My Kitchen Rules Recap: The Loser Now Will Be Later To Win

After last night’s dramatic events, when Jess and Emma were declared “pretty shit but not as shit as the really shit ones”, the two worst teams, Jazzey and Stell and Ash and Matty — who had to fight hard to reach that position given the makeup of the competition — head to “Elimination House”, which is a big house where Pete and Manu live as common-law husbands.

We begin the episode with the voiceover guy masturbating while eating a large bag of arrowroots in the booth. We then get a glimpse at Group Two, who are here to eat the food cooked by the worst teams in Group One, which is a twist in the usual MKR format in one way, but in another way isn’t a twist at all, as it’s firmly in the show’s tradition of having stupid pointless twists.

Arriving at Elimination House, Stella reveals that she has never seen a houe this big, because she is a dirty little peasant who knows nothing of the finer things in life.

“If we were the first to go home, I think we’d be really disappointed,” says Jazzey, stunning all with this bombshell.

Manu and Pete greet the losers. Manu explains that MKR has always been about home cooking, so “we’re stepping up to the ultimate home”. What the goddamn hell that means nobody can tell — they’ve edited out the bit where the teams ask him. The judges explain that they’ll be cooking for group two. “I like that,” says Matty, but he might just be talking about a bird that he saw.

Then the real blow is delivered: Colin Fassnidge is going to be supervising the teams’ cooking. “He’s one of the most renowned chefs in Australia,” says Ash, who has only ever watched one TV show. “He sounds like he’s a little bit bossy,” says Jazzey, unaware that actually he’s not a little bit bossy, he’s a complete prick.

“I’m gonna watch you like a hawk,” says Colin, but why would he watch a hawk?

The cooking begins. “We’ve gotta be quick,” says Ash to Matty, which is utterly pointless. She might as well have told Matty he has to grow antlers. It’s not clear whether they have to come up with their own dishes, or they are ordered to make something, but then, this is My Kitchen Rules, where food has never mattered even a little bit.

Colin pops into Stella and Jazzey’s kitchen to rant drunkenly at them. Meanwhile Matty reveals he’s been watching Gordon Ramsay videos to learn how to cook. Looking forward to him calling Ash a fucking donkey. Colin comes in to let Matty know that he’s doing everything wrong. “What’s the name of this house?” he asks. Matty replies, “Elimination House” after a long pause in which he tries to remember whether it’s called “Matty the House”.

Ash tells Matty he needs to hurry up. Instead Matty talks and talks and talks.

Suddenly, here comes Group Two, expressing their astonishment that a house can be big. We first meet Henry and Anna, truffle farmers from Tasmania who are that state’s biggest employer of trained pigs. We also meet two army people, and the Russian women, who you’ll remember from those ads during the tennis about how great xenophobia is.

Seriously, the voiceovers just sound like modulated vomiting.

The guests enter the house, and are just as amazed by the fact that a big house has expensive stuff in it. Pete explains to them that someone is going home today and everyone’s like oooh no we just got here, but then Pete tells them it’s not one of them that’s going home and they’re all like haha what a trickster you are Pete! It’s all good fun.

“I don’t want to help anyone go home,” says one of the contestants, which is a stupid bloody thing to say — the whole point of the show is to get other teams to go home.

Frangipani pie is a pastry dessert with a pineapple and coconut layer or something. That’s what Ash is telling me, but she’s lied to me before. Colin comes in to ask her if she’s happy with her pastry, to which the answer is no. “Colin came in at the right time,” says Ash, who is far too dimwitted to figure out her pastry is dry and disgusting on her own.

Meanwhile Jazzey and Stella are seconds away from something, but I can’t be bothered seeing what it is. Jazzey believes that one of the new contestants is going to be her boyfriend. I think her best bet is to try to break up the truffle farmers. Speaking of which, we now see an introduction montage about the truffle farmers. Apparently Henry is the truffle farmer from whom Damo and Caz bought their truffles in last year’s MKR. Everyone has a good laugh about this around the table, causing Henry to grab his groin in embarrassment.

Moving on to Pat and Louisa, who are billed as “NSW mother and daughter”, so you know they have a riveting backstory. Pat’s main personality trait seems to be that she’s soaking wet for Manu. Also she dances like a fuckwit while driving and humiliates her daughter in shops. Louisa is a teacher whose students often bring her apples in natural and non-stiff ways while cameras are on them.

With 45 minutes to go, the teams are still cooking, which is pretty much the most boring thing anyone can do. Matty is using the food processor, and this time he doesn’t break it. Although he does tip the blade into the food, so he’s not quite ready for a full-time kitchen job yet.

