My Kitchen Rules Recap: Truffling the Feathers
Can you wait to see what Henry and Anna the truffle farmers serve up? I hope it’s truffles! Lots and lots of truffles! I hope they shove truffles down these bastards’ throats till they choke — if that’s not too aggressive.
Anyway Henry and Anna are born and bred country folk who like standing in water and digging in the ground like pigs for fungus. They also have a dog which I guess goes well with truffles.
The siblings drive to the shops, while Anna explains her dreams of serving a meal that doesn’t cause anyone to vomit. Henry reveals that he can’t think of anyone besides Anna who he would rather be competing in MKR with. The unspoken implication is that he can’t think of anyone at all, because Anna is the only person he knows.
Cut to Olga and Valeria who inform us that Anna and Henry seem like “simple people”. Cut to Georgie and Alicia who inform us that they don’t see Anna and Henry as a threat. Here ends the standard Bitch Montage.
Anna and Henry are buying various ingredients from the supermarket that crush our hopes of seeing three courses of pure unadorned truffles. They then go to pick up some venison, as they plan to serve a particularly cute main course.
Arriving home, they decorate their instant restaurant, suffering from the same delusion as everyone else on MKR: that the decorations are of any significance whatsoever. Nobody scores on the decor, nobody cares about the decor, the decor adds nothing to anyone’s experience including the home viewer, so why anyone bothers I have no idea. Anyway their instant restaurant is called Black Diamond, because they’re big fans of Kiss and every course will be based on a different Kiss song. Anna and Henry rush upstairs to put on their Kiss costumes, and then begin preparing dinner.
Anna is just a country girl, she’s not polished or fancy or anything like that — or so she CLAIMS. She’s just lulling us into a false sense of security, no doubt, by complaining at length about the high heels she’s wearing. Nobody seems to be holding a gun to her head and ordering her to wear high heels, so no sympathy from me: just don’t wear them. Nobody can even see your feet when you’re serving dinner.
With 32 minutes to go, I dunno, they’ve done stuff with truffles and bread and things I guess. Cooking, you know?
Tragedy now strikes as we are forced to listen to Pat and Louisa. Louisa refers to Henry as her future husband, so she’s really staking out her claim as the Off-Putting One of this series.
As the guests arrive, Georgie and Alicia express their doubts that people from Tasmania can actually make food or live in houses or wear shoes. “I dunno if they’re gonna just serve bangers and mash with truffles,” says Georgie, like some kind of utter arsehole. I imagine they edited out the bit where asked whether they have indoor plumbing.
We now get a “bonus extra” in the middle of the ad break, which is an MKR innovation for which the producers deserve some kind of criminal indictment. Your bonus extras are a disgrace you vampires.
The guests arrive. Sonya says that Henry looks good when he opens the door. He’s definitely one of those guys who the act of door-opening suits. Everyone is amazed by the instant restaurant and its sophisticated theme of death and decay.
Why won’t they play Black Diamond by Kiss on the soundtrack? Ridiculous missed opportunity.
Henry and Anna explain to the guests that they are obsessed with fungus and incapable of talking about anything else. Sonya and Hadil discuss how much they want to fuck Henry. Someone makes a “fun guy” joke in violation of several UN treaties. Pat claims to be happy about all the different ethnicities around the table, because she has nothing else to be happy about, with a daughter like Louisa.
Davide and Marco — Marco! That’s his name! — mention how good-looking Matt and Aly are. Marco invites us to imagine a muscular baby sliding out of Aly, even though he just ate. Georgie and Alicia are still calling Davide and Marco “Mario and Luigi” even though there is no resemblance whatsoever. Marco DOES look like a really fat Chris Pratt, but nobody seems to have noticed this.
Around the table everyone sniffs the truffles at the table. Olga says that truffles are the most expensive dirt and fungi in the world, because she isn’t sure which they are. Olga doesn’t believe that something is good just because it’s expensive, but she’s proof that something isn’t good just because it’s cheap either.
Manu and Pete arrive in slow motion, to pad out the running time. Henry and Anna present their menu: for entree, truffles; for main, truffles stuffed with venison; for dessert, a frozen truffle.
Georgie and Alicia are 100 percent certain they can cook better than Henry and Anna, who haven’t cooked yet, because their menu is “farm food”. Georgie and Alicia are dicks and proud of it. “Not everyone can just use truffle, because it’s expensive,” says Georgie. Alicia chimes in with the stunning insight that “some people might not like it”.
Entree is served. “Looks like a lot of truffle,” says Matt, who as a serving member of the defence force, has no doubt had all the truffles he can stand in his life.
Manu gives his assessment. “If you don’t know how to use truffle properly, it’s not that good,” he explains, to distinguish truffles from foods like chicken and tomatoes, which taste wonderful when cooked by someone who doesn’t know how. “You would hope that someone who worked on a truffle farm would know what to do with it,” he says, and then holds up an empty plate, saying, “This is what I think of it.” Oh no! He hates it so much he wishes he had been served an empty plate instead! Disaster for the Tassie farmers!
