During this season I had to work alone most of the time. I think that it was a good learning experience for me to work by myself. Working alone was not necessarily difficult but more stressful. I was more stressed about the short amount of time that I had as well as worrying about not messing up the recipe. I went through 4 lessons of this, however, it was a good experience since I got to work independently. I think it helped with my confidence in cooking. At the beginning, I wasn’t consciously worried about being by myself. As the activity went on I became subconsciously more dependent on my partner being there. And so the stress of self-reliance increased my confidence in cooking since I luckily did not burn my hand or anything like that.

Here are the things I made:

1. Hummus (This was one of my favourites as it was very tasty and simple to make)

I used a tenderizer mallet for the first time which was fun. It was surprisingly hard to mash the chickpeas.

2. Quiche

3. Oat & Raisin Cookies

4. Christmas themed Salad

5. Gingerbread cookies

The dough was a bit annoying to handle since it was so fragile and kept breaking. I had to constantly re-do the dough which was frustrating.

6. Baked Tofu

7. Royal Couscous salad

8. Sugar cookies (I really liked this one as the cookies were very tasty.)

The mixing was very hard as everything started meshing together into a huge glob, it felt a lot different than when I make brownie or cake mix at home. I mostly let my partner do the mixing as she has more arm strength than me.

9. Chocolate Lava Cake (This was another favourite. I really love chocolate lava cakes, and making one myself was very fun since I got to see how it’s made.)

Overall, this season of Masterchef helped me learning completely new techniques which I’ve never experienced while cooking at home. Most of the recipes were fairly simple or just required the skills that I learnt from the activity. This shows how the skills that I’ve learnt over these couple of sessions are applicable to various recipes. I think that I’ve definitely learned new skills although they might not have been the ones I thought I’d be learning. My struggles throughout this season stemmed from my inexperience. From this 2 season journey, I figured out that my arm strength is something I should work on as well as I should try to be more confident while cooking.