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Written by Fortune Kanguuhi felt the pressure in the MasterChef kitchen as nothing went right for the Namibian from the get go.
She was not entirely sure what she was going to prepare for the judges and finally settled on her initial idea of steak, sweet potato and beetroot. A dish that her mother would make for Sunday lunches.
One of the weaknesses that she shared with us was that in her family they would eat a lot of meat and very few vegetables, so her veggie repertoire was limited and could count against her in the competition. It transpired however that it was not vegetables that would be Fortunes undoing but an inability to deal with the pressure in the kitchen and poor time management. An hour is ample time to prepare steak, potato purée and beetroot. Bizarrely Fortune served the judges raw steak, an aspect of cooking that is supposedly her strong point.
As the time pressure built Fortune appeared to fall to pieces in the kitchen and serving the steak raw after having an hour to prepare the meal was as Pete Goffe-Wood put it, “not up to scratch”. Especially when you take into account some of the dishes that some of the other contestants were preparing.
Mentally it looked as though Fortune was broken. When she found herself in the bottom five and having to face the koeksister challenge she did not appear to have the desire to face the challenge head-on, instead saying that “desserts are my biggest fear in life. I don’t like measuring things, I don’t like things that are so precise”.
Herein lies another lesson for any aspiring MasterChef, if you don’t like measuring things or things that are precise you’ll be better off staying at home and watching it on TV.
