Crash and burn

I was on Masterchef on Monday night. Somehow, though, it had 'accidentally' slipped my mind to let anyone know about it.

Rewind to this time last year. I'd always been vaguely interested in competing in Masterchef. After all, I've run a catering company (part-time while I was at university – a handy source of dosh), cooked for Wine Magazine's sommelier challenge for the best part of three years and (modesty apart) am widely acknowledged to be a pretty good cook. I had visions of being covered in glory. At the very least I knew I was good enough to make it through to the quarter finals.

So some time in the depths of January last year I went for an audition. The panel of producers seemed pretty impressed with my guacamole and even asked me if I'd be prepared to leave the rest of the tub with them for lunch after they'd sampled it during the interview. That had to be a good omen, right? Well, no – completely wrong, as it turned out.

The day of filming dawned. It was a brisk, sunny day in late April (in fact it was the week we had summer last year) and I headed down to the location early one Sunday morning. My fellow contestants seemed like a nice bunch of people and the only inkling of trouble I had was when we were each taken away from the group for an on-camera interview. The producer kept asking me how much winning Masterchef would change my life and I really wanted to say: 'Not much, really'. The truth is that doing well in Masterchef would have broadened my options as a food writer, but unlike many of the other contestants, it wouldn't have changed my life in any fundamental way at all. To say so, however, would have seemed contrary to the whole spirit of the thing, so I ended up mumbling something semi-true about wanting to teach people about how easy it was to cook well if you use good ingredients.

It wasn't until early afternoon that we filed into the kitchen set for the first 'mystery bag' round. I have to admit that I was feeling pretty nervous, but had been quite surprised by the fact that John Torode (who I'd met on a professional basis a couple of times, but whom I'd never taken much of a shine to as he came across as being pretty full of himself) recognised me. No that him telling the group that, as a wine writer, I should have a decent sense of taste helped calm my nerves any.

Once the ground rules had been laid out, the clock was started and we opened our bags. The first thing I found was a box of risotto rice. Great, I thought: I can remember being told that risotto is a really good test of a chef. Besides, I make a mean risotto. I also found some butternut squash and some dried porcini mushrooms, and I decided to use them to flavour the risotto.

I had a bit of a heart-in-mouth moment about halfway through our cooking time, when I realised the squash wasn't roasting fast enough in the oven, so I took the tray out and cut the small cubes into even smaller cubes. This just about fixed things, although the squash was still a bit on the toothsome side when I stirred it into the rice. And, to be completely honest, the mushrooms were so strong that their flavour ended up being a bit too dominant. Other than that, it was a fine risotto and I was quite proud of it.

That state of pride lasted another few minutes, right up until the moment when one of the other contestants, who'd also cooked risotto, took her dish up to the judges – and John Torode went off on a rant about how risotto was the biggest culinary scam the Italians had ever perpetrated on the world and how cooking risotto told you nothing about a chef's culinary abilities (by the same token, surely, cooking a pork chop – for which another contestant was heaped with praise – also tells you nothing about how well someone cooks).

Anyhow, I knew I was stuffed. And so I was. Bounced out in the first round. How humiliating. So although I told a few people about what had happened (my friend Helena's response was the most comforting of all. 'So they gave you an ingredient they despised on a TV show?' she said. 'Do you think they might have wanted to make someone cry?'), I didn't tell anyone when the programme was going to air.

It didn't stop them finding out, though, and I've been inundated with really kind messages from all kinds of people, including old friends I'd more or less lost contact with and acquaintances from the wine-tasting circuit.

And I still think John Torode's pretty full of himself.