Quickfire Challenge: Joe Jonas is on hand to challenge the cheftestants to create a midnight snack for elementary school kids to eat during their sleepover at the Museum of Natural History. They won't have utensils or plates, and Joe Jonas will pick the winner. And here are the dishes they showed:
Antonia: white chocolate and cherry muffin with cinnamon and allspice. There are also apple slices, but she doesn't mention them.
Blais: white bread, spiced apples with whipped honey and crunchy chocolate
Spike: homemade potato and carrot chips with mascarpone and marshmallow dip with lime zest
Tre: cracker with cranberry and cherry jam, apple-smoked bacon and fresh basil
Casey: chocolate and bacon lasagna with apple juice and candy
Dale L.: sweet tart nuggets and caveman boulders with chocolate sauce
Jamie: mini cheddar biscuits with homemade apple sauce
Tiffany: coconut rice pudding with grapefruit sauce
Dale T.: corn cake with dried cherries and whipped maple topping
Fabio: apple with white chocolate, caramel and blueberry, and an apple with dark chocolate, marshmallow and candied ginger
Tiffani: Rice Krispie treat snowball with malted milk and graham crackers
Angelo: fried dough with white pepper, Old Bay spice and cheddar crumbs
Stephen: snickerdoodle sandwich with white chocolate, coconut ganache, apricot and mint
Jen: bacon ginger taffy and honey grilled peaches
Mike: chocolate coconut corn bar and coconut horchata chaser
Joe's least favorites were Tiffany's, because it was too messy; Mike's, because the chocolate flavor didn't come through, and Stephen's, because the mint wasn't strong enough. His favorites were Spike and Tiffani, and I'm sure it wasn't at all set up ahead of time, but it's a tie! So they're going to the museum to let the kids decide! Tiffani and Spike do a schoolyard pick from the other chefs to form teams. Tiffani ends up with all of the women minus Carla plus Dale L. Various cheftestants complain about not getting to make their own dishes and having to help someone else win immunity, which is kind of fair. Anyway, the kids vote by screaming and Tiffani's dish wins pretty overwhelmingly, so she gets immunity and she gets to pick her ingredients for the elimination challenge.
Elimination Challenge: It starts right after the Quickfire ends, and they remain on their teams. They have to cook breakfast for the kids and their parents the morning using only what they find in the museum's pantry. Tiffani's team will use T-Rex diet food: meat, eggs and dairy. Spike's team will use Brontosaurus diet food: vegetables, fruits, and grains. They have to sleep over in the museum on cots, what little sleep they get. Each team breaks up into pairs. Team T-Rex realizes pretty quickly that their choice isn't as great as they thought since they don't get flour or herbs, which makes sauces pretty much impossible. Jamie slices her thumb open and has to leave to get stitches, leaving Jen alone to cook their dish. Many other chefs feel like Jamie wussed out, and considering that Fabio broke his finger and still cooked during his season, I kind of have to agree. And the guest judge is Katie Lee (no longer Joel), the host from the first season, which seems awkward. Here's what they served:
Team Brontosaurus:
Dale T. and Mike: fresh corn grits, stewed peppers and salsa verde
Marcel, Richard, and Angelo: banana parfait with seasonal fruit and tandoori maple
Carla and Spike: V9: gazpacho with fruits and vegetables
Fabio and Stephen: potato gnocchi with leeks, spinach and mushrooms. That perennial breakfast favorite.
Team T-Rex:
Antonia and Tiffany: frittatas with either bacon and cheddar, ham and cheese, or chevre
Casey and Tre: salmon with shrimp and apple-smoked bacon sauce
Jen and Jamie: braised bacon and hard-boiled eggs
Dale L. and Tiffani: steak and eggs with Hollandaise
The winning team is Team Brontosaurus and the winners are the makers of the banana parfait: Angelo, Marcel and Blais. It's funny, because at the last minute, Angelo decided to cut up the plums and Marcel didn't want to, and then Marcel thinks that he should have won as an individual. Hmm. Of course he does.
So the members of Team T-Rex are the losers. They argue with the judges. Jen especially is feisty and acts manic and twitchy and did she get her meds screwed up or what? She's sure that her dish was awesome when, in fact, it was pretty bad. And really? Hard-boiled eggs cut up on top of a wet slab of bacon? Meanwhile, Jamie did literally nothing, which hardly seems fair. Anyway, the judges send Jen home, although they claim it has nothing to do with her arguing. I can't believe that Jamie got away with doing jackshit, and I LIKE Jamie. I really think Jen was either overtired or on caffeine or SOMETHING ELSE because she acted really weird and un-Jen like. Weird. And she also unleashed a stream of profanity when she thought she was off camera. I feel like I need a shower.
I think they're trying something different with the "Previously On" segment, and I like it. Instead of the usual "Previously on Top Chef" voiceover and then clips from the last episode, they intersperse interview footage with various chefs with short clips from the episode. So most of the footage is new interview footage that we haven't seen before, or footage from the Stew Room that we didn't see before. Anyway, it's a new way to help viewers who missed last week get caught up, while not totally boring people who did see it and just want to get into the new challenges. I usually FF through the Previously On segment because by the time I get to it, I've already watched the episode at least two or three times to recap it, and I'm not interested, but I found myself watching this. I'm not going to recap it, because there's really no new information, but I'll give you an overview: the chefs realize that this competition is no joke, they respected Elia's skills and then she got eliminated, Richard got disqualified for going over time, Angelo won, and Fabio was pissed because he felt Bourdain was overly mean. There you go.
