A Top Chef Birthday

One episode in and I'm already hooked! Although I'll confess, I'm a little bit predisposed to like any show set in Chicago and seeing the montage of the city in the beginning made me miss living in a real city all the more.

It's always hard to pick out favorites this early in the game. There's just too many people for them to focus on more than 2-3, and they obviously skew the "story" quite a bit. About 10 minutes into the show, I turned to T and said, I bet Nimma's out. For one thing, it's never a good sign when someone decides the first night that they're going to bed when everyone else is drinking champagne because they're "not here to make friends." I had a feeling she was going to be the weepy isolationist and I wasn't too far off.

Then, the first quickfire. First of all, I was a little disappointed by the quickfire. Making a deep dish pizza was a little lame; yeah, you're at Uno's, could you be more predictable? And on the scale of difficulty, pizza ranks pretty low. I mean, last year, they had to make dishes out of the buffet without knives! Despite the ease, some of the cheftestants managed to find a way to screw it up. Good gravy people, even if you've never eaten a deep dish pizza in your life, you had to know not to fill the whole damn pan with dough! Come on! You have had pizza before, right?

Nimma popped up again (in a bad way) with her underseasoned pizza. OK, I'm going to kick into culinary school food snob mode here for a moment. Underseasoning your food is like, THE lamest, most amateur rookie mistake there is. It is something that is pounded into your head over and over and over again in cooking school. At my school, underseasoning a dish was a major loss of points. I also just went and looked at her bio, and she went to the freaking CIA! She definitely should've known better. Then she had to go and overcompensate by OVERseasoning her dish in the Elimination Challenge. All I could do was shake my head. Again, amateur time. And that cauliflower flan thing....egad. Even if that part had turned out, her dish looked and sounded sooooo boring. A shame, because there's a million things you could do with shrimp scampi.

I've also got to freak out momentarily over the two people who ended up having to make souffles. Ok, again, basic stuff if you have been to culinary school! Not to mention that if I knew I was going on this show, I would have spent weeks memorizing and practicing baking any and everything I could think of. Time and again, people have gotten slammed for tanking a simple dessert. A souffle is really not that complicated for people operating at this level of the game, and the guy who dumped all the crap on top of his souffle? I was speechless.

As far as the cheftestants go, so far, T has a soft spot for the Kiwi, but I think it's only because he reminds T of his friend from New Zealand (aptly nicknamed, Kiwi). That guy, I think his name is Spike? He already annoys the crap out of me. When he said "Padma was like, Casa, m*f*s!" I could only turn to T, slack-jawed. I am also thoroughly over anyone who is into "molecular gastronomy." Seriously people, move on. Ferran Adria has. So should you.

The only guy I like so far is Erik, and that's only because if he wins, he wants to take the money and open a hut on the beach in Hawaii. Sweet.

Oh, and last but not least, I have to comment that the fact that Anthony Bourdain and Rocco DiSpirito were on the same judging panel together cracked me up to no end! If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go back and read some of Bourdain's blogs from last season. He is waaaay harsh on Rocco (and deservedly so after that whole debacle with The Restaurant). It's hilarious. I'm really hoping that he blogs again this season.

I'm already looking forward to next week!

Christian's collection was, say it with me now...

FIERCE!

Totally not my style at all, so even if I was skinny enough to wear any of it, I probably wouldn't, but then again, who's to say what I'd wear if I were skinny enough? But I digress. So Christian was the big winner of this season's Project Runway, and despite the fact that he's a cocky little bastard, he totally deserved it. I thought his collection was really cohesive and just enough 'out there,' if that makes any sense. Rami's collection was good too, but I think some of it was just a little off the mark. But that woven dress was AMAZING. I wish I had the body to wear that! And maybe someplace to wear it too.

Now we just have the long countdown till the next season begins (insert single tear here). Although it helps a little that Top Chef starts this week, and in my hometown, no less! Woohoo!

The cow says...

In case it's not already obvious, I spend a lot of time around kids and kids' stuff these days. I don't post much about it because I know how old it can get to hear someone go on and on about every little darling thing their baby genius does when you don't have kids yourself. But every so often, I come across something that is worth mentioning.

Today, I had to take E to the doctor (for what turned out to be just a cold - but that's a whole other story), and while we were waiting in the exam room, we dug through the small bin of crappy toys that they keep around. Normally, I wouldn't really let her play with stuff that's probably got some latent plague germs festering on it, but she was pretty unhappy about being there and honestly, I'm just not that much of a germophobe to where I was willing to put my foot down.

