My Kitchen Rules Recap: Expect The Expected

It’s finally happening. The instant restaurant we’ve all been sort of waiting for a bit. Amy and Tyson putting their pies where their mouths are. Will the big game they’ve been talking be matched by the big game they cook? Will Tyson kill everyone in his culinary rage? Will David stop saying “hustler”? Will Betty stop saying “hashtag”? All these questions yet to be answered, but one thing we do know: this is only the second week of the season and it already feels like it’s been going for months. After tonight almost everyone will still be in the competition, and we’ll have to watch a whole new bunch of teams, plus Colin Freaking Fassnidge. God there’s a long hard road ahead of us.

Anyway, let’s get on with it. Off to Queensland, where Amy and Tyson live, which is surprising because Tyson doesn’t look like he could handle the sun. We see the same montage we saw on the first night, and get a reminder that when Tyson gets angry his neck swells up, leading to the suspicion that he might actually be a species of frog.

We are shown several occasions on which Tyson has called other teams’ food “average”, and Bek and Ash complain about how many times they’ve heard the word “average”, which is ironic, because Bek and Ash would’ve killed to hear the word “average” the night they cooked.

Amy and Tyson go to the butcher to buy lamb’s brains and pork jowl, because they are wankers. They then have a debate over whether puffed quinoa is an acceptable substitute for puffed wheat, and the likelihood of them having any friends at all is really plummeting. Having bought puffed quinoa, they drive around in a desperate quixotic quest to get hold of some puffed wheat. The puffed wheat is extremely important for extremely irritating reasons. Tyson is getting very stressed, but if it’s any consolation, this is the stupidest problem anyone has ever had in the history of the world. They have a big fight in the car about puffed wheat and Tyson is like if you taught a short-tempered three-year-old to have really misguided priorities.

Without puffed wheat, Amy and Tyson head home sadder and not wiser, to set up their instant restaurant. Their instant restaurant is called “Mosaic”, which Amy says reflects the way they like to plate up food. So the guests can expect a lot of tiny pieces of coloured glass and stone in their food tonight.

They begin to make dessert, which will be “Chocolate Raspberry Discovery”, a dish which isn’t anything at all. Tyson says he is “all for ambiguous menu names”, because they create a sense of mystery and also that the chef is a cock.

They move on to the pork jowl, a cut of meat that you can’t deny matches Tyson perfectly. And then to the brains, which are disgusting and horrible and pretty insensitive to serve to some of the guests, who don’t need to be reminded of their own problems with brains.

Speaking of the morons, here they are, wandering down the street to the strains of Marilyn Manson’s “The Beautiful People”, a selection that would have certainly seemed apt in the wild hallucinogenic soup that the show’s music editor uses for a mind. Everyone’s speculating on the possibility of “Angry Angry Man” coming out: Amy’s unimaginative name for when her brother gets angry. All the guests hope that Angry Angry Man emerges, either because it will give them a better chance of moving up the leaderboard, or because they want to see his inflated neck pouch.

Everyone knows that Amy hates hugging, so they all give her big warm lengthy hugs because they take pleasure in the suffering of others. Just like the show’s audience, really. They all enter the dining room and have the dumb premise of the instant restaurant explained to them. After Amy and Tyson retire to the kitchen to fry up the brains, the guests sit around whining about Tyson calling their food “average”, an assessment entirely supported by the scores. “I’m looking forward to seeing whether Angry Angry Man serves up Average Average food,” says Karen, like the witless sap she is.

Then they get bored with that and start talking about how Kyle and Bek are going to bang each other under the table later.

“I really need to start crumbing these brains,” says Amy, which admittedly is a fairly good catchphrase. She hopes the guests will think of the brains as “crunchy chicken nuggets”, but that’s fairly unlikely given “brains” is written on the menu.

The judges arrive and the music is “Seven Nation Army”. No point even trying to figure out what the soundtrack is trying to imply at this stage. For the second night in a row, Pete fails to tell Manu that he looks good. What has gone sour between these two?

Ash is worried that there might be some “different food” on the menu. That just goes to show what a showcase MKR is for culinary excellence, doesn’t it: contestants living in fear of difference. However did Ash manage to fail? When she sees the menu she nearly vomits. Or maybe it’s just because she saw the way Bek was looking at Kyle.

It’s time to deep-fry the brains, while the guests make a series of brain puns that would completely justify the actions of anyone who burnt the house down with everyone in it. In the kitchen Amy and Tyson are repeatedly mentioning how much they believe in their own abilities, which means they’re either going to fail horribly or succeed amazingly.

The brains are served. “Those were inside a lamb’s head once,” Bek whispers to Ash, although I don’t see why that’s such a creepy concept: every kind of meat was inside a something’s something once.

The judges eat the brains, and Pete declares them “bang on”. As a paleo devotee, he is a great admirer of our ancestors’ use of brains, both as food and as receptacle for evil spirits. He explains how much he enjoyed slicing into the brains with what can only be described as homicidal glee.