Every time I watch the opening credits now, all I can think of is the version they did for last season's reunion, where it was sexytime. That's all I can see now. And Mike is in there, and I don't like it.
The cheftestants enter the kitchen to find out about the Quickfire. And guess who's there? Joe Jonas! I immediately recognize him as a Jonas brother though, since I'm not a tween or a parent of a tween, I wouldn't know which one he is. Spike claims to immediately recognize him. Antonia definitely does, since she has a daughter who is a Jonas Brothers fan, and will be insanely jealous when she finds out that her mom was in the same room with a Jonas. This is like if my mom had met Kirk Cameron circa 1986. I would have FREAKED OUT. Meanwhile, Dale T. is like, "He's who?" and admits that he thought Jonas might be a pastry chef. Heh.
Padma explains that there is going to be a sleepover at the Natural History Museum, and Joe Jonas will be the special guest. So the Quickfire Challenge is to create a midnight snack for the kids, and Joe Jonas will pick the winner. Blais interviews that they have no idea what Joe Jonas's palate is like, so it's hard to calibrate the flavors. Is he a cheese doodle guy or a gourmand? And will he be picking the dish that he likes, or the one that he thinks the kids will like? Joe Jonas gives further details on the challenge: there will be no plates or utensils available, so the snack must go in a brown paper bag, and they have... thirty seconds. Everyone kind of freaks out internally before Joe admits that he was kidding. Okay, that was actually funny. A few of the cheftestants definitely bought it. Padma laughs too, and then says that they have forty-five minutes, and starts the timer.
People start running around grabbing ingredients and equipment. Dale T., like Blais, is worried about cooking to an unknown palate. Dale L. is worried because he knows that kids are picky eaters. So his strategy is just to throw a bunch of sweet and crunchy stuff into some marshmallow fluff and call it crack for kids. And frankly, it's not a terrible strategy. Then everyone is looking for sugar in the pantry, but no one can find it. Fabio yells out, "Who has the shooooo-gar?" Turns out that Dale T. has the sugar on his station, and Casey explains in an interview that the proper etiquette for a common ingredient like that is to take it out, use it, and then return it to the pantry so that others can find it. Instead, everyone has to run around looking for it, and then visit Dale's station with a cup and scoop some out. That is kind of a dick move. I can see Dale's position, which is probably that he doesn't have time to run it back, but it's not like he took some esoteric ingredient that no one else needs. It's sugar. They're making a snack for kids. Nearly everyone will need it at some point. Thus, selfish.
Mike and Jen are cooking to each other, and Mike jokes that he's making chocolate polenta bars, if he can execute it. He interviews that his mom probably did make him snacks in brown paper bags when he was growing up, but he probably blocked it out, because they were so bad. I hope his mom isn't watching, since he just insulted her cooking. Although since Mike is her son, I'm sure she has bigger problems. Marcel, on the other hand, has a mom who took over his school's lunch program to make it healthier, so he loves her cooking and loves cooking for kids. I'll bet kids like Marcel. He kind of looks like a cartoon character and he makes weird-looking food.
Spike comes from a restaurant family and always had to make the homemade potato chips growing up, so that's what he's making today. He's using a deli slicer instead of a mandoline to slice the chips, but he knows what he's doing, obviously. Kids probably like Spike too. He looks like Poochie. Tiffani is having some trouble with the liquid nitrogen and asks a passing Blais for help. He tries to just yell something out, but it doesn't work, so he takes a second to run over and fix it for her. Blais can't stand to see liquid nitrogen used improperly. It was nice of him to help, but it must be annoying that every other cheftestant (except maybe Marcel and Angelo) probably ask for his help with that stuff. Tiffani goes on, in an interview, to redeem herself A LOT in the eyes of everyone. She reminds us of the challenge during her season where they had to cook for the Boys and Girls Club, and she was an insufferable prig about how real chefs wouldn't deign to cater to the child's palate. Yikes, reading through that recap, I'm remembering more about why I hated both Stephen and Tiffani. Anyway, Tiffani now admits that she was an asshole. And with that interview, anyone who had residual hatred for her must feel it wash away, right? She was always a good chef but her attitude sucked, and she's showing us that her attitude has changed. She just rocketed up to my top five, easily. Anyway, she knows now that the challenge is to give the kids what they want, so her dish is "somewhere in between a Snowball, a Moon Pie, and a Rice Krispie Treat, if all those three things, like, had a threesome and a baby." I really like her right now. We could hang. Especially if she brought some of those treats she's making. I'm not sure why she needs to use liquid nitrogen to freeze the marshmallows in her dish, but who am I to judge?
Blais interviews that he was "a husky kid" (a.k.a. fattie, and I was one too, so I know whereof I speak) and that no one ever really told him how to eat, so he would eat things like cereal with heavy cream, because it tasted good. Yikes. That makes me like him more, though. Stephen, on the other hand, had parents who monitored his eating habits, and he ate healthy. So today, he's making snickerdoodles. He knows they're still cookies, but they aren't super high in calories, for a cookie. Dale T. knows that kids want unhealthy food, but all that sugar means that they will be wired, and he wonders if he should have laced his corn muffins with Nyquil so that they kids would pass out. I have sometimes wondered the same thing with my twins' bottles. Just a nip. It couldn't be that bad for them, right? (Note to Child Protective Services: Jokes! They're jokes.)
