My Kitchen Rules Recap: Et Tu Piper

It’s been a while between recaps. First I had to get over my anger at Ibby and Romel not being forced to change their blatantly cheating score, and then I had to get over a new bout of anger at the introduction of the “Open House”. This is the innovation whereby, having devised the interesting idea of pairing teams up with each other, creating the tantalising possibility of seeing wildly different personalities clash, the producers decided to pair up every team with the team most like itself, minimising any potential tension or drama. Then they also bring a bunch of strangers in to eat cramped dinners in bedrooms and laundries for no apparent reason.

I mean, Jesus Christ.

But anyway, the last Open House is that of Piper and Veronica and Josh and Austin, the two teams who are the most obnoxious and unbearable of all. Also, three out of four of them are American so they can bond over barbecue sauce.

The name of their restaurant is “Honestly Good”, because Josh and Austin are honest and Veronica and Piper are good. The same logic could be used to name the restaurant “Shitfully Repulsive”, but “Honestly Good”, they’ve decided, is more appetising.

The two teams get into the kitchen of the random house they’re in because why not, and start cooking. The beauty queens begin to cut up various odd vegetables and fungi, while they reflect on their lost youth and faded beauty.

The psychopath brothers are already dubious about the mad women’s desire to do weird things with mushrooms. But Josh has his own problems: he has to make sure his chicken stock isn’t too watery or too bland. Food really isn’t very interesting, isn’t it? Austin also explains that he wants his red wine sauce to have a really strong red wine flavour: Austin always was the crazy dreamer of the family.

For dessert the awful ladies will be making a chocolate brownie, which Piper will be luring into the kitchen with promises of treats, before baking and coating with a chocolate glaze. Josh asks Piper why her brownie will be special. Piper explains that it will be made of chocolate, which is a nice thing, so it’ll be very special. Josh is incredibly impressed by the thought of Piper’s amazing ordinary easy dull dessert. But it IS special for Piper, because it’s her stupid tedious grandma’s own personal stupid tedious recipe.

The guests begin to arrive. They don’t know why they’re here. We don’t know why they’re here. Their very existence is an affront to logic. But Veronica sets her jaw and gets on with it, pouring enormous amounts of win to get the strangers nicely liquored up.

The proper guests arrive and Bianca immediately begins to complain about the wind, which is ruining her hair. If she’d been born in the fifteenth century she’d have written a pamphlet denying the existence of God and been burnt as a witch. All in all it turned out better for her this way. The chefs explain the menu, and Andy and Ruby are disgusted that they would have the gall to serve a brownie that contains no bizarre spices or guinea pig entrails at all.

The diners have a deep discussion about whether they wish to be eliminated. Sal and Lyn confide that they do not wish to be eliminated. The other teams promise not to reveal their secret. The discussion then moves on to how much Ibby and Romel hated Mick and Jodie-Anne’s salad: it was a lot. Mick and Jodie-Anne don’t much like being told their salad was shit, although there is a very simple way to avoid being told your salad was shit — a way that has yet to occur to them.

Back in the kitchen Piper is making her grandma’s recipe for revolting artichoke and mushroom soup. “We need something to soak up the soup,” Veronica says. After mulling the possibility of using Austin’s pubes, they decide to make some bread. As the soup will be disgusting, they achieve consistency by also making the bread disgusting, adding coconut.

The bread is baked. It looks like half-raw pita. Piper makes Austin taste her pickled mushrooms. He tells her they taste like a shitload of vinegar. She seems pleased with this. She is apparently insane. While the idiot girls are out of the kitchen, the idiot boys decide they need to taste the soup. They do so, and notice that it is extremely bland. When Piper comes in Josh tells her it needs more salt. “No,” Piper says, secure in her lifelong “no flavour” food philosophy.

“My grandma would be very proud of this soup,” says Piper, referring to the woman who lost her senses of taste and smell in a factory explosion at the age of six. “It’s really nice to share the soup with all the members of the public,” says Piper as she serves. It’s all right for her, saying that: she’s not the one who has to eat it.

Some of the randos like the soup. Some question why it tastes so vinegary, not understanding that Piper’s grandmother lived in an abandoned vinegar factory.

The soup is served to the judges and the other teams. Lyn says she loves it, but as we know she possesses no ability to distinguish between good food and bad food. Lisa realises there is coconut in the bread, which confuses her because she is a normal human being. Relatively speaking. “It’s like a salt and vinegar chip in the middle of my bowl,” complains Mick, who’s apparently too FANCY for salt and vinegar chips.

