Alas poor Yor-whisk!

Who amongst hasn’t rummaged through the bin for a churro?

The Team Challenge

So apparently Emily Campbell threatening to turn Jason Mohammad into a worm on a string hadn’t warranted an emergency change of format, so we’re starting with the Team Challenge. Or the “Service is Up” if you want to be lore accurate

The theme for this week’s Roleplay Restaurant was Mexico, meaning we mostly had to wait with bated breath about the inevitable British Taco/Tortilla Misterming

you literally said “tortilla press” WHY DO YOU THINK IT’S CALLED A TORTILLA PRESS?

The teams set up for this week were Nitin and Emily serving beauty and brawn

And while Emily ponders if that’s a slightly backhanded compliment or not, we’ll move on to the other team of with Donna and Eric playing Farmer and Farmer’s Wife

diva, he’s wearing an Hermès silk scarf, WHAT DO YOU MEAN?
I have to assume that someone in production got wind of the fact that Eric doesn’t “do teams”

and given that having to follow someone else’s recipe on a time crunch almost drove him to the second dirty protest to hit the MasterChef kitchen – I count Georgia holding eye contact with Matt Tebbutt as she made him eat a deep-fried rabbit’s eyeball to be the first

the resident welfare expert did the best they could and just shot him up with weapon’s grade mood enhancers because the energy was like watching Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout having a manic episode

I do think the pairings were perfect though, I’m not sure anyone other than Donna would have coped with any of this happening around them while staring down the barrel of their sixth squid ink tuile and the sound of Giorgio Locatelli chipping a molar coming from behind you

and still been willing to serve up their food with a smile

oh, here comes Tweedledee and TweedleDonna with your sightly mid Mexican meal, hope you enjoy!
Eventually they needed to actually have an intervention because Donna’s tuiles were increasingly looking like the leathery wings of Hell’s bat-spawn and the judges began to look like they were being consumed from the inside by the sort of deep incomprehensible sadness that the literary greats of the gothic horror genre spoke of

the advice being to make the tuile bigger, at which point she dumped her entire supply of primordial eldritch goo into her pan and Giorgio lost all hope

my favourite part is Grace having to slowly walk away because she can’t face Donna scraping up the same awful tuile but this time it’s 250% bigger

and all while this was happening, Eric was going at a fillet of sea bass like a cat on the side of the sofa as soon as you leave the room for their Sea Bass Ceviche

the tuile making process was no less of a mystery to Nitin who was just staring blankly at his pan increasingly looking like that one frying pan at the back of your cupboard that you can’t use anymore because it looks like it might give you tetanus but you can’t throw it away because you don’t know if you can put a frying pan in the bin (maybe this is a problem located specifically to my kitchen?)

neither team ever got the full hang of their tuiles, Donna’s was probably stronger because it looked marginally more like what you would expect a tuile to look like whereas Nitin’s looked a bit like an origami crane in desperate need of whatever ALLEGED mood enhancers Eric was on

despite there being concerns over Emily having cut her fish into quite chunky cubes, the judges were more on board with her ceviche than Eric’s that was slightly overcured.

Over the tuile hump now, the teams could take care of their Charred Cauliflower al Pastor

“look after” much like a mental health professional in 1955: a back alley lobotomy performed on a kitchen table with their bare hands

the difficult part of the process was not trying to find the cauliflower’s prefrontal cortex, but more so the making of the tortillas and Nitin having to meet Emily’s very exacting tortilla standards

evidently these were two very different gasps

Donna had it much easier because Eric would let anything slide as he wafted around the kitchen like Mr. Burns after his longevity treatments

