The Road to the MasterChef Kitchen (PT. 1)

It all began one late New England summer day in August of 2024 when I (Jesse) came home to see Jess, surrounded by ring lights, taking selfies in a chef’s coat. “Oh heyyy” I exclaimed. “What do we have here?”.. Jess looked up at me with the most electric smile, one that could light up the darkest alleyways in downtown Boston at 3am, and said “I DID A THING!”. I looked at her confused for about 90 seconds and thought, what “thing” involves a chef coat and bright lights. “I applied to MasterChef!” Jess said. I, at the time, had seen the show but hadn’t really watched a full season religiously. I knew though that this was big for Jess, someone who had always loved food and being creative but was stunted by the everyday life of a 45hr work week in a world that doesn’t really care about you. I remember being so proud of her in that moment. She took the bull by its horns and put herself out there, this was monumental step towards greatness for Jess. We went down the application/casting worm hole: long form questionnaires, background checks, emails for days, pictures of “our life’ and ultimately a cooking video. To be a fly on that wall when we shot her cooking video. I taped handwritten notes on printer paper with talking points and reminders behind the cameras view, fumbled with my first time using a gimbal, and completely failed multiple times at framing her in the shot. Yet, we still produced a pretty damn good video. The real struggle was uploading the video to the proper website. I struggled for hours trying to get the video to upload, my google search was oversaturated with “how to…”. as 5am rolled around, 5 hours after the deadline, we finally got the video to upload…. or so we thought.

For months we waited for the call together. When will it come, will they call even if it’s to say “sorry, not this time’”, what will we do if she does makes it on the show. We hadn’t thought that far, but we also didn’t care. At this point in our relationship we had been reciting the mantra “DO HARD THINGS” for a few years. This was a play off of my high school wrestling teams mantra “PAY THE PRICE”. In essence it meant you have to pay the price if you want to do hard things in life. Something that we realized we needed to manifest if we ever wanted to escape the rat race of modern civilization. As the application process progressed, we decided to binge watch all of the seasons to truly understand what Jess was getting herself into. Night after night we watched as Gordan and the judges tasted home cook’s meals.

Ultimately, Jess never got that call back. It was heartbreaking for both of us. She put every extra min of everyday she had into this process and it hurt to never hear from the casting team again. It sucked to see her on top of the world for weeks to only be let down.

Fast forward to late July of 2025. It was like deja vu, Jess looked at me and said “you’ll never believe it, MasterChef is doing a Duo’s season”. I knew at that point that this was meant to be. We were meant to tackle this competition together and with every once of intensity in our bodies. We had a small leg up as we knew what to expect from the application process. We spent everyday talking about how we would approach the casting aspect and what dishes we would make on our cooking video. As we got further along in the casting process the intensity of what we needed to provide proved to be challenging, notably, my passport was set to expire 2 weeks before filming began. I used a 3rd party to expedite my renewed passport, not really understanding the full scope of the process. As the deadline approached to send in a copy of my new passport neared, I got the dreaded email; your passport application has been delayed. The company I had used, failed to put the paperwork in on time. My heart sunk, '“am I going to be the reason why Jess and I didn’t get to live out our culinary dreams?”. I won’t go into details regarding the strongly worded conversation I had with the company handling my renewal, but let’s just say I had my $500 fee refunded.

My passport finally came in, 1 day past the due date. We thought, surely 1 day isn’t a big deal, right? The weeks went on and the silence from the casting team was deafening. Did we miss this amazing opportunity by 1 day?… We stopped watching episodes of MasterChef to forget about all the work we put into the process.

One night after dinner Jess looked at me and said “why not us, why don’t we get to be part of this amazing experience”. I remember going to bed that night disheartened. The next day we both went to work with a feeling of defeat, the deadline for casting decisions had passed and we never got the call. Boy were we wrong! Around 11am on a Monday, one week before we had to fly to LA, we got THE CALL. The call that ultimately changed our lives. “You have been chosen to fly to LA for the final casting process”.

That whole week leading up to flying out to LA was a whirlwind. What will our jobs think? How will we pay our mortgage/bills, how will we survive 6-8 weeks without our girl Wynnie (our pup), what if we make fools of ourselves? None of that mattered as we knew this was our calling. I remember going to bed at 1 am for a 5am flight, shortly after grilling 10 different lamb chops at 10 different timespans. Trying to nail that perfect medium rare. We made lemon curd 8 different ways with varying amounts of gelatin to see how it set up in the fridge and it responded to being piped from a pastry bag. We meant business and we were not going to let small but important details, like adding too much/little gelatin or messing up our hero protein, crush our dreams. We knew it was going to be hard, we knew it was going to test our relationship, and we knew we would be polarizing (mostly me lol). But we didn’t care, We knew we had to Pay The Price and DO HARD THINGS to win!

-Jesse