My Kitchen Rules Recap: On Top Of The World Looking Down On Creation

Previously on My Kitchen Rules: Ibby and Romel cooked edible food, something impossible for anyone who isn’t an experienced professional chef.

Tonight on My Kitchen Rules: spoiler alert but oh my god yes.

“We were raised by missionary parents,” says Josh, like that’s an excuse. He also notes that food is like air, because without air you’d suffocate and without food you’d starve, so you know he’s a real sophisticated gourmet.

For their instant restaurant, Josh and Austin are setting up a torture dungeon in their garage. The theme is “end of the world bunker”, with cans of corn and peas on the shelves to taunt the guests as their stomachs bloat later in the night. There is also a TV showing nothing but snow, to represent the brothers’ personalities.

Off Josh and Austin go to shop for these “ingredients” they’ve heard so much about. Meanwhile Andy and Ruby claim that it’ll be a big advantage to Josh and Austin that they were home schooled, because they had to catch and kill their own meals every night. As the guests read the menus, we regularly cut back to Josh for some racist impressions.

At the shops Josh and Austin buy some things. Sorry I can’t make the story any more exciting.

The entree will be clam chowder with homemade bread, a classic dish from their indeterminately accented hometown. The main course will be fatal chicken. The dessert will be lemon curd domes to evoke the Duomo of Florence.

In a cutaway it begins to become clear that Amanda is only pretending to find Blake’s jokes funny. Something to watch there.

Josh and Austin drive home and begin their three-hour prep. During these three hours they:

• put on their aprons
• write lists on whiteboards of what they have to do
• look at their knives
• some other things apparently although the evidence of it will later be entirely absent

The guests arrive. Romel sees a plate of cat food sitting outside the front door. “Let’s hope it’s not what we’re being served tonight!” he smirks. Aha, Romel, how little you know: soon enough you will be begging for a plate of Whiskas.

The guests enter the dining room and finally understand that tonight is the night they die. Immediately they start talking amongst themselves about which of them has the key to the room hidden in their intestines.

In the kitchen, Josh and Austin have been made aware that their guests are waiting for food, so they begin to mull over the possibility that they should cook something. Time to make the clam chowder, a dish they heard about on a Simpsons rerun last week and thought sounded nice.

In the dining room Blake explains that because the brothers were home schooled, they are idiots. Everyone nods understandingly.

Back in the kitchen, Josh tastes the fish stock. It tastes like bland, salty water. “There’s no flavour to it,” Josh says, wrongly: salty is a flavour. He grabs whatever random objects he can off a shelf and throws them in the fish stock. “I’m creating a fish stock that tastes like fish stock!” he says in astonishment, having had to look “fish stock” up in the dictionary earlier that day.

Manu and Pete arrived, ready to hurl abuse. Austin explains that the restaurant theme is “like a step into our minds”, and then he giggles like Scorpio from Dirty Harry. Josh tells the room that everything on the menu is something he and Austin cook for themselves a lot, causing many to wonder later how either of them are alive.

The entree includes homemade bread, and since the guests have already been waiting for some time, they begin baking it. They could’ve started the bread during their prep time, but they didn’t because bread is famously a food that can be whipped up from scratch in seconds. Meanwhile the clams begin screaming in pain. “We’ve gotta get these clams off,” says Josh, defying God’s law.

In the dining room, Chris expresses a wish that the clam chowder transport him to Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, as if that is even a remote possibility. Ruby just hopes that the bread is edible, which is also a long shot.

“Cayenne pepper is definitely not something that you’d usually find in a clam chowder,” says Josh, “but Pete and Manu keep saying give us what you eat.” He neglects to add the judges’ unspoken caveat though: the complete quote is “give us what you eat, assuming you aren’t dead-eyed psychopaths who eat nothing but Cup-A-Soup.”

