Top Chef ~ Foo Fighters
Top Chef, Foo Fighters, Bravo TV series Episode Recap & Blog
For this week’s Quickfire Challenge, the chefs all draw knives with mystery numbers on them. Each number stands for a page in a Top Chef book of past contestants’ recipes. They are told they have to do their own spin on the recipe they picked. Sound too easy? Not when they’re given the twist: Keep the current ingredients but add Swanson broth and make a soup. This is a breeze for Jamie, who seriously hearts making soup and is apparently pretty good at it. Carla, always spurting words of hippy wisdom, says her magical ingredient is love. Is that available in the condiments aisle? The orb-haired cook also declares that you can judge a chef by their soup. Not good news for Fabio (whose name makes me snicker involuntarily), since his creation was a flop. Leah pulls out the win, even though Daniel somehow made ham and egg soup successfully, and gets to choose her team for the Elimination Challenge.
There are 2 groups. Team Sexy Pants (ha!): Jamie, Leah, Stefan, Fabio, Hosea, