My Kitchen Rules Recap: God Will Know His Own
Tonight: it’s the businesswomen versus the married hipsters. Many questions need answering, such as: why does the voiceover guy say, “THE MARRIED HIPSTERS” that way, as if hipsters marrying is some kind of defiance of social mores? And how come the show calls Mell and Cyn both “businesswomen” AND “housewives”? And when will Mell come clean and admit she’s just Cyn’s receptionist? And why doesn’t Court have a complete first name? And how long until Court’s eyes have migrated to the back of her head? And wouldn’t the decent thing to do on Mell and Cyn’s part be to throw the challenge for the greater good: making sure Josh is not happy? And wouldn’t “the grater good” be a clever pun to make if discussing utilitarianism in regard to cooking reality shows?
Oh, the challenge has started. Anyway let’s see. Mell is making vanilla bean ice-cream, which will be the hero of the dish, as she mouths mechanically, so jaded that she just doesn’t care about forging her own identity in the world. Meanwhile Cyn is making risotto, which she refers to as “the death dish”. But risotto is the death dish on MASTERCHEF, not MKR. Pete and Manu discuss how difficult risotto has been in the past, but that happened ON ANOTHER SHOW. Get your own fucking death dish you bloody copycats. I know it’s hard because 90% of all dishes known to man have proven to be near-impossible for anyone on MKR to make, but how are they try to poach another show’s death dish?
Anyway.
Court calls her dish “funky”. This causes Duncan to mention the Tone Loc hit “Funky Cold Medina”. This causes the soundtrack to begin playing “Funky Cold Medina”. SEE WHAT YOU’VE DONE, COURT? You reckless fool.
Meanwhile Mell and Cyn are all business in the kitchen. They actually say that. “We’re all business in the kitchen,” they say, as if outside the kitchen they’re a barrel of loose, hard-drinking hedonistic shenanigans. But actually they’re business everywhere. And that’s not a commendation of their competence: it just means they’re cold and bereft of humanity.
The chicken song is playing because Court and Duncan are playing fried chicken. In any well-run business, the person who selects the incidental music on this show would’ve been fired years ago.
Mell’s ice-cream is looking dubious. Ice-cream is actually the MKR death dish: nobody can ever make it right. The average MKR contestant is so bad at making ice-cream it wouldn’t surprise to see it end up AS risotto.
Meanwhile Court is doing flash-pickling, which sounds more interesting than it really is. Josh can smell something burning, but it might be his own crotch, set alight by Amy as an attempt to escape this hellish marriage.
As Court discusses her love of eating pickles straight from the jar like some kind of loveable zoo orangutan, Josh starts bellowing about how Court and Duncan want to keep getting into sudden death because they want to cook against him. Amy tells him to shut his stupid grinning semi-paralysed mouth. He refuses. She tells him to shut up again. He won’t. She storms off to the other side of the balcony, unable to take one more second of close proximity to the netherworld beast she has hitched her wagon to. Della and Tully are left standing awkwardly next to Josh while he blithers witlessly about being the only one willing to “say it how it is”. Any producer worth his salt would at this point announce a shock twist in the rules, whereby both teams survive sudden death and Josh is not only eliminated but turned into furniture. But this does not happen, and we, like Amy, must live with Josh a while longer.
Cooking has become totally irrelevant to the show, as the focus has shifted entirely to the universal loathing for Josh. “Josh is an arsehole,” says Karen, who has probably never insulted anyone before in her life. Della and Tully refuse to face him. The spectators are concentrating so intensely on hating Josh that they don’t even notice that Mell is still fucking up her ice-cream like the hapless receptionist she is. Josh tries to brighten the mood by announcing that he is excited to eat some chicken, having never heard of the concept of “not talking for a few seconds”.
Meanwhile Brett and Marie and Kyle and Tim have an uninteresting conversation about Cyn’s shitty risotto. Down on the floor Court and Duncan are babbling about Kanye for some reason, and not to take Josh’s side, but you wouldn’t want to be stuck next to them at the movies.
It’s nearly time to plate up some food, which everyone continues to maintain is tangentially connected to this show. The judges try Mell and Cyn’s risotto, and cannily put their finger on the one problem with the dish: it’s garbage. They kind of like Court and Duncan’s fried chicken. I think. It’s hard to tell. They’re speaking in riddles. Guy is bouncing around in his chair shouting about beer and saying “dude food!” and nobody knows what his deal is.
Back into the kitchen go the flailing incompetents. Mell pulls out her ice-cream machine again and discovers her ice-cream has somehow magically turned into ice-cream. Or rather, it’s turned into ice-cream because it’s in an ice-cream machine, so I don’t why everyone’s acting so surprised. Tully yells irrelevant questions at Duncan in order to distract him and ruin his main course, as is her job as a balcony occupant. “Under Pressure” comes on the soundtrack because they’re using a pressure cooker, do you get it? Do you? DO YOU?