In the dining room everyone is still talking about Ibby and Romel and their qualifications. Because they told the others previously that they were usually too busy to cook, the others are demanding to know how come they knew how to turn on an oven and cut a carrot in half and stuff — apparently they assumed that “we don’t have time to cook” meant “we have literally never cooked anything in our lives and we do not know what food is”. Now that it turns out that Ibby and Romel can, in fact, prepare food without violating any federal laws, everyone feels extremely betrayed. This is a table of idiots.

Back in the kitchen, Josh and Austin are nearly finished not quite baking their bread. Josh stirs a nauseating mass of monkey diarrhoea in a pot, then checks on the bread rolls. They aren’t baking properly: is this because they weren’t proven for long enough? Is this because he keeps opening the oven? Is this because God hates them? The possibilities are endless.

The brothers’ whiteboard is turning out to be of little assistance, as according to it the things they’re doing right now should’ve been done eight hours ago. In the dining room the guests have notice that entree is taking quite a while. They ain’t seen nothing yet.

Josh looks at the bread rolls again. “They look like tumours!” he cries. The bread rolls are like the picture of Dorian Gray: the inner ugliness of Josh and Austin has been infused into the bread.

The brothers pour their revolting slop into small mugs. Austin thinks it’d be a good idea to put some clam shells into the soup, because Austin is literally insane. They decide against using shells to choke everyone to death, and serve entree, just as the guests begin writing letters to their loved ones begging them not to be too sad.

Romel cannily identifies that entree is Cup-A-Soup. The judges look at their mugs, confused, having inexplicably expected some food for their starter. Pete tries his bread and raises his eyebrows like a man who hates all wheat products but for whom this is beyond the pale even for him.

Josh declares that they are on a tightrope and the other guests are sharks waiting for them to slip up. It is a tightrope over the ocean, with sharks in. The sharks have been placed in the chicken’s hen.

Manu tells the brothers that their chowder has good flavours and yet still manages against all odds to be utterly disgusting. The texture is gross, the clams are overcooked, the vegetables are undercooked, the cayenne pepper is gross and the bread is garbage. “I’m really struggling to find anything I like about this dish,” says Pete, on which point he is in disagreement with every viewer of the show: we LOVE this dish. This dish has made us so happy. Pete notes that the bread is “claggy”, proving that Josh’s decision to include glue in the dough was a misstep.

However, Chris loves the chowder. “I love the presentation,” he says, like some kind of pervert. Chris is really, really weird. Jodie-Anne thinks the soup is gritty and sandy, the attempt to capture the spirit of the seaside having gone way too far.

“We haven’t done anything in preparation for our mains,” says Josh. They had three fucking hours, you know. He begins peeling potatoes while Austin begins Frenching the chickens — once more defying God. It becomes clear that Austin can’t French chickens, so they swap.

The dinner table waits…

The brothers fiddle endlessly with their chickens, having more trouble with them than you’d expect if they were still alive.

In the dining room we are suddenly and alarmingly reminded that Ian possesses the power of speech. I bet you’d forgotten!

In the kitchen Josh makes an executive decision that, rather than rushing the food and possibly serving a sub-par dish, they will take much, much too long, and serve a sub-par dish.

The dinner table waits…

Austin is giggling wildly, which always indicates that he is feeling nervous or that he is about to shoot someone in a swimming pool. While he does this, all the guests take turns at doing their impression of Austin’s laugh. They will be sorry when he is dissolving them in quicklime. Everyone is getting extremely drunk, the natural effect of large quantities of alcohol on an empty stomach.

The brothers have finished Frenching the chickens and peeling the potatoes. It is now time to begin thinking about maybe cooking some stuff. Josh starts the sauce. “Balance of flavour is so important,” he says, having memorised this phrase from a magazine.

Meanwhile the dinner table waits…

It is one hour and fifty-five minutes since entree, and Amanda and Blake decide to visit the kitchen to find out what the fuck, man. They discover Josh and Austin and a huge pile of raw chicken. “What have they been doing in here?” asks Amanda. There are no answers to this.

Amanda and Blake return to the dining room to inform their fellow guests that, two hours after the entree, the chicken is still raw. The guests make a pact that whoever loses consciousness first will be eaten first.