“Did I enjoy this?” asks Pete. Nobody answers, so he decides he has to answer himself. He tells Piper and Austin of his love for Jerusalem artichoke, and how he couldn’t taste any in the soup. Manu informs them that their soup’s flavour is awful and vinegary and putting coconut in the bread is majorly fucked up, fam. “Does that make sense to you, because it doesn’t to me?” he asks.

Piper responds with the mightiest bus-under-throwing this show has ever seen. “It didn’t make sense to me,” she says, “but that was Veronica’s bread”. Veronica, of course, is not there to defend herself, staying quietly in the kitchen imagining foolishly that Piper is her friend. Learn your lesson, Veronica. Piper is NOBODY’S friend.

Josh and Austin are mightily pissed off that Veronica the Quisling didn’t listen to them when they said hey what if we make this soup not complete shit? But at least they can take control of the main, which is venison with malted milk powder so God help the diners.

At the table Bianca explains for the hundredth time that she hates meat unless it has been burnt to the point where it instantly causes cancer. “If it’s mooing, keep it away,” she says. Manu points out that venison doesn’t moo, causing everyone to laugh at Bianca and giving her yet another reason to loathe humankind.

As they wait for main course, the strangers discuss the venison. They are people we’ve never seen before and know nothing about so their conversations are of no interest whatever. Then again, the conversations in the kitchen aren’t exactly My Dinner With Andre.

Josh is very tense about getting his sauce and his stock and his deer and his weird face just right. He knows that if main goes wrong they’re in trouble because entree and dessert are in the hands of the lobotomy princesses.

Josh’s venison has been resting like the lazy piece of shit it is. He cuts into it and it’s slightly overcooked, and as everyone knows, slightly overcooked venison might just as well be poison. Some other bits are cooked well, though, at least if you trust the judgment of Josh and Austin and Veronica and Piper, which no sane person every would. Also, they rubbed the venison with malted milk powder which remains strange and disturbing.

As they plate up, they lose track of which plates are going to Pete and Manu, which means they might give Pete and Manu some of the overcooked ones, which would mean they would have to once again blame Veronica.

Venison is served. Veronica and Austin wait to hear just how much Pete and Manu hate them. Manu demands Josh come upstairs so he can spit in his face as well. Manu reminisces about the good old days when he told Josh and Austin they were filthy little pig-men, and then heartwarmingly tells them that he doesn’t think this anymore and that they cooked their meat quite well. Romel is furious about this, as he is incapable of maintaining an erection unless Josh and Austin are being humiliated in front of him.

Manu adds, however, that the sauce is gross which seems pretty important. But then Pete says the sauce was beautiful, because Pete has a mutant palate that enjoys massive doses of acid.

“I don’t eat deer, but this was fantastic,” says Bianca, smiling for the first time this century. Mick and Jodie-Anne are worried they might be going to elimination, but as long as Piper is making dessert there is hope.

Dessert, of course, is a brownie. A fucking brownie. “Piper is very good at convincing people to her way,” says Josh, and that’s true, which is weird because she has an objectively annoying voice and a wealth of horrible personality traits that would surely cause any sane person to reject anything she says out of hand. Yet here we are, making a fucking brownie.

A stranger wants the brownie to be a little bit gooey. Who gives a shit what you want you drab rando.

At the proper table, Romel says he doesn’t think a chocolate brownie is a competition dish, and also that he is a cheating prick. He only says the first part actually but the second is implied.

“A brownie can seem simple,” says Piper, and so can Piper. In fact she rarely seems anything else.

“When we go out to the diners, they are smiling,” says Veronica. She quickly puts a stop to that. One rando thinks the salted caramel is too salty. She would’ve preferred ice cream to whipped cream. Your opinion is worthless, nobody.

The judges eat the brownies. “Everybody here can make a brownie,” says Ibby, massively overrating his fellow contestants. “Usually I judge how good a dish is on how long I remember it,” says Andy. “With this brownie I’ve already forgotten it.” This is a blatant lie, as she clearly knows it was a brownie.

The strangers vanish into the night, back to their ship of the damned. The teams gather for scoring. The judges explain that the entree was pretty gross, the main was pretty good and the dessert was sort of OK I guess but not really but you can have a decent score for it because everyone’s just really chilled right now. Also the strangers give their best score ever because they’re basically peasants. Romel is pissed right off and wondering why he gave up cheating.

The upshot is that they beat Mick and Jodie-Anne and Lyn and Sal by a freaking mile and those four will need to battle in sudden-death to see who continues undeservingly a bit longer. Tune in tomorrow to see the depressing death throes of someone’s dream.

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