Halfway through the egg challenge, Ramsay takes an interest in Abby, the youngest contestant at 8, who’s got her pan too hot and is still struggling to get a single egg fried and on a plate. Abby, who's from Winchester, Virginia, still has a sweet baby-talk quality to her voice and is impossibly adorable. In Episode 2, while watching the other kids race to cook pancakes, she screamed nearly every time a pancake was flipped over and at one point nearly collapsed from excitement. “Take the pan to the plate, young lady,” Ramsay tells her.

She yells back, clearly stressed: “IT’S NOT READY.”

When time’s up, the judges all count down the last 10 seconds together.

The kids raise their hands in surrender and stop cooking.

“Who’s feeling good, guys?” Ramsay asks, cheerfully. No one raises a hand. The kids’ mood is total frustration. “Aw, come on, no one?”

A producer hollers from the side, “Let’s do the last five seconds again, guys,” and on cue the kids pretend to plate eggs and run around while someone counts, “Five, four, three, two, one.”

Then the kid chefs are shuffled out of the room for a break. Instead of the judges going to inspect the eggs, Rooney emerges from the greenroom and walks station to station to see who cooked the most eggs.

After the numbers are calculated, Birdsong, Elliot, Bastianich, and Rooney sit at a table offset discussing how to make the next challenge work. As it turns out, the number of eggs each kid cooked in this first challenge will determine the number of ingredients he or she will be allowed to use to cook a signature dish. Little Abby, sure to be an audience favorite, has successfully fried only two eggs in 10 minutes.

The lights on the set go dim; the pans and eggs and dishes are being cleared away. Out of the blue, Gordon Ramsay makes an announcement:

“The lady from BuzzFeed is going to do the egg challenge.” The cameramen, producers, and crew are as surprised as I am. “Lights up, please, thank you,” he hollers at no one in particular.

The kids aren’t present and the cameras aren’t rolling. And though I’ve been hanging around the set of his show for two days, I don’t think I’ve done anything to make him want to actively embarrass me. We had so far spoken innocuously about this show and his own children. I had not even asked him about the time he fat-shamed a contestant on Hell’s Kitchen, nor the time he tricked vegetarians into eating meat, nor about his allegedly showing up with a camera crew without permission at the wedding of his now-estranged mentor Marco Pierre White. I did not ask if he actually hired someone to film his father-in-law (and former business partner) having an affair, or if any of those things make him feel any doubt that he should be a role model for children.

But Ramsay’s probably just bored; he doesn’t want me or anyone getting too comfortable, and he knows this will be fun. And he does not know, thank god, that I attended culinary school. In theory I should be decent at this. But I'm not. I can’t be relied on to do anything quickly — not cooking, writing, thinking, or any kind of thing. I accidentally set my course book on fire more than once.

Ramsay abruptly starts singing “If I Could Turn Back Time” and rushing the producers to bring over the pans, oil, eggs, and butter. "Get the clock ready. You have five minutes. Are you ready? Five minutes, I want to see how many you can do. Your time starts now.”

“I'm shaking,” I say.

“And begin!”

I start cracking eggs into the pans without remembering to turn on the heat under any of the pans.

“Turn the gas on first, young lady! Fifteen seconds gone! Let's go, let's go, let's go! Thirty seconds gone.”

“Shit!”

“Please no cursing, Emily. Forty seconds gone.”

“OK, OK.”

“Darling, you gotta go faster, I am starving. Coming up to one minute gone. If an 8-year-old can do it, I'm sure a 22-year-old can do it.”

I am 31.

But there is a crowd of about 20 people from the crew watching, taking photos with their phones, and laughing.

“Emily, I'm begging you, turn the fucking gas on.”

“No cursing, Chef,” I say.

“Coming up to two minutes gone. EMILY, PLEASE,” he yells. I am still not even finished cracking all eight eggs into all eight pans because I have apparently forgotten how to crack eggs, what to do with the shells, how to pan, what are eggs.

“What if I just throw one of these raw eggs at you,” is for some reason my response.

“Please, Emily, don't waste time. I've got your editor on the phone, he's live and he's not impressed.”

I consider telling him that my editor is a woman. I don’t really want to embarrass him and make him yell even more. Or do I?

“My editor is a woman,” I say, cringing.

“Well, she's not very happy. We're Skyping her straight after this. I BEG YOU, GET ONE FUCKING EGG ON THE PLATE, PLEASE.”

I remember I should throw some butter in there and baste.

“Nice, that's lovely. Butter, butter, butter,” he says three times rhythmically. I’m reminded of the way he also offhandedly said, “To the bar. The bar, the bar, the bar,” three times earlier in the day.

“Seventy-five seconds to go!” he yells.

This is the part where, if you’re a real cook, your brain turns off and your muscles remember and everything’s familiar so you can work like a machine. You can rhythmically baste, tilt, scoop, and plate along a row over and over with movements so efficient that 75 seconds is the perfect amount of time to plate eight sunny-side-up eggs. But the kids don’t have that muscle memory, how could they, and neither do I. No one is magically a master chef. It takes practice.

Ramsay, I’ve realized by now, needs to yell the whole time and doesn’t like silence, so he says, “Coming up to 60 seconds to go! EMILY, PLEASE.”

I get an egg on the plate.

“ONE EGG, YAY!!!!!!” he says sarcastically. “Last minute!”

The rest of the eggs just haven’t finished cooking. I have spent most of my five minutes fumbling with the heat and running back and forth between my two ranges of four eggs each.

The entire production crew of MasterChef Junior counts down my last 10 seconds.

“One egg. You are as good as Abby,” he says.

Abby, he reminds me, is 8 years old.