And the dinner table waits…

Amanda says that Josh and Austin are”getting a taste of their own medicine”, which makes them the luckiest people in the house, because they’ve had a taste of something. However, hope springs eternal, as Josh and Austin have just placed their chicken in their tiny, lukewarm oven. Josh notes that chicken and mashed potato are too bland to serve by themselves, so they need to add that most exciting of ingredients, the pea.

In the dining room two and a half hours have passed and Chris tells everyone what he would do with the canned goods on the shelves. Everyone joins in the game, swapping recipes like erotic fan fiction. For now, dreams are all these poor souls have.

“Entree wasn’t as well received as we thought it would be,” says Josh, adding that outer space is large and snakes have relatively few legs, “so we’ve got to nail this main”. Literally nailing it seems a better idea right now. Queen and David Bowie begin singing “Under Pressure”, which must’ve cost a lot to license and just proves that if humiliation is worth rubbing in, it’s worth rubbing in properly.

In the dining room the guests begin banging on the table and shouting “where’s our food”, tragically believing in their naive innocence that when the food comes it will be a good thing. The brothers know that the guests are impatient, but “I’m not going to compromise our standards,” says Josh, displaying a remarkable gift for comic timing. They take the chicken out of the oven and put it on the barbecue, but the chicken has seen previous episodes and is refusing to cook out of spite.

And so the dinner table waits…

Just as celebrities begin arriving in the dining room to film appeals for donations to famine relief, main is served. It is four hours and twenty minutes since entree, which technically makes this course breakfast.

The brothers apologise for the delay, but continue to refuse to apologise for their personalities. “I don’t buy Josh’s apology at all,” says Romel, “I think it’s coming from a place of shame and regret.” Well, yes. All apologies come from a place of shame and regret, that’s the point.

Manu and Pete eat. If you call that eating. Manu takes a deep breath, and lets fly with his best impression of a football coach spraying his players when they’re down twenty goals at halftime. Austin tries to protest but makes Manu angrier. The fact they took so long to serve up such utter pigswill, allied with the fact they’ve been slagging off everyone else night after night, has driven Manu into a Gallic fury. He is deeply offended by the brothers’ disrespect for the guests, for the judges, for the competition and for the concept of digestion, and he wants them to know that on a very personal level, he hates their stinking guts.

Pete doesn’t like it much either. ‘Let’s hope you can serve a great dessert,” he says. “And not in two hours, or I’m going home,” adds Manu, twisting the screwdriver in the ear.

God it’s beautiful. This episode should win an Oscar. Or at the very least the Perrier Comedy Award.

In the dining room the guests discuss their expectations for dessert. “Rat faeces on fire” is the general consensus.

Yet somehow, in the kitchen a miracle has occurred. The brothers have taken out their lemon curd domes and somehow, they look like domes of lemon curd. One can’t help but suspect the use of CGI to achieve this effect.

Dessert is served and the guests suffer chest pains from the shock of seeing something that resembles food. “I can see a bit of hope for Josh and Austin,” says Andy, though she’s only talking about their cooking there.

The judges taste the lemon curd domes. The fact they do not immediately melt into a radioactive puddle stuns them, and Manu and Pete compliment the brothers on their ability to do a thing. However, the biscuit base is undercooked so they have cleverly managed to slip in some failure as always.

Scoring time. “These boys have got a lot to learn,” says Mick, which is pretty frigging rich coming from him.

The brothers need 46 to beat Mick and Jodie-Anne and thereby avoid the elimination cook-off, but at times like these the raw numbers don’t matter as much as the happiness that Josh and Austin have granted us all by displaying their amazing ability to ruin everything they touch. Let’s not worry about the score, let’s just smile and be grateful we are alive in such times.

Anyway in the end they score 31 and the entire world passes out from laughing too hard.

Tune in tomorrow, when Josh and Austin cook off against Karito and Ian for the chance to show how bad they are at cooking for a little bit longer.

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