Everyone is stuffing his or her treat into the brown paper bags. Antonia laughs at Mike, who is sweating and grunting while trying to finish on time. She offers to help him, as she is cleaning up her station with five minutes left, but he doesn't want help. He just wants to sweat and grunt. He is gross. Anyway, Padma and Joe return to try the dishes, and everyone seems to finish on time. Here are the dishes:
Antonia: white chocolate and cherry muffin with cinnamon and allspice. There are also apple slices, but she doesn't mention them.
Blais: white bread (cooked in the microwave?), spiced apples with whipped honey and crunchy chocolate
Spike: homemade potato and carrot chips with mascarpone and marshmallow dip with lime zest
Tre: cracker with cranberry and cherry jam and apple smoked bacon and fresh basil
Casey: chocolate and bacon lasagna with apple juice and candy. Mike thinks chocolate lasagna sounds horrible. I think it sounds awesome. I don't think there's any pasta involved; I think it's just layers of different flavors, and that's why she called it lasagna. It's tough to tell from the pictures, though.
Dale L.: sweet tart nuggets and caveman boulders with chocolate sauce. Dale claims that his goal was to make his dish as sweet as possible, and he's hoping to achieve a ten-year-old rave. They really will be hallucinating after all that sugar.
Jamie: mini cheddar biscuits with homemade apple sauce
Tiffany: coconut rice pudding with grapefruit sauce. The dish is still warm when they get to her, and it falls apart in their hands.
Dale T.: corn cake with dried cherries and whipped maple topping
Fabio: apple with white chocolate, caramel, and blueberry, and an apple with dark chocolate, marshmallow, and candied ginger. Fabio jokes that a midnight snack in Italy is pasta and roast chicken. Even for kids?
Tiffani: rice krispie treat snowball with malted milk and graham crackers
Angelo: fried dough, white pepper, Old Bay spice, and cheddar crumbs. He calls it Cheese Crisps 2010: The New Evolution. Only Angelo would have both a title and a subtitle for his dish.
Stephen: snickerdoodle sandwich with white chocolate, coconut ganache, apricot, and mint
Jen: bacon ginger taffy and honey grilled peaches. She jokes that if the kids don't like her taffy, they can whip it at each other. Then she laughs overly hard at her own joke. I'm just pointing it out because this is the first instance of Jen being a little over-the-top, compared to her normally laid-back style.
Mike: chocolate coconut corn bar and coconut horchata chaser, which is supposed to be like cookies and milk.
So they skipped over Marcel and Carla, which is fine by me, but why did they show EVERYONE else. Weird. Joe lines up with Padma to explain which dishes he liked and which ones he didn't. The worst are first. They also cut to this weird shot of Jen GRINNING REALLY HARD, like so hard that one of her eyes is almost shut. I'm just saying. In light of what comes later, I feel like I need to explain why I thought something about Jen was off from the very beginning. Anyway, Joe disses Tiffany's dish because it fell apart and was messy, Mike's dish because it wasn't chocolatey enough, and Stephen's dish because the filling wasn't great and needed more mint. I don't think I've ever asked for more mint on anything. I hate mint except for gum and toothpaste.
The two favorites were Spike and Tiffany, and Joe puts his best Camp Rock acting skills out there to pretend like he couldn't decide which one was best. So they're going to let the kids decide! What a spontaneous decision! I wish they had just admitted up front that Joe was going to narrow it down to two and then the kids would decide. I don't get why we needed this whole storyline overlay. Anyway, many chefs are worried about the kids deciding, or even being around or seeing kids at all. For example, Dale L. thinks that kids are called brats for a reason. Look, I don't begrudge anyone for not liking kids, just because I have some. A lot of kids are annoying, mine included at times. I do kind of think that, by writing off all kids, you're missing out on some cool people, but it's not like any of the chefs is going to make a magical buddy connection at a Quickfire, so whatever.
Spike and Tiffani learn the details of what they need to do to earn immunity in the Elimination Challenge. They will have to serve their snack to 150 kids. Tiffani is confident; Spike is less so, if only because he's putting carrot chips up against Tiffani's sugar bomb. So what are the other cheftestants going to be
doing while these two serve food? Standing around? Playing with the kids? No, they're going to help out! Tiffani and Spike do a schoolyard pick to determine the teams. Jamie immediately interviews that she's not really interested in helping someone else win the Quickfire. I get her point, but suck it up. You signed up to do the show, and you've been on it before, so you know that you may have to do some things that you consider bullshit. Do it, and lose the 'tude. And I hate when people use the word 'tude, so you know I mean it.Okay, so the picking begins. Spike starts out by choosing Blais, and Tiffany picks Jen. Long story short, the teams end up like this: Spike has Blais, Dale T., Marcel, Stephen (?), Angelo, Mike, and Carla. Tiffani has Jen, Antonia, Dale L., Casey, Jamie, Tiffany, and Tre. Fabio is the odd man out, and he gets to choose which team to join. He knows that Spike doesn't like him, so he joins Spike's team as kind of an eff you. I am a little puzzled by some of the order there (and I listed them in the order they were chosen). Is Spike totally sexist? He picked Stephen ahead of Casey, Jamie, Tiffany, or Carla? What does he know that we don't know?
The teams have two hours to cook, so the leaders start spitting out instructions. Dale L. tells us that their team is "the Spice Girls and their bodyguard" (I'm assuming he's a Spice Girl and Tre is the bodyguard) versus "the cool guys and their babysitter Carla." Carla would be the best babysitter. She would be goofy and fun, and she would make an awesome bedtime snack. Spike tells us that Tiffani is kind of a drill sergeant, and he has a lot more fun in the kitchen than she does. Check out how fun Spike is: he calls Fabio "Fabian." Right to his face! No one laughs, because it's not funny, so Spike repeats it and chuckles to himself. Dork.
Casey works on crunching up (the technical term) the Ritz crackers for Tiffani's dish, and she jokes with Dale that she's "a virgin at the Ritz Cracker hand job." Dirty! Tiffani and Tre are working on the liquid nitrogen to freeze the marshmallows. Blais notices and says that it's "like a Liquid Nitrogen 101 class, which I actually do conduct." He wishes he could show them how it's done. Nerd.
Tiffani's team starts bagging the food, and Jen is in charge of that action. She's yelling loudly and telling people what to do, which isn't out of character for her, but it does seem a bit over the top. I started to like Jen when, during her season, she told people to cut the chit-chat and get to work, but this seems different somehow. Dale T. notices Jen ordering people around and says that he likes when she gets all bossy. He interviews that it's frustrating to work on Spike's dish, because he didn't come up with it, and it's not his food. Fabio is busy bagging for Spike, and he interviews that he thinks Tiffani doesn't respect his cooking skills, and he likes to fly under the radar and then crush the opposition. The element of surprise, if you will. Anyway, all the snacks get bagged, and they head to the museum.
At the museum, they set up their stations right underneath the dinosaur skeletons. Stephen explains that it's anyone's game, and it really just depends on if the kids want salty (Spike's dish) or sweet (Tiffany's dish). The cheftestants mill around nervously until the kids finally show up. It's a madhouse as they pass out the snacks to the kids. Fabio compares them to both cows and Tasmanian devils. Casey worries a little bit about giving sugar to kids that are already fired up, but then she shrugs, "They're not my kids!" Exactly.
Once the kids have their snacks, Tiffani and Spike do a little campaigning. Spike is slightly more persistent, but doesn't seem to have much luck. The rest of Tiffani's team goes out and tries to get the kids chanting their team name, except for Jamie, who informs us deadpan in an interview, "I don't plan to have children. Ever." Heh. Meanwhile, the kids are all sugared up and probably also excited to be on camera, and they are going bugfuck nuts. One kid screams so raucously that he falls over, then gets back up and screams some more. His mom must be proud.
Padma and Joe Jonas finally show up and there is not nearly as much of a fracas as I expected. Some of the kids look bored, actually. Joe asks which of the kids thought that the Red Team (Spike) won, and there are very few cheers. Padma asks who liked the Blue Team, and the crowd erupts in cheers. So Tiffani wins! Yay! However, what would they have done if it had been close? Do they have an Applause-O-Meter? Anyway, Tiffani has immunity, and she's thrilled, because she knows that the competition this season is fierce.
The kids file out and there are tons of bags and stuff on the floor. Didn't their mothers teach them to take out their garbage? It's like when I leave a movie theater. I get so mad when people don't take their garbage out with them. They put trash cans right by the exits! It couldn't be any easier! You slobs! I would totally make those brats come back in and clean up. Also, get off my lawn. Anyway, the cheftestants are kind of wandering towards the exit when they notice Colicchio entering from the other end of the room, so they walk back toward him, looking apprehensive. Tom announces that their Elimination Challenge is going to start right then, as in, no going home to bed. Now.
So it's 1:30 AM, which begs the question, how long did they keep those kids up for that challenge? I get that it's a sleepover and they kids were going to be up late, but shouldn't they at least pretend to make them go to bed by like 10 PM or something? Kids today. Anyway, Colicchio explains that they will be serving breakfast for the sleepover kids and their parents at 7:30 AM, so about six hours away. And, they can only use the ingredients they find in the museum's kitchen. Tiffani might be going a little far in trying to convince us that she's CHANGED since her season when she says that the others need to save the crankiness for their real lives and embrace the fun of this sleepover. I think the cheftestants are allowed five minutes of, "What the Christ?" at this point, when they thought they were going home to bed and now find out they have another challenge in six hours. So it's already a tough challenge, right? It's about to get worse.
Colicchio points out that there are two dinosaur skeletons in the room: a T Rex and a Brontosaurus (which I thought they decided was called Apatosaurus now?). Tom explains that one team will be inspired by the T Rex diet, and can cook with meat, eggs, and dairy ONLY. He emphasizes the word ONLY, although I guess they could have thrown that in during post. The other team will be inspired by the Brontosaurus diet and can use fruits, vegetables, and grains ONLY. Since Tiffani won the Quickfire, she gets to pick, and she barely hesitates before picking T Rex. It's a tough one, since she doesn't know the extent of the museum's pantry. Are they going to ship in a ton of fresh produce or is it going to be a lot of canned stuff or what? Anyway, they'll be sleeping right in the museum. Tom leaves and Jen yells out, "I LOVE BREAKFAST!!!!" and claps and makes a weird face. Just pointing out that she was acting weird way before Judges' Table.
The cheftestants head to their sleeping quarters, which are a bunch of cots in front of dioramas of mammals that look like the one where Ross and Rachel did it for the first time on Friends. They're given sleeping pants and flashlights. Spike immediately strips down to skivvies and puts on his new pants, but a lot of the others look uncomfortable. Stephen says he's used to living in his fancy loft, and this scene creates "uncomfortability." Um, does he mean "discomfort"? Tre says that he likes to sleep naked, so he feels stifled. Let your freak flag fly, dude! No one will complain.