Emily had eventually managed to bully Nitin into birthing the tortilla messiah

and tortilla Christ was on their side because while both of their Cauliflower al Pastor were good, Nitin’s decision to cook the cauliflower in the griddle pan meant it had more of a charred flavour than Donna’s oven-roasted lobotomy scrapings

but both dishes were quite tasty and for recipes and processes they were largely unfamiliar with, I think they all did really well. Where things kind of began to come off the rails for Eric and Donna was in the dessert portion of the challenge. Which, because as we know there is only one (1) Mexican dessert, was of course Churros with a Chilli Chocolate Sauce. The issues for Team Uppers and Donnas (please congratulate me for this pun, I need attention) was that Donna, delirious from her third round of whisking things

got sudden and completely unnecessary cold feet about the quality of her churros

imaginably because Nitin, who daren’t do anything wrong lest he get put in Emily’s Man-sized Timeout Cage was making their churros right next to them at the same time

and filled with stage fright had no choice but to throw her churros in the bin

and I have to imagine that when Giorgio Locatelli signed up for this show, he didn’t imagine that he’d be dumpster diving for Donna Preston’s churros like slightly mean Italian Jimothy

Donna standing there with a stunned expression that can only be read as “Did internationally acclaimed Italian chef, Giorgio Locatelli, really just pull my churro out of the bin?” <3

and unfortunately for Donna the emergency second batch of churros that they did end up making in a bit of a flap were probably second even to BinGate (Churro’s Version)

and the Chilli Chocolate Sauce wasn’t pulling in any of the points that the two (2) mummified slug corpses had lost them because it was the opposite end of the Chocolate Sauce Spectrum to Tommy’s Unspreadable Nutella Tarmac

Emily’s sauce however was the perfect middle ground, although still looked questionably greasy in texture

but their churros were things of pure beauty

and really only made Donna’s and Eric’s look more like the nest of a particularly feeble pigeon

Sharing is Kerridging

For this week’s Semi-final decider, the recipes that the celebrities would be following were that of The Man, The Myth, The Gastropub Legend: Tom Kerridge

and it wouldn’t be a Tom Kerridge appearance if someone wasn’t cooking that £7 premium side dish favourite

as well as Tom Kerridge’s Biblically Accurate Overpriced Chips, Nitin was making a Chickpea-based vegetarian burger as well as two side dips – one of the latter getting rave reviews from Nitin

but the burger and chips that he made were really good

I do however think he had a considerably less demanding recipe and workload than the likes of Eric who was being hamstrung by Bangers and Mash

the speed at which I would have “will not make sausages on camera” drafted into my Celebrity MasterChef contract

you have to remember your rights to invoke The Sausage Clause.
Instead of letting Eric suffer as more and more of his sausage meat disappeared into The Sausage Void

Tom Kerridge did very kindly step in – but he kind of had to because he’d also served as guillotinist-in-chief because Donna got squeamish after making eye contact with the most toothsome hake you’ve ever seen

and to be fair to her, it does look a bit like it’s about to get cut from my Nautilus deck at the first available opportunity

sometimes I just have to make references for nobody but myself.

Eric’s scramble to figure out Where On Earth Sausage Sandiego had gone hadn’t left him with the greatest amount of time to get his Onion Gravy done, leaving it a little bit wine-y and Christ there was a lot of it

but he was relieved of a complete Bangers and Crash-out by the fact he once again made a stellar pile of mashed potato. But I think you could tell he had been very frustrated by the whole thing and I imagine more than a little bit peeved that an elimination would be decided by two challenges in which someone else had told him what to do

I would be too, diva!

Once Tom had slayed the leviathan for her, Donna was on much more comfortable ground and pulled off a perfectly cooked Hake with Hasselback Potatoes and Yuzu Mayonnaise

and the praise couldn’t have been higher – even if it did make Tom Kerridge sound slightly full of himself

and therein really lies the problem of the guest chef rounds. Although, I will say how much better Grace and Giorgio are at complimenting the contestants on their techniques than Frogg and Toadrod who sort of just used to say “YUMMY!”, pull a funny face and point out fish tastes nice with citrus as though it was some great trade secret.

Finally we have Emily who was inventing my new drag king name: Pork Cordon-Bluh

she was the only one you could trust to make this dish because the pork alone required someone with a bicep circumference of a well-fed domestic ball python

the only slight issue with the dish in the end was the fact one side of the brick of pork had caught in the pan a little bit but everything was pretty much spot on!

I don’t like it but there did have to be an elimination and sadly it was a bit of a tragic end for Eric Underwood and his wild gesticulations

you ringered too close to the sun, babe!