We are introduced to the Russians, Olga and Valeria, who moved to Australia after their career as pop sensations Ta.tu petered out. We learn that the Russians believe Australians are lazy, and that Valeria raises her eyebrow without thinking about it. Such a fascinating and ancient culture. They are billed onscreen as “NSW Cooking Comrades”. Get it? Comrades? Because Russia? Used to be communist? Communists call each other comrade? Get it? DO YOU GET THE JOKE???????

We meet Georgie and Alicia, who are billed as “NSW Confident Siblings”. That’s it. They are siblings, and they are confident. Upon further investigation, they turn out to be the sister variety of siblings. Georgie and Alicia’s parents own a Chinese restaurant, so their very presence here is cheating. They are very unimpressed with the fact that Ash and Matty are serving a vegetarian menu for an elimination challenge, bitching and moaning loudly about how unacceptable this is. Alicia claims that if she were in a restaurant she would not order their dishes, which raises the question: why doesn’t she go to a fucking restaurant then, instead of coming on a TV show?

The other question is: will the confident siblings or the Russians fill this season’s role of Nasty Ethnic Team?

Next we meet two young men who immediately come across as eminently forgettable. I don’t even know their names — one of them is called something like David, but not David. The other one isn’t. Sonya, one of the “Besties” who we have yet to meet in detail, laughs hysterically at her own claim that these two men look like Mario and Luigi, which I think is supposed to be funny because they look nothing like Mario and Luigi. The only way you could think they looked like Mario and Luigi is if you have two friends called Mario and Luigi who have nothing to do with the video game but happen to look a bit like these two guys on MKR.

Meanwhile Valeria complains about the existence of corn fritters and Alicia thinks they might be a strategy, while in the kitchen Matty confesses his secret shame: he has never heard the word “colander”.

Jazzey has never used a woodfired oven before, but sticking to her life motto — “if I’ve never done something before, the best time to start is when under extreme pressure in an elimination round on a reality TV show” — she shoves her pita in anyway.

Ah, now the army people. Their names are Matt and Aly and they are a “Defence couple”, which is a thing apparently. Matt is a cavalry officer, but there is no footage of him riding horses. He reveals that food is very important to soldiers — war truly is hell.

The corn fritters are served, as is the prawn saganaki, which is what…Jazzey and Stella served I think? Ash is feeling proud because she knows it’s better than her instant restaurant entree, by which she means it contains neither glass nor anthrax. The judges eat the entrees — everyone has to eat two of everything I just realised, this is gluttony on a repulsive scale. Stella and Jazzey begin to panic because there is a whole tomato in one of their entrees, because they “didn’t have enough time”. Enough time to take a tomato out of the bowl, presumably.

Matty thinks the two entrees are pretty even, but what is the point of even hearing what Matty thinks about anything? The judges dismiss the teams without commenting on their dishes, so why did the teams have to stand there watching them eat? The whole freaking system is out of order.

Having eaten the entrees, Alicia says she is disappointed in the corn fritters, by which she means she’s fucking stoked to have something to complain about. The prawn saganaki apparently contains whole tomatoes across the board, so there’s consistency there. Valeria thinks there were flaws in the entree, but that’s rich coming from someone who can’t even pronounce “entree”.

Speaking of mispronunciation, Matty is in charge of the falafel mix, or as he puts it, “the floffal mix”. Why Ash let him be in charge of anything is a mystery, and emergency services are presumably on high alert outside.

In the other kitchen, Stella and Jazzey are determined to prove they can cook meat well. “We have to cook this salmon to perfection,” says Stella, a woman prone to wild fantasy.

It is time for an in-depth introduction to Sonya and Hadil, two Jordanian sisters who think anyone who’s jealous of them should “get off their arse and work hard”. So maybe THEY will be the Nasty Ethnics this time around. But look the competition is fierce.

Meanwhile Matty is chopping onions, something he is almost qualified to do. “I don’t know what I’m doing right now,” he says, believably.

On the other side, Colin pops into Stella and Jazzey’s kitchen in a feeble attempt to justify his employment. “What’s a lemon salsa?” he asks — turns out it’s a salsa with lemon. It’s the little tips you pick up that make this show sing.

In the dining room, some guy I’ve never seen is asking about salmon. Henry says a crispy skin is beautiful. Henry says he spent his whole childhood fishing, but unable to catch anything, he decided that fishing in dirt was better than fishing in water so he became a truffle farmer.

Olga declares that Russia is a nation of winners, which Matt and Aly find amusing because it is factually incorrect. “I’d ask them how the Russians did in Afghanistan,” says the snarky cavalryman, and god how I wish he had.