Before they sleep, the teams need to meet and have a strategy session. Team Brontosaurus, which is Spike's team, decides to break up into pairs and have each pair create a dish, with one team of three. Over at Team T Rex, Jen is pointing out that it's still a competition even though they're working as a team, and one of them is going home. Well, not if they win. Everyone looks a little taken aback at her rant, and Tiffany even interviews, "Jen, take a chill pill." Well, it's Tiffany, so it sounds more like, "Jee-en, take a chi-iiiwwwl pi-iiiiwwwl." Lots of extra syllables. But then they show a shot of Jen where she kind of looks like she's panting and her eyes are totally blank and it's scaring me! What is up with her? Anyway, they also break up into pairs and hope that there are bacon and eggs and suchlike. If any of them have ever cooked for someone doing Atkins, they should be golden.
The kids are finally asleep, and the cheftestants bunker down too. Well, some of them do. A small group (Marcel, Fabio, Blais, Angelo, Spike, the Dales, Stephen) decide to take a flashlight tour, where they get to walk around the darkened museum with flashlights. Antonia explains that they only have forty-five minutes to sleep. I have to say, staying awake might be the better strategy under those circumstances. I guess it depends on your personal sleeping style, but it takes me a while to get to sleep, especially under strange circumstances, and if I had to hit the ground running, it's probably better for me to just stay up. Anyway, they wander around and compare some of the early humans to Fabio and Casey. Har har har.
Okay, well at some point, even the guys who took the tour go to sleep, because when the alarm goes off at 3:45 AM, everyone is on a cot, sleeping. Casey says that she only slept for forty-five minutes, and Fabio can't believe he's thirty-two years old and sleeping to a moose. And Tre! He didn't sleep naked, but he did take off his shirt, and holy muscles! Dude has got a rocking body. I propose more challenges where Tre takes off his shirt.
Now dressed and ready, everyone sprints to the kitchen, which is probably a good way to wake up your brain and body. They all immediately crowd into the walk-in. The members of Team Brontosaurus are happy to see a plethora of fruits and vegetables. Team T-Rex, on the other hand, are facing some hard truths. Apparently, Tiffani thought that carnivore meant omnivore, so they would get everything. Then why would they make you choose? Who would choose to have limited ingredients over unlimited? Duh. Anyway, maybe they just didn't think through the fact that there is no flour, or lemons, or limes, or herbs. I might not have thought of the herb issue. They're concerned about having no acids or other methods of flavoring things. And there's no sausage, so Jen and Jamie have to rethink their Scotch egg dish. Jen tells us that her father always told her that second place is first loser. I'm sorry that her dad sucks. I am super competitive in some areas, but at least my parents didn't force that one me. Dale L. tells us that his team is screwed, and the other team is humming right along. I don't know that they have it any easier; I think it's a matter of expectations. They understood what ingredients they would have, and planned accordingly. Team T Rex thought they'd have a bunch of stuff that isn't there, so they have to revise everything last minute and it's stressful, especially on no sleep.
Carla and Spike have teamed up to make a gazpacho, and I know that a cold tomato soup is the first thing I want when I rise and shine in the morning. And you know what I like to follow it up with? Gnocchi! Great, because that's what Fabio and Stephen are making. They show Stephen peeling potatoes with a knife and it is just painful to watch. My mom could peel
a potato in like two seconds with a paring knife. I can't, so I use a peeler, which is what Fabio is doing. Maybe Stephen usually uses a peeler too, but there wasn't a second one available. Either way, he is cutting out like a third of the potato while "peeling" it. Ouch.Jamie is trying to slice the rind or skin or whatever off a side of bacon and she slices her thumb open. I don't know if she has bad knife skills or what but looking at what she was doing when the injury happened, I don't get it. Anyway, a medic comes and checks it out and tells her that she needs stitches. Jamie looks sad and frustrated, but also exhausted, and I wonder if she wasn't a little checked out emotionally and just decided to hop on the getting stitches thing as a way to be excused. Because she's walking around with a bandage on and it's not like her thumb is gushing blood. And I don't think the medic told her that she HAD to leave, or they would have said that. Anyway, Jamie goes back and tells everyone that she's leaving, and to her face, they are all like, "Go! Get that fixed!" Jen is especially supportive. Casey and Fabio, in interviews, are both kind of like, "Seriously? A cut? And she's leaving?" Fabio reminds us that he broke his finger during his season, and kept cooking. Right? I mean, I don't want blood in my food or anything, but wasn't there a season where someone cut themselves and then put on a glove, and the glove filled up with blood? Ah, yes, it was Kelly in last season's finale. You don't want to know the search keywords that led me to that page. And they are presumably less than three hours from service -- couldn't Jamie skip out once the dishes are being served and get stitches then? I'm just saying. I really like Jamie but this seemed lame to me.
Jen is rushing around the kitchen yukking it up, overly bright. She laughs that she'll let everyone know once she finishes figuring out her dish, and then laughs way too hard at her own joke and goes, "Woo-haaaa-hooo!" Too much coffee? Something else? She interviews that she doesn't blame Jamie and she's just going to work on her dish. And honestly, she has plenty of time to make what she's making alone, I think. I don't think Jamie missing was the problem with her dish.
Tre and Casey are trying to figure out what to make. Casey is busy deboning salmon, and Tre asks if she has any ideas for a sauce. She doesn't. He decides to mix up some shrimp and some stock and try to make it really flavorful, even without herbs or acid. Casey interviews that she's confident, because she saw a T Rex in Jurassic Park and it ate a lot of brontosauruses. Then she kind of shrugs like, "You asked me a really dumb question and I gave you a really dumb answer and I'm not sorry." It cracked me up, anyway.
Tiffany and Antonia are making three different kinds of frittatas. They discover as the dishes come out of the oven that they're not being cooked evenly. They don't have a lot of time to do anything about that, and plan to just give the judges the best ones. They only have these tiny pans that cook like eight pieces at once, which probably isn't helping their workflow.
Meanwhile, Jen just slipped and fell on the floor, because there's something wrong with her. She starts throwing paper towels on the floor randomly, claiming that the floor is wet. Dale T. takes a sheet out of the oven and realizes that his plan to make polenta cakes isn't going to work, and he needs to revise. He discusses with Spike and Mike (hee!) that they should just do regular polenta.
Someone says that there's only eighteen minutes left and Jen shrills, "EIGHT! TEEN! MINUTES??????" Look, maybe she had an extra cup of coffee. I don't know. Anyway, Spike is supposed to be helping Fabio with gnocchi, but Fabio thinks that Spike is being too rough with his precious potato pillows. As they pack up for service, Antonia wonders the same thing I did about gazpacho and gnocchi as breakfast dishes. As they pack up, Casey tries some of Jen's dish and interviews that it tasted like "wet bacon." Since Casey is apparently the only cheftestant who tasted it besides Jen, we have to assume she's right. Jen keeps pulling off pieces and tasting them and going, "It's good, it's good. I think it's good." So Casey keeps her trap shut. Perhaps she could have said something, but they're headed out for service and what's Jen going to do at that point? Not serve anything? Serve some hard boiled eggs? And it is a competition, and Jen was the first to point that out. Anyway.
They all start setting up their buffet lines before the diners arrive. Blais, Angelo, and Marcel made a fruit parfait. They taste it just before service, and Angelo says that he thinks the plums are too large, and they should cut them up. He gets Carla to do it. Marcel utters two gems: "I think it fucks with the integrity of the plums" and "you don't fuck with someone else's mise en place." Marcel thinks Angelo might be sabotaging his own dish, apparently? I don't put it past Angelo to fuck with things, but I don't think he would sabotage his own dish.
Now that they're nearly done, Jamie returns and tells people that she got two stitches. Dale L. interviews that he took a chunk out of his thumb one time, and duct taped it and kept going. I don't want to second-guess Jamie too much, and I would probably be crying like a little bitch, but I do think she should have at least tried to suck it up. Anyway, she starts helping Jen out as much as possible, which is really just plating at this point. Casey says that she liked Tre's sauce when she tried it in the kitchen, but she didn't have time to try it again just before service. As Tre sauces the plates, his sauce does look kind of thick and sparse, though.
The kids and their parents arrive for service. Every one wants meat and eggs, although Carla says that the people that do come through their line are very receptive to their dishes. The judges show up with their guest judge, Katie Lee (no more Joel), who Tom reminds us hosted the first season. And she was horrible. Why is she back? Her cookbook came out ages ago, so what's she promoting? She still has a totally blank look on her face. Like if you didn't watch her season, and you think Padma is blank sometimes, you don't know Katie. She was a host-bot of the highest order. Anyway, they head to Team Brontosaurus first.
The first dish was created by Dale T. and Mike: fresh corn grits, stewed peppers, and salsa verde. It kind of looks like a yellow puddle with some peppers on top. I hope it tastes better than it looks. Marcel, Richard, and Angelo made banana parfait with seasonal fruit and tandoori maple. It looks beautiful and is plated incredibly well. Carla and Spike call their dish "V9": gazpacho with fruits and vegetables. That was a smart title choice because people are used to thinking of V8 as a breakfast drink, so it helps to make gazpacho for breakfast seem normal. Fabio and Stephen serve up potato gnocchi with leeks, spinach, and mushrooms.
Tom and Katie head over to sit at a table with two kids and a museum staffer named Ryan while Gail and Padma sit at a different table with other kids and another staffer. They try the different dishes but don't say anything worth much. Tom does mention that this is the first time they've been served gnocchi that weren't hard. Everyone loves the banana parfait, both in looks and in flavors.
Now the judges head over to sample the T Rex dishes. Antonia and Tiffany offer frittatas with either bacon and cheddar, ham and cheese, or chevre. Casey and Tre serve wild Coho salmon with shrimp and apple-smoked bacon sauce. It's funny that if you look at the glamour plate that they offered up for photography, the sauce is spread out all over and thin. Contrast that with the sauce we saw Tre plating a moment ago, which was chunky and sort of the thickness of sour cream. Damn. Jen (and Jamie) made braised bacon and hard-boiled eggs. Dale L. and Tiffani produced steak and eggs with Hollandaise (or at least a version of Hollandaise).
Everyone settles in to eat, noting that the meat line is much longer than the other. They try Jen's dish first. One kid notes that she wanted the bacon to be crispy, and it wasn't, and a staffer says that the eggs had no flavor. Moving on to the salmon, everyone likes the fish but they all think the sauce is too salty. Tre interviews that he kept his sauce on the burner and it over reduced, but he thinks it's better to have a slightly salty sauce than something that is bland. Really? There are so many things he could have put in the sauce to make it thinner and still flavorful. Stock. Butter. Did they have wine? Even water wouldn't have been horrible, if he only used a little. I don't get it. The diners find that the frittatas are unevenly cooked: some are perfect and some are undercooked. They all like Tiffani and Dale's dish.