Oh wait — actually he loved it! What a rollercoaster this show is to be sure! Manu says it’s the best dish he’s had in the nine years he’s been doing the show, which sure, it’s a low bar, but still, not bad.
Valeria stares straight ahead, like a woman watching her house burn down. Most of the table seems to enjoy the entree though: Dan says he wants five more kilos of it, the disgusting pig. Olga and Valeria disagree, or rather they disagree but lie so they can be mean. Davide doesn’t finish his, but Marco finishes it for him and everyone laughs because Marco is the Fat One. Then Valeria whines about the bread. “You can do better?” asks Pete. “I can,” Valeria lies.
In the kitchen, Henry and Anna, oblivious to the loathsomeness on display in the dining room, don’t want to burn the truffle, because they are naturally unadventurous and dull. Why NOT burn the truffle? Live a little, for god’s sake! Anna is excited to serve truffle mash, and even more excited to say “truffle mash” a few dozen times.
“Venison can go one of two ways,” reveals Alicia: presumably, it can either be served for dinner or flee with terror into the woods. Dan thinks it’s pretty ballsy serving truffle again for the main, and given his haircut, he’s a man who knows ballsy.
Hadil now informs the rest of the table that her sister wishes to fuck Henry. Louisa begins to fidget, panicking that she won’t be able to fuck Henry. Valeria reveals that her type is “bad guys”, by which she means “guys with sufficiently bad judgment”.
In the kitchen, the venison is still a bit raw, much like Louisa’s emotions. There is a fine line between good venison and bad venison, according to Henry, but what would he know: his venison is still a bit raw. He is freaking out. Anna remains relatively calm because she took the precaution of downing a slab before they started.
Back at the table, the discussion refuses to move on from the subject of how fuckable Henry is and who is going to fuck him. Will it be Sonya or Louisa? Surely the only reasonable way to settle is to see whose instant restaurant scores higher, and give Henry to them.
In the kitchen Henry is stoked and Anna is trying to make the truffle mash look like a nice lump. Coincidentally, in the dining room guests are discussing what a nice lump Henry himself is.
Main is served. Manu and Pete eat daintily from their dishes of venison, while Dan barely restrains himself from pouncing at them, stealing their meat and kissing them all over.
Amazingly, Anna and Henry are also very good at cooking venison. It’s a weird sensation unfamiliar to the regular MKR viewer: a team that cooks food that people like to eat.
Now over to Georgie, who says there’s not enough salt in her mashed potato, apparently with no sense of obvious shame. And then over to Valeria, who makes dumb faces and says dumb things.
Time to make dessert while being interrupted by Sonya and Hadil, who bring the dishes into the kitchen and distract them by rubbing their scent glands all over Henry. “Are you dating anybody, Henry?” asks Hadil. Henry replies in the negative and laughs nervously to cover his terror.
Oh yeah, Dan and Gemma are still around.
In the kitchen, Henry busily scoops the ice cream into balls, while Anna prepares to burn the crumble. In the dining room, Georgie and Alicia explain how they would make this dessert better than Henry and Anna, whose dessert they have yet to see or taste. Olga and Valeria explain that everyone is wrong about the first two courses being good as actually they were bad. These two teams should join forces to open a restaurant where you never eat anything but the wait staff constantly mock you for your choices.
Anna takes out the burnt crumble and finds it has been expertly burnt, before suddenly remembering that it wasn’t supposed to be burnt. Whoops! Her mistake was leaving the crumble in the oven too long — that was a gamble that didn’t pay off this time, but good on her for trying something.
“So far we’ve gone so well, we can’t afford to fall at the last hurdle,” says Anna, even though the fact that so far they’ve gone so well is exactly why they CAN afford to fall at the last hurdle. It’s when you’ve stuffed everything up that you can’t afford to stuff up another thing.
They strive to salvage the dessert, and serve it. Olga and Valeria complain that the presentation is messy but by this stage their credibility is in tatters and they can be rightly considered vexatious litigants.
Pete liked the dessert but didn’t love it. There wasn’t enough ice cream for him, which is a strange thing to say for a man who claims dairy will kill your children. Matt enjoys the dessert, as it reminds him of the famous crumble and ice cream of the Swat Valley. Valeria doesn’t think raisins belong in the crumble, because she is a giant swollen intestinal abscess of a woman.
Now it is time for the scores, after a brief interlude for the voiceover man to violently manhandle his own genitals.
Some teams give nines. Some give eights — including the Russians and Georgie and Alicia, which doesn’t make any SENSE, dammit. If you’re going to spend all night talking shit about the food, have the frigging balls to carry that through to the scores. Also Davide and Marco only give them a seven, because I don’t think they were paying attention.
Anyway in the end Henry and Anna get 58 out of 70 from the guests and 49 out of 60 from the judges which makes the total 107, which is much much better than any of the floundering halfwits in Group One managed. On the other hand, they are also currently on the bottom of the leaderboard, so it’s precarious.
Tune in tomorrow, when Dan and Gemma insist they are still on the show.
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