Now we meet Dan and Gemma, “in-laws from Adelaide”. Gemma is the sister of Dan’s partner, but somehow she trusts her husband to be alone with Gemma’s raw sexuality. Dan and Gemma are extremely dull people about whom we learn almost nothing, which is more than we want to.

Matty is happy with his floffel mixture, but Colin comes in to express his visceral revulsion at Ash and Matty’s failure to turn the deep fryer on. Matty, being a rookie chef, has yet to watch the Gordon Ramsay video where Gordon explains that frying things is easier when the fryer’s on. Meanwhile Stella and Jazzey’s salmon is raw in the middle, as are Stella and Jazzey.

Ash is running around with an armful of vegetables and is in such a hurry she declares they will need to make the salad by just chopping everything up and throwing it in a bowl. Which I always thought is how you make a salad anyway. What else is there?

In the dining room, Hadil says that the falafel better be perfect, which means that she and Sonya are going to bitch about the falafel no matter what. They also pronounce “falafel” in the most annoying way anyone has ever pronounced “falafel” in the history of the world. They say “falafel” like they’re punching you in the face.

Colin visits Stella and Jazzey to mock their life choices, then pops in to Ash and Matty’s to mock the idea that two falafels is a main course. Ash reveals that she has already dressed the salad, a statement that Colin finds vile and offensive. Matty says he tasted the garlic sauce and liked it. Colin scoffs contemptuously, and then abuses Matty for smiling. If Matty doesn’t get far as a cook, at least he can front an anti-bullying campaign when this is all over.

Stella is freaking out and hoping that the salmon turns out all right, which is good because usually on MKR the people who hope for the best without having any idea whether their food is any good end up succeeding.

Main is served, and Hadil says “falafel” in that pretentious fucking wanky way over and over and over and over and over and Jesus Christ.

Olga says eating the salmon was like a punch in the face. “Maybe they know what they’re talking about,” says Aly. “Maybe they can’t say anything nice about anyone’s food,” says Matt, who is really itching to bring up Afghanistan.

Time to prepare dessert, and however the final course turns out, the teams can both be extremely proud of the fact that this episode is far too long.

In the dining room Valeria insults truffles, but more importantly, Louisa keeps staring at Henry with undisguised desire to get up on dat dick. This causes the show to put a pink border around her face and play Love Is In The Air, because if MKR is about anything, it’s about sex.

Olga reveals that she and Valeria come from “a dessert background”: they were pastry chefs in the gulag. Actually Olga used to own a dessert shop — what the hell is with all these food industry professionals being allowed on this show?

Anyway, back to the Adventures of Matty, who has no idea how to get the core out of a pineapple and is on the verge of trying to have sex with it. Meanwhile Jazzey has her Plan B on standby, which is a reference, fortunately, to dessert. Her Plan B is coconut, which is pretty lame.

Dessert is served, as we enter Hour Sixteen of this episode. Olga and Valeria are incredibly smug about the fact that they are served a broken crust. “Us, the people with a background in pastry — BIG MISTAKE!” Know what else was a big mistake? The invasion of Afghanistan.

Stella has “fingers and toes crossed” that they’re not the first team to leave Elimination House. What she doesn’t know is that the losing team NEVER gets to leave Elimination House. They will grow old and die there and be buried under the floorboards.

“They were two very good desserts,” says the guy whose name isn’t David. He pronounces panna cotta quite pretentiously, but nowhere near as badly as the sisters’ falafel. Valeria whines about her tart and suggests they should’ve made a pineapple curd instead of a coconut cream and explains how she would have made dessert, but offers no insights into how she would handle a land war in Asia.

The Group Two teams give their scores. The nice teams are nice and the nasty teams are nasty as per their contracts. “We know both teams gave their all,” says Pete, lying as always.

Ash and Matty are judged first. The corn fritters didn’t wow Pete, because he has not read the latest studies indicating that corn was a common part of prehistoric man’s diet. Manu was disgusted by the falafel. They both hated the dessert. This makes Olga smile, even though it doesn’t affect her in any way — she just likes it when people are sad.

Altogether Ash and Matty get 68, out of 140, which qualifies as “shithouse”. Can Stella and Jazzey beat that?

Yes they can. Turns out they can actually cook a little bit, and not only can they, they did.

Thank god that’s over and Matty can go back to his simple life of being groped by old women and staring open-mouthed at ceiling fans, while Ash can go back to her life of wondering what the hell she did to deserve this. Meanwhile Stella and Jazzey live to fail another day.

Tune in tomorrow, when Henry and Anna shove their snouts in the ground and see what comes up.

If recaps are your thing, and my writing is your thing, you can lend a hand to my continued undertaking of these activities by kicking in to my Patreon, which helps me just a little bit in living this writer life.