The judges reconvene to discuss what they found. One table had kids that preferred the meat dishes, while one table's kids preferred the non-meat dishes. Guess the judges can't rely on the kids to make their decisions then! Jen packs up and muses that she thinks her team did well, and that her dish in particular was good. Blais, on the other hand, goes through all of the steps his team took in making what looked like a very simple dish and worries that they will be penalized because it took three people to make a kind of fruit salad. The judges and cheftestants all leave the museum.
Ah, the return of the weird interstitial. In this one, Fabio gave the hard sell for the gnocchi, which is kind of weird since the diners didn't decide the winner. But I think Fabio is trying to set up the phase in his career. Anyway, Spike describes him as the mayor, which is fairly accurate. He's shaking hands, kissing babies, the whole nine.
Stew Room. Tiffani explains that she th
ought that her team would get to use all of the ingredients. Fabio points out that both teams were challenged, since he had to make gnocchi with no eggs or butter. Well, he didn't HAVE to make gnocchi. Jen already looks annoyed, and her cheeks are really pink.Padma comes in and asks to see Team Brontosaurus. Once that team is gone, Tiffani's team assumes they have won and discuss what happened. Dale L. is pissed that Team Brontosaurus won with non-breakfast dishes. Jen, very bitter, says that she doesn't even try to cook for the people anymore, and just cooks for the judges, because she's learned her lesson. And she kind of has a point. There were many challenges last season where I felt like the winner didn't really adhere to the rules of the competition, and yet won because the judges liked the dish. They don't enforce the rules, or they do so unevenly, or they don't judge on the criteria they claim that they will. I would bet Colicchio would claim that it's a secondary concern, and if there is one dish that is just horrible and the others are mediocre to okay, the person who made the horrible dish is going home regardless. And that's fine, but then why bother with the challenges at all? Anyway, Dale tells Jen she is selfish. Ooh, cat fight! Meanwhile, Jen is red in the face and twisting her lips around and I'm still not convinced that she's in her right mind.
Judges' Table. Padma tells them that they won, and Tom says that everything was good. They agree that there was no one leader. They start talking about Fabio's gnocchi and Fabio says that Spike nearly ruined them, joking (?), but also generously gives Stephen credit for the rest of the dish. Padma adds that they also really liked the banana parfait, and then Katie announces that Marcel, Blais, and Angelo are the winners of the challenge for that dish. Angelo interviews that he won the first two challenges, and he thinks it's hard to beat him when he's on a streak. Marcel, meanwhile, thinks that if they had picked one winner, it would have been him because more of his components were on the plate. Maybe it would go to the person who conceptualized it? Or Angelo, for cutting up your giant plums? Shut up, Marcel.
They return to the Stew Room and send Team T Rex out. Jen is practically gnawing on her fingers. She knows she's in trouble. Once they get out there, Padma tells them that they're the losing team and one of them will be going home. Tiffani gives her big speech again about how she thought that her team would get all of the ingredients. Tom kind of looks at her like she's an idiot and says that he did say they would ONLY have meat, dairy, and eggs. ONLY being the key word. I wonder if anyone else on her team made the assumption Tiffani did. Because otherwise, they really should have set her straight on the fact that it was a matter of her not listening, and not that it wasn't explained well. Because she looks like an ass. Jen agrees with Tiffani, and when Tom sets them straight, Jen pulls a face like, "Whatever, dude." Okay, if Jen thought her dish was so great, why does she care? She should assume she's staying, right? I'm just saying. Anyway, Tiffani finally drops this line of argument, since it's going nowhere, and says that they were taken aback when they entered the kitchen, but they adapted really quickly. Colicchio says that there were flaws and technical issues, and Jen already looks like she's about to cry. She's all twitches and rocking back and forth and pulling faces over there.
Tom tells Tiffany and Antonia that their frittata was unevenly cooked. They knew about the problems with the oven, but Katie Lee says that hers was raw. Was it raw, or undercooked? Because I feel like there's a difference. And was she the ONLY person who got a raw one? I think she's the only person we saw mention it, anyway. Gail compliments the steak and eggs, but adds that it was just basic steak and eggs, so it's not really a huge accomplishment. Padma finds out that Tre created the overly-salty sauce for the salmon, and Tom can't believe that Tre knew it was that salty and still served it.
Padma calls Jen out for flopping around like a toddler. Seriously, she's shifting from foot to foot and her face is bright red and she's one step away from sighing loudly and rolling her eyes. Jen says that she doesn't think she or her team deserve to be there, and she tasted every one of the other team's dishes and she didn't like them. Well, Gail asks if she didn't like them and she just goes, "Ttccch" with her mouth and gives a fake smile. She is scaring me. Who is this person? And why is her face pinker than that salmon we saw a while ago? Jen won't say what she didn't like, but just says that she thought her team's food was better. Well, now it's just coming off like sour grapes. Tiffany tries to help her out and says that she didn't think the other team served breakfast food and Jen's like, "Gnocchi for breakfast?" and rolls her eyes. You know who she's acting like? You know that SNL Weekend Update character Aunt Linda that Kristen Wiig does? That's who she's acting like, with the eye-rolling and the face-pulling and the unending sarcasm. NAILED IT! Katie responds that they thought gnocchi for breakfast was inventive, and Team T Rex didn't introduce much creativity. That's fair; they basically had meat and eggs and more meat and more eggs, but I'm not sure what they were supposed to do with their restrictions anyway. Meat without eggs?
Tom asks why they chose to put everything on one plate and Jen snaps, "You guys are smart enough. You're the judges. Why didn't you say, 'Hey, can I get a different plate for this?'" Tre raises his eyebrows and Tiffani goes, "Oh, wow." Tom retorts that he's smart enough to know it, but maybe someone on their team should have been that smart. Jen is also leaning her head way back and looking down her nose at him. I don't know what her problem is, but I've never seen her act this way.
