Dispatches from Planet Monti!

Way back in Season Three of MasterChef, there was a competing cook who quickly became one of my favorite people ever on any food-related show. Her name is Mairym Carlo, but she goes by “Monti”, to which Joe Bastianich reacted with quite a bit of skepticism when she introduced herself to him on the show. He quickly came around on her, though, and she lasted deep into the competition. She didn’t win (honestly, nobody was going to beat Christine Ha that year, Christine was the ’91 Redskins of MasterChef contestants), but she lasted and since then she has gone on to quite a lovely career as a food blogger, podcaster, occasional judge on other food competitions, and so on. (She appeared on an episode of Cutthroat Kitchen where she told one cook that their dish “tasted like divorce”. Ouch! That must have been a terrible dish.)

More recently, Carlo has made a nice career for herself as a food influencer, particularly on Instagram, where she posts videos of her visiting restaurants that feature a specific thing they’re really good at, and also where she shares a ton of information about product recalls in the food world. This last service seems especially important right now, seeing as how we have a government that I’m not sure, ahem, has our best interests at heart.

Yesterday, Carlo shared a slideshow on Instagram in which she describes a lot of what’s happened in her life over the last quarter-century, starting with this:

“Twenty-six years ago today, I was run over by a dump truck.”

That is not a metaphor. From that horrible moment that could have ended her life, she emerged laser-focused and has done all the things I mention above, and more…and all of that leads up to her announcement that she has a book coming out next year, called Spanglish: Recipes and Stories. I, for one, will be buying that book on sight. Watching Monti Carlo forge a career and identity for herself out of passion, warmth, and unending energy has been truly inspiring, and I can’t wait to see what she has in store next.

And oh, imagine my delight earlier this year in seeing that she is also apparently a member of Team Poofy Shirts And Overalls!

 

And as long as I’m celebrating Monti Carlo, let me repost something I put together way back in 2012 when her run on MasterChef came to too soon a finish. (I still don’t understand why Josh didn’t get sent home on that dish, when he actually won a basket of the exact ingredients in the dish the cooks were supposed to replicate and he didn’t get it done.) I have to admit that I miss the early years of MasterChef, when the personalities seemed bigger. There are cooks I remember from those seasons even though they were a decade ago, and yet I have to really try hard to remember anybody from the season that just finished. Anyway, the balance of this post is a time capsule of sorts…let’s go back to August 2012….

[Insert weird time travel music and wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey sound effects and shimmering here]

Well, I will find whatever episodes of Master Chef remain a lot less interesting, because my favorite contestant, Monti Carlo (yes, that is her real name), has been eliminated. Her departure was pretty upsetting: it was the first time in the whole season she ever found herself in the Bottom Two, and the other one there, Josh, had managed to completely screw up the assigned dish despite having won the earlier challenge and thus having literally been handed a box of the exact ingredients for the dish they were supposed to replicate.

Oh well. I thought Monti was just terrific. She was smart, skilled, and funny. She clearly didn’t know as much about food as some of the other contestants, but she made up for it with an adventurous spirit and a self-confidence that grew as the season went on. I loved the episode where she was given a John Dory fish to filet and cook, and she’d never even heard of that fish before, much less cooked one. The judges noted how long it was taking her to start fileting it, but when she did, she took the knife right to it and muttered, “I’m gonna figure you out.” I loved that.

I don’t think she was destined to win, really; I expect the finale to boil down to Frank (the Italian stockbroker with mad kitchen skills) and Christine (the blind woman with mad kitchen skills). Becky is annoying with her oddly inflated sense of self-worth, and so is Josh, with his pouting whenever he doesn’t get what he wants. I don’t think Monti was going to win, but I think she should have come closer than this. And if Graham (the fat judge) was going to offer the last guy to get eliminated a job in one of his restaurants, why no offer to Monti? Why didn’t Gordon Ramsay offer her the money for a down payment on the food truck that she wants to run?

Oh well.

I also loved Monti because she had fantastic facial expressions. She mugged for the camera wonderfully, so I took some screengrabs and captioned them…as if Monti was the heroine in some kind of cheesy Asian martial arts/fantasy flick. At least, that’s the notion.

[Wow, I used to generate some really weird content, didn’t I??? –Present Day Me]

It’s Monti Carlo’s world, and we’re all living in it, is all I’m saying.