The guests eat the brains, and David says it was an “average dish”, because David made the decision long ago to be a twat, and he believes in seeing that project through to the end. Betty agrees, and for the same reason.

In the kitchen Amy and Tyson are cooking main course and talking utter nonsense. They are making pommes frites, AKA “chips”. But there’s a problem: the deep fryer has stopped working. “These pommes frites are really pushing my buttons,” says Tyson, matching his sister absurdist catchphrase for absurdist catchphrase. He follows up in sensational style with “If I wasn’t doing this pork jowl I’d be punching a wall”. Someone should release an album of these.

As Amy tries to save the chips, Tyson battles with the pork jowl, and burns himself. His cry of agony is heard in the dining room, where everyone has a good old chortle about Angry Angry Man and how funny it is when someone you don’t like suffers severe burns. Tyson’s neck pouch is beginning to swell, but the deep fryer seems to be making some kind of comeback. Or not. I don’t know, cooking is pretty dull.

Tyson plates up, while calling the dish horrible and announcing his hatred for it. “This is my worst nightmare,” he says, and it’s true: night after night he is tormented by visions of mediocre pork jowl and uncooked pommes frites. “I feel like I need to apologise,” he adds, but if he hasn’t apologised for his personality up till now I don’t see why he’d cave in for his cooking.

The judges try Tyson and Amy’s ugly main, and in a shock twist, Tyson’s shameful garbage comes up trumps: they love it. Pete declares main better than the entree. Manu says the flavours are out of this world. It just goes to show: trying to make your food look good is pointless.

The guests are forced to admit that the main tastes good too. Except David and Betty, who are twats.

And so to dessert, which brings out Amy’s violent side, as Tyson’s dewlap slowly deflates with the relief of the main. Tyson is making a sponge cake in the microwave, which seems very out of character for him, but people can surprise you, can’t they? This is the first time anyone has on this show, but still.

In the dining room, Karen suspects that dessert might be a “hidden dessert”, apparently under the impression that it’s already been served and she has to find it. Tim says he’s a bit nervous that Tyson and Amy might beat his and Kyle’s record. David chimes in to remind everyone that he sucks.

Dessert must be taking too long, because we’re back to the Bek-Kyle bullshit. They’re doing some kind of dumbass mock-wedding thing, as if they’re all four years old. Then Bek and Kyle kiss and everyone screams with joy as if they just watched the Death Star explode from the forest of Endor. It’s all Karen’s fault. She’s been pushing this from the start and she deserves unhappiness.

Mercifully, this hideous spectacle is interrupted by the arrival of dessert, “Chocolate Raspberry Discovery”, which in practice means some chocolate and some raspberries and a bit of other stuff. But I guess that doesn’t sound all that good. As is traditional, dessert is accompanied by a flurry of on-screen tweets written by people who think it’s spelt “desert”.

For the third time tonight, Pete uses the phrase “bang-on”, which indicates a lack of creativity on his part, but also that the dessert was pretty good. “I am glad you’re in this competition,” he tells Amy and Tyson, by implication saying he wishes none of the others were. Which is fair enough really.

Bek feels bad because Amy and Tyson might beat Kyle and Tim’s score, and she thinks it would be sad “to have that taken away from them”, apparently not realising that if you score 100 and then someone else scores more, you still have a score of 100, it doesn’t get erased or anything. And no matter what tonight’s score is, she’ll still get to 69 Kyle. Tim and Kyle are also worried, because they don’t understand how scores happen either.

Amy and Tyson have done very well. The guests give them eights and nines: the eights from Kyle and Tim out of jealousy and from David and Betty out of dickishness. They get 43 out of 50 from the guests: would they have gotten even higher if anyone liked them? Who can tell?

The judges dish out high scores too, and Manu gets to use the phrase “fatty brain”, which usually he only uses when texting Pete. It’s tens all over the shop — Pete gives three tens for the first time ever unless you count the time he acted as judge of the Miss Paleo Wet Loincloth Contest, and they score 59 out of 60, giving them a total of 102 out of 110, which means they’ve broken Tim and Kyle’s day-old record, which I guess makes Tim and Kyle big fat losers according to Bek.

“It shows I’m not full of shit,” Tyson says, but let’s not get too excited here. The main thing is, Tyson and Amy are crying tears of joy, and feeling that their decision to murder their parents to teach themselves self-reliance when they were six years old has finally paid off.

Now it’s time for the “Elimination Twist”, a source of much speculation throughout the last two weeks as to whether it would mean that the best team was eliminated instead of the worst, or whether elimination would be based on height instead of cooking ability. In keeping with the grandest MKR traditions, though, it is a dull and uninteresting development not even worthy of the name “twist” — all it is is that the bottom two teams have to cook off against each other in sudden death, literally the most boring “twist” they could possibly have come up with.

Tune in tomorrow, when David and Betty cook off against Bek and Ash in a clash of mediocrity versus ineptitude. Who will be eliminated: the team that clearly isn’t good enough to be there, or the team that we all want to piss off so we don’t have to hear them say “hashtag” ever again?

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