Now they get into the Jamie issue. Jamie says that she helped come up with the idea of the dish, and started prep, but then had to leave because she cut herself. Tom directly asks Jen if the dish was affected because Jamie left, and Jen says that it absolutely was not. Antonia speaks up and says that everyone else on the team thought that Jamie was a pussy (not in so many words).
Then the judges start telling Jen what was wrong with her dish. Gail says that she thought it was out of proportion, but Jen disagrees. Tom says that the pork was seasoned well, but the eggs were bland. Jen says that the eggs were NOT underseasoned, and that the bacon had strong flavor, and there's no changing her mind on the seasoning issue. Tom says that they'll have to agree to disagree. I find it interesting that they don't get into the texture of the bacon, which is what a lot of people pointed out was problematic. Maybe they did and they didn't show it.
The cheftestants head back to the Stew Room and Jen is VERY proud of herself. She tells everyone that she yelled at the judges more than they yelled at her. What is up her ass? Seriously? I get defending your dish, but when did she decide that the judges are totally against her and the other cheftestants to the point where they are fabricating opinions? Dale asks if she was this angry with the judges during her own season and Jen says, "AB-so-LUTE-ly NOT! Welcome to Jen All Stars." I don't like Jen All Stars. Can we trade her in?
Back at Judges' Table, Gail says she's never seen anyone so angry at judging, and Tom says that he doesn't mind it, because people will stay or go based on a dish, not based on talking back to the judges. They all agree that Tiffani and Dale made the best dish, so they are safe. They talk about the frittatas. Tom is mad that they didn't pay more attention to how the eggs cooked in the oven, and Katie points out that it was a boring dish, more suitable to a buffet or a cruise ship. True. I think I've had those frittatas at various brunch places. Not too inventive. They all agree that Casey's salmon was good, but they can't understand why Tre served such a
salty mess of a sauce. He should have fixed it or even not served it. Back in the Stew Room, Tre, Casey, and Dale L. discuss whether or not Jen put a target on her back with her diatribe. Tre and Dale think she did, but Casey points out that the judges won't take it personally.They finally get around to talking about Jen's food. Gail thinks there's a huge disconnect between what Jen claimed her dish was, and what Gail actually ate. Good point. Katie didn't like the lack of texture, which was soft and soft with more soft on top. Tom hated the bland eggs. They discuss Jamie's role, and how Jen said she had nothing to do with the failed dish. Padma points out that it must hurt a little bit to hear that Jamie had no impact. I think as long as Jamie stays, she won't give a shit. Back in the Stew Room, Jamie says that she feels like she let her team down. No one disagrees. The judges have made a decision, finally.
They call Team T Rex back out to hear the results. Tom tells them that they know this was a difficult challenge, but this is All Stars, so get used to it. Then he excuses Tiffani and Dale, because their dish was the best. Then he addresses the remaining pairs. Tiffany and Antonia had unevenly cooked eggs, and they should be better chefs than that. Jamie and Jen (really, just Jen)'s dish had texture problems, and the garnish was underseasoned. Tom tells Jen, "I admire that you're up here vigorously defending your dish. However, it's not going to make the dish better." Oh, snap! Then he moves on to tell Casey that her salmon was good, but Tre's sauce was over-reduced. So who goes home?
Okay, I don't know who everyone else thought was going to go, but Padma sends Jen home. Jen immediately breaks into a laugh, which I think is a cover for a sob. Antonia and Tiffany both exclaim out loud something to the effect of, "Holy shit!" Everyone rushes over and hugs Jen. She has enough presence of mind to shake the judges' hands. In her exit interview, she says that her dish was awesome and maybe she was too strong and vocal at Judges' Table, but she doesn't know why she's going home. They told her why. The texture was off on the bacon and the eggs were underseasoned. It's not like it was a secret ballot. But she thought her dish was awesome, even though we saw multiple diners and judges (and Casey) talk about why it wasn't so great.
Jen goes back in the Stew Room and says goodbye, and even does a little curtsy. The other cheftestants seem stunned. Jen interviews that her dad said that second place is always first loser, and she wonders what he'll say about second to last. Who cares? Tell him to eff off, Jen. You're a good chef who had a bad day maybe due to lack of sleep or too much caffeine or something. Shake it off. She adds that she was robbed and she should have made it to the finals. Okay, let's not get crazy. I thought she would go far too, but obviously her dish was just bad. Tom and Gail both said in their blogs that it was easily the worst dish, and it was pretty obvious that either she or Jamie were going home even before Judges' Table. And once Jen said that Jamie had no effect on anything, Jen had to go. Done and done.
So then Marcel opens the door to let Jen out, and she must think she's off microphone, because she lets loose with this torrent of curse words about how it 's bullshit and her dish wasn't close to being on the bottom. They try to edit it like the other cheftestants heard, but I don't know that they did. Regardless, I feel bad for her because she was obviously barely holding it together on camera and then she finally let go and they still recorded it. The other cheftestants agree that Jen fought but it didn't work and it proves that the judges aren't playing around. Jen's final words are that the judges got it wrong. Well, without actually tasting the food, it's hard to say if that's true or not. But I don't think they took the decision lightly, for what that's worth. Bye, Jen. Sadly, Jamie is not my favorite anymore, so I've just got Tiffani and Carla left. Don't disappoint me, ladies.
See Jen's boss Eric Ripert react to her blow-up at judges table.
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