Why would anyone ever want to make a parsnip puree? Mell and Cyn are, apparently caring nothing for decency. On the balcony Kyle and Tim and Brett and Marie are still being boring, with an assist from David, who nobody even knew was in the building, but sticks his tedious oar in to remind everyone of why they don’t like him. They’re discussing oysters or something, but geez WHO CARES? Can’t we just stick to watching Mell and Cyn fail and if possible see someone kick Josh in the dick?
Mell blitzes the parsnip puree. There is only one step remaining: throwing it in a bin. But they have overlooked this crucial element! Will this come back to bite them? “We have so much to do,” says Cyn, regretting almost all her life choices to this point.
On the other side Court and Duncan are making their own noodles, or to put it another way, they’re not. Their dough is too dry. Court has a brainwave: what if they made it LESS dry, by WETTING it? Duncan quickly consults a dictionary to learn the definitions of “wet” and “dry” and thinks: yes, it might work!
“Whatever they’re doing, they’re not doing it right,” says Josh, sadly not speaking in the third person about his marriage. But suddenly, his whole world comes crashing down around him as Court and Duncan successfully make what look like something approaching halfway decent noodles.
Meanwhile Mell and Cyn are cooking meat in a businesslike fashion, although the business is Enron.
Time is ticking away, and the teams are plating up, and food has literally never seemed less interesting. The dishes look OK if you like that sort of thing which I do not.
Time for the judges to be released from their shackles. Guy is excited about Court and Duncan’s broth, I suppose it’s dude food or something. “I think this team doesn’t want to go home tonight,” says Manu in what is a rather cruel and insulting comment about Mell and Cyn. “This is what you expect from sudden death,” says Pete, which is confusing, because he seems to think the dish is good — nobody who has worked on this show would ever expect good food in a sudden death challenge.
Mell and Cyn’s beef seems underwhelming, although some of the judges quite enjoy it, or at least say they do, in that “I am going to try to find some positives so the result isn’t too obvious to the viewer” way.
Dessert time on MKR is always an interesting time. It’s the period in the show when you start to wonder how it’s possible that this episode isn’t over yet.
Pete asks Manu whether chocolate and yoghurt work together. Manu doesn’t know. “Then what fucking good are you?” screams Pete.
Nah he doesn’t, but wouldn’t it be great if he did?
Meanwhile Mell and Cyn have stuffed up their curd. “Being businesswomen, I don’t think they’ll give up,” says Marie, which defeats some serious competition to become the most meaningless statement of this MKR season. In the future, scientists will discover the tape of this episode and wonder what sort of toxic metal our generation used in our pipes to cause the sort of brain disease that would cause someone to say, “Being businesswomen, I don’t think they’ll give up”. They’ll surmise it might be the same disease that caused people to refer to career businesswomen working full-time as “housewives”.
Anyway, dessert etc. “If our pannacotta don’t turn out the way we want them, we could be going home,” says Court in a post-show cutaway, doing a pathetic job of manufacturing tension. For a moment it looks like the pannacotta will fail, and Josh smiles like hyena on nitrous. Then the pannacotta doesn’t fail, and Josh looks like he’s going to cry.
Unfortunately the pannacotta turning out OK means everyone starts talking about breasts and Della and Tull start shaking their boobs and Court and Duncan damn near bang each other right on the countertop. But the danger isn’t over yet: Court and Duncan have let their lust distract them from the task at hand and they struggle to provide their promised berries. “Their weakness is desserts,” says Josh to Amy, bizarrely thinking she wants to hear his awful creepy voice in her ear. “If you want to win this competition you have to get everything right.” Not only is this a bit rich coming from a man who hasn’t got one thing right either in this competition or life itself, but it’s patently not true. This competition is the F Grade of cooking shows: you can win by just not serving lethal doses of anything.
Anyway dessert is served and the judges kind of like Mell and Cyn’s dessert I guess, I don’t know, I’ve aged so much during this episode. “I’m glad they finished on a high,” says Pete in the voice of a man who refused to eat any of the dessert because of paleo.
They like the pannacotta too, but also they bitch and moan about it, so who knows, really? But Court and Duncan are going to win because Mell and Cyn are falling apart at the seams and because it’ll keep Josh as loud and obnoxious as the publicity department wants him to be.
Yep, they win. Easily. Duh. All the quibbling was just a lie. The judges are lying pigs.
Josh is very sad and that’s what counts. Also Mell and Cyn go back to Wollongong feeling inadequate which is a bonus.
Tune in tomorrow, when Josh’s abusive relationship with the rest of the human race continues.
Have you ever wanted to see an MKR recap LIVE? This show isn’t much like that at all, but it IS the best hour’s entertainment you’ll get at this year’s festival. Tickets HERE.
