The night that was: MasterChef Australia 2012 Finale

I didn’t start out as a MasterChef fan. The whole first season in 2009 passed me by without an acknowledgement. Come 2010 however, I was sucked in by Chuck into the nightly drama of watching 24 ordinary Australians ‘battle it out for the food dream’. Two years later I am still watching every night (except Friday, who cares about Friday?) and together we two addicts made special preparations for the 2012 finale, which aired last night.

To celebrate MasterChef Night, we decided to have a fellow MasterChef fan-couple come over for dinner to watch and make loud sarcastic comments with us. We also decided to mark the occasion by cooking them a meal of MasterChef recipes from this season. I was in charge of Andy’s fish pie whereas Chuck took Kylie’s strawberry and apple crumble. 

We prepped the night before, which for me meant cutting up piles of vegetables. Wednesday night our friends were expected nice and early so I got into the cooking the minute I got home.

Sustainable blue swimmer crab stock - I'm so freakin' fancy-pants.

I stuck to the recipe to the letter, as one should when making something for the first time. The only deviation I dared was to include a purple carrot as well as an orange carrot in the veggie mix.

All the veggies and deliciousness softening.

Of course, if I'd thought ahead I would have known that putting a purple carrot into the mix would turn EVERYTHING purple. 

  Yes, I served up a purple pie. 

I have never made a MasterChef recipe before, though I have printed a few off the website when they've made me salivate on screen.  All in all it was an easy recipe to follow and didn't take too long to prepare. One thing I have noticed is that MasterChef recipes tend to have ridiculously long ingredient lists. When you have an open pantry as impressive as the one available to the contestants, you can put in 20g of this or that and chopped handfuls of 6 different herbs. Not so on the average cooking night.

I have also never made a pie before, only tarts. This wasn't a proper 'pie' as far as I was concerned, because it only had on-top pastry. Still, I was pretty proud of my decorating efforts:

See the fish theme?

And I literally danced around the kitchen when it came out of the oven looking like this:

 Oh yeah, go me.

It was delicious, even if I do say so myself. And so very purple. I even feel a little inspired to try some of my other MasterChef recipe collections, see how they turn out.

Chuck's strawberry and apple tart was also tasty as anything - so good I have no photos because it was announcement time in the competition when we took it out of the oven and it got devoured immediately.