudding that might just be a legally distinct trifle

America, I know you know what trifles are!
The judges mostly liked it – some of the sponge inside was a bit dry but due to the liberal amounts of cream, custard and I assume banana, they were pretty thrilled with the whole thing!

Which finally brings us to Emily going all out with the gastropub favourite: a brownie accompanied by Miso Ice Cream and Salted caramel

it sounds amazing and also the sort of thing you immediately regret after eating because the sugar crash feels like a hangover after 5 double gins. Which just really means you had a great time! And I’ll do it again and again and again!

An Unofficial Ultimate Dessert Ranking:
1. Emily Goes For Brownie Points
2. Donna’s Greater Spotted Dick
3. Eric’s Non-union American Trifle
4. I will not entertain cake as a pudding.
5. What?ffles

Given Giorgio’s ever increasing sense of exasperation over the Tommyinnit experience and what might be the worst thing to happen to waffles, it was no surprise that Tom was leaving

I’ll miss the sexual chemistry most of all

this is my toxic yaoi.