You either die the hero or live long enough to become the villain.

Recap friend!

How The Vegetables Have Turned

For this week’s Mystery Box Challenge, the celebs were having to put vegetables front and centre with a grand total of 32 different vegetables on offer

about 21 of which would go completely untouched as most of the contestants seemingly forgot the entire point of the challenge the moment it started. But Melvin was on hand to pick up the slack by just shoving anything he could get his hands on into a curry – I think if Grace had stood still for long enough she’d have ended up in it too

having been critiqued for his signature Jollof not having packed enough of a punch – the gloves were off and this was his revenge dress of a curry

but despite threateningly gesticulating with a chilli while listing off his passenger manifesto for the Veggie Tales’s Noah’s Arc

and Giorgio Locatelli’s entire central nervous system shutting down from the vapours of Melvin’s curry alone

both judges really liked it and thought the heat was perfectly acceptable

Melvin’s disappointment for not having made someone see the face of God with his curry wouldn’t last long as Lauren took one slightly too confident spoonful and almost turned inside out

I don’t think it takes that much to elicit such a response from Lauren because if you so much as sprinkled salt on her she’s probably fizz up like a slug

Lauren was adding a second layer of abstruseness to the challenge as she locked herself into a Mystery Cheese guessing game

the answer was actually the super secret third option

behold, the face of a woman who just blitzed Halloumi into an incredibly granular pasta filling:

and yet this would not be the weirdest deployment of squeaky cheese this episode because Una Healy threw four great big chunks of it onto her plate and scattered it with dried cranberries(?????) in the hopes you wouldn’t look at her weird circular omelette

every time I watch her absolutely annihilate that omelette with a ringer cutter in the name aesthetics like someone getting the final dramatic kill in a horror movie I scream laugh like the ungodly love child of Tommy Bowe and a hyena

I have never seen such an act of pure desperation on MasterChef in a LONG time and then all the dust settles, humanity returns to the panicked lizard brain and you have no choice but to gaze down upon your circular omelette you artfully decorated with 5 slivers of spring onion and realise you were…. naughty

God bless her, she was in the trenches the moment she walked into the larder and was flummoxed by the mystery bushel

and then all hope went out the window after her first omelette was reduced to eggy tatters because she hadn’t oiled her pan

the one thing going for her was that she’d actually put vegetables into her dish – they were somewhere in that annular omelette. Whereas Giorgio had to actively persuade Max into using vegetables for this specifically vegetable-based challenge – a basil pesto does not count

Giorgio was very precious about the herbs not counting towards the vegetable body count

Max’s grand plan was to make egg pasta for the first time, a process that Giorgio thought would be the worst thing to happen today but nobody ever expects the Halloumi and Cranberry trail mix

Max’s pasta making was actually good! A questionable decision to perhaps knead it on the hob top

a process that seemed to be catching on

Lauren Steadman, if Max Fosh told you to jump in a fire, WOULD YOU?
The only real problem with Max’s pasta – other than a token smattering of finely diced broccoli not really meeting the challenge to make a vegetable dish (HOW were you all so bad at this?) was that he’d made his tagliatelle so long it came with a real risk of an RSI

and no chance of a second date… apparently?

the best part of this is Giorgio very emphatically saying “of course!” as though Grace has asked the most preposterous question which the captioneers were too cowardly to subtitle

please don’t underestimate the eroticism of hamster cheeking pasta on the fist date, girls!

Lauren, having given into hob kneading peer pressure, was also doing pasta, albeit a filled pasta stuffed with the aforementioned blitzed halloumi. She was serving it alongside a butternut squash puree after having realising that her entire kangaroo pouch of spinach would probably only amount to but a single spoonful of vegetables once cooked

and while there’s some great technical skill on display in the dish she made, it’s not the most visually appealing plate of food

the colours are very sun-bleached 70s wallpaper. The dish was also quite under-seasoned and while the pasta had at least held its shape and filling, she hadn’t managed to get all of the air out so it was a little bit loose and flabby.

Lastly we have Sue who with her extra 10 minutes had managed to snipe all of the Goat’s Cheese that Lauren thought she was using and was using it for her Tomato and Goat’s Cheese Tarte Tatin

I think she might have been better off using red onions for this endeavour – God knows there were enough of them in that tax write-off of a larder. It ultimately hadn’t really worked with the whole thing being a little bit soggy

but having Giorgio describe it as leftover pizza is much kinder than being told your Halloumi tastes like an espadrille that stepped in someone’s Special K

Una, I fear I am going to have to try Halloumi with dried cranberries. I crave to know the unknowable.

A Vegetable-based Invention Test Dish Ranking:
1. Melvin Odoom By Force of Vegetables Alone
2. Lauren Steadman’s Spinach Pouch
3. Max Fosh’s Mile Long Tagliatelle
4. Tomorrow’s Pizza, Today!
5. Una Healy, You Will Always Be Famous

One Day You’re Ginge and The Next Day You’re Take-out

Apparently YouTubers are like hydras, chop one head off and suddenly you have two with this week’s Who’s That Celebrity Coming For Dinner Through The Keyhole guest being Angry Ginge of Mostly Just Shouting On YouTube Fame

who is in fact friends with Max Fosh, giving Grace Dent the opportunity to resurrect a meme of the ancient texts

in looking for that Gif I realised that it first aired on television 18 years ago and had to go lie down in a dark room for a little bit while pondering the ephemerality of the human existence and the importance of the bits we leave behind. Angry Ginger however was not asking them to cook up an existential crisis and instead wanted everyone to cook him the filthiest take-away they could possibly conceive

and the entire time they let him reel off the many dirty, near untelevisable things he’d let a piece of fried chicken do to him, they kept suspiciously cutting back to Lauren clutching a stick of salsify

Lauren’s approach to this challenge was mostly just hoping that putting a piece of butter-roasted cod and Petit Pois a la Francais into a box was enough

her excuse was that athletes don’t really do take-aways which…. sure, I get but you don’t have to inflict your strict dietary regimen on the rest of us!

and it wasn’t Lauren’s best dish, her fish was slightly overcooked and there was just a general disappointment that it came from the Under 500 Calories portion of the Ember Inns menu. But, her one concession to treating herself, were some damn fine chips that would’ve even passed Una Healy’s potato refereeing

Una taking a leaf out of the Melvin Odoom Playbook of Tactical MasterChef Warfare <3

Max’s non-regulation compliant chips were the disappointing accompaniment to his Chicken Parmo – which is the first take-away I remember having once we moved to the UK and I remember feeling like I had eaten God himself. but I also thought the bread aisle in Big Tesco was a near religious experience – I was a very easily awed twelve year old

it’s definitely not winning any prizes in the Westminster Cheesy Chicken Nugget Show but everyone was willing to overlook the fact it looked a bit like Una Healy’s Halloumi had returned with a vengeance

because at the end of the day it’s a big chicken nugget slathered in a biblical amount of cheese and that’s kind of all that matters.

Una was also going for Chicken and Chips as she set out with a goal to educate the masses on the magic of the Spice Bag

which I personally hadn’t heard of either. It turns out it’s basically chicken, chips and a stir-fry as delivered by a Deliveroo rider whose bike has terrible suspension

her chips were pretty good but she’d overcooked the chicken, making it quite tough amongst everything else, and her spice mix hadn’t quite permeated through everything meaning it was a little more bland than you’d like. However, everyone did really like her curry sauce.

Chips were a common denominator in this challenge, which is a bit odd to me, I don’t ever add chips to my take-away orders because I think they travel terribly so you might as well just whack some oven chips in while you wait. The only person forgoing chips entirely was Sue who’d gone for a full Chinese with her Ginger Beef Stir Fry with a Crispy Mushroom Pancake and homemade plum sauce

but Melvin will tell you that he was also not doing chips, he was making ~potato bites~ which streamline the arduous chip-eating process

and he was trying harder to make Melvin Odoom’s Potato Bites™ a thing than McCain did for that brief two months that Vibes were meant to revolutionise the potato snack complex

sadly for him and the spirit of Ainsley Harriott he was briefly possessed by, it’s back to the drawing board on the revolutionary potato front

but while his Chips But Triangular™ were the temperature of partially dried socks, his Lamb and Mint Burger went down an absolute treat with everyone

if you asked me who would’ve had the most successful episode on a whole, I think I would’ve guessed the newly installed MasterChef Balustrade before I anticipated Melvin Odoom getting near universal positive critiques after the last episode

A Take Away Dish Ranking:
1. Sue’s Straight Up Chinese
2. Melvin Odoom’s Potato Prototype
3. Max Fosh’s Ugly Nugget
4. Athletes, They’re Not Like Us At All
5. Una Healy’s Saturday Night Take-away

At the start of the episode I fully expected to spend an hour watching Melvin Odoom going down in flames but he really, really pulled off some great dishes this episode and in the end I really can’t argue with Una being sent home

but I will thank her for introducing me to the Spice Bag and resent her for the rest of my life for making me even think about dried cranberries and Halloumi. Women truly do contain multitudes.