It's about frickin' time!

Let's just cut to the chase. Nikki is finally gone! Hooray! I'm sorry, but she was clearly the most useless person, not just in last night's episode but in at least the last 2 or 3 episodes. All she's done is talk about how she's Italian and she makes comfort food, and then when the judges don't like her stuff, she says that she's not doing it for them, she's cooking "for the people." Pfft...whatever! Something about her has just always rubbed me the wrong way, and her food was never spectacular. Goodbye, you won't be missed. (And before you get your panties all in a bunch, no it's not a real mugshot - it's from some lame event.)

I think T is planning on writing another "guest blog" but in the meantime, here are my thoughts. Last night's episode was pretty entertaining. I liked the idea of doing Wedding Wars instead of Restaurant Wars. It's a pretty mean bait & switch to pull though. Catering a wedding is really nothing like working in a restaurant, and to have to pull an all-nighter with no warning - rough. Especially having to make wedding cakes.

Nikki's team had disaster written all over it from the start. You just knew that Dale was going to clash with everyone. And he had every right. Most of those people were morons. I mean, they took what should have been a super easy theme (Italian food) and totally screwed it up. And not to keep bashing Nikki, but way to step up as leader. I mean, if you're connecting with the customer on what he's into, and you have the most experience with the type of food he wants, then WHY would you shirk the leader role? Again, have you not watched this show ever? I understand not wanting to take the bullet if things go south, but you'd at least get props for taking on the challenge! When she flat-out said, "I was not the lead in this effort" at Judges' Table, my jaw about hit the floor. I think you could see the shock and disappointment emanating from Tom's bald head.

Maybe I have a soft spot for Dale since he's Asian and from Chicago, but I think he was a bit unnecessarily villainized by his teammates too. There was a lot of grumbling about how he was doing things wrong or whatever, but no one actually wanted to step up and correct him or offer to take over. I hate that attitude. It's like when you're trying to decide with a group of people what to do on a Friday night, and someone sits there in the corner and says nothing while the decisions are being made, but then once you get to the bar, they're like, "This place sucks. Why'd we come here? I wanted to go to this other place." Well why the hell didn't you say so? It's so easy to complain about decisions after they've already been made.

I thought the smacktalk between Dale & HatBeard was dumb. I understand that at this point, they'd probably all been up for well over 36 hours, so tempers were flaring. And much as I like Dale, it's obvious that his fuse is shorter than most. Punching the locker because they lost the Quickfire...kinda pathetic. But I do think HatBeard was just baiting him. In case I haven't mentioned it before, he REALLY annoys me. Way to cover up for your own lack of work by trying to point the finger at the guy who did the most. Yeah, that made sense. For once, Lisa did the smart thing at Judges' Table and just kept her mouth shut. She knew that her cake, ugly as it was, was going to keep her out of harm's way, and chiming in on their pissy little fight was only going to draw unnecessary attention to herself. Of course, I wonder if part of the reason that she didn't say anything was because she'd fallen asleep standing up. She looked exhausted! Way more so than her teammates, almost to a scary degree.

Not a lot of comments about the other team. It was another lovefest, led by once again by Richard, who I'm begrudgingly beginning to like and root for. I'm with T about the faux-hawk though - it's lame and needs to go. I did think it was pretty cool of him to share his win with Stephanie. And I guess TweakBeard must not have packed enough speed in his bag that day because he was strangely quiet through most of the episode. Although his comment about the "culinary boner"...well, I could've done without that.