The toy that E seemed to focus on was some kind of old See n' Say. For those of you who aren't around kids much, yes, they still make See n' Says, although they are a little bit different from the ones we had as kids (I had the alphabet one above when I was little). Most of the newfangled ones have a lever to pull now, instead of a string. And they are also a lot smaller. No, really, they are. It doesn't just seem that way because we're bigger. Some of them have a little flap that flips back and forth to change things up, but they are otherwise pretty much the same. The one pictured at right is what we currently have, purchased for a whopping $1 from another mom.

This particular toy that E found today was totally different though from your standard See n' Say. It was shaped like a house and had a series of wide buttons in a circle which I think are supposed to light up when you push them. I have to assume here because there were no batteries in it. So anyways, the odd thing about this toy was what was on the buttons. Some of them were pretty standard: kitten, dog, bird. But then there were four with pictures of kids on them. One was of a little boy in a suit and glasses talking on a cellphone. Heh? Then there was a picture of a little girl, also in some sort of suit, carrying a boombox. What? I'm dying to know what they "say" when you push the button. The other kids were in more "kid-like" clothes and doing things like, licking a lollipop.

I figure that toy's probably been kicking around the doctor's office for years, so I'm sure they don't make it anymore. Still, I did a Google search, hoping to find a picture of it somewhere, but no such luck. I did however find this interesting little article on How See n' Says Work, just in case any of you are curious.

RIP Rice cooker

My rice cooker died last week. Actually, to be more precise, it went out in a literal blaze of glory. T was outside grilling Korean short ribs for dinner and the rice cooker timer had popped and was happily keeping our rice all nice and warm when it suddenly started popping and sparking like an insano indoor fireworks display. I make light, but it was actually a little scary. I'll admit, I screamed a little when it first started, but otherwise was just frozen by fright.

Turns out, the cord, which was admittedly not in the best condition was a teeny bit wet. OK, so it was a really frayed and chewed up looking cord sitting in a very small puddle of water. Shoot me. So all told, we're actually really lucky that it wasn't much much worse, and also that nothing else caught fire, like the cloth stand mixer cover just a few inches away.

I'm so bummed though as I've had that rice cooker forever. I actually swiped it from my parents' house when I went away to college, so it's got to be at least 15 years old...although eek, now that I think about it, probably more than 20! Gosh, I'm old. Now I have to decide whether to replace it with one of the shiny new expensive Japanese models that most people swear makes perfect rice (but nothing else) or stick to the old school and get a replica of what I had. I haven't priced them out yet, but I'm leaning towards replica. I'll have to checkout the selection at the local Chinese grocery stores.

Oh, and despite the drama, the rice inside the cooker was just fine. There's a little char mark on the counter though.

Now I just feel dirty

A little sidenote: I know that I often post on shows days after they originally aired, but sometimes that's how it goes when you have a baby. Thank god for Tivo. I finally watched last week's episode of Celebrity Rehab last night. Like I mentioned in a previous entry, I don't really feel good about admitting that I watch this show. For a while, I could sort of argue that it actually provides a service, giving outsiders insight into what rehab is really like, what drives people to use and become addicts. But now, after last night's show...I'm not so sure.

Last week's episode was titled "Graduation," which was a little bit odd to me because it led up to but did not include the graduation. In fact, by the title alone, I assumed it was the last episode, but it's not. Anyways, the main focus of this and (partially) the last episode was pushing the celebs into going to a "sober living" program after graduation. And here's where I start to feel dirty because I'm sorry, from what I can tell, these people seem nowhere near being ready to go back out into the real world, even "sober living," which I'm assuming is a euphemism for halfway house. To me, it seems to border very precariously on professionally irresponsible to release them, especially the ones who still won't admit they have a real problem! This is when I start to really wonder about the artifice of the whole show. Why was the program only 18 days? Is that a standard course of treatment (for some reason, 28 days seems to be a common number in my head), or is that just what they decided they up front would be an adequate amount of shooting time? I'll give VH1 and Dr. Drew a small small amount of kudos for at least managing to provide them with 3 months of the sober living program, all paid for, but it still doesn't seem right to me. Especially since it seems like everyone is looking for excuses not to go, even though it's going to be gratis (again).

This show makes me sad. Sad for the people on it, sad for the people not on it, sad for America. But I've committed this much time to it, so I may as well see it to the end. Thank goodness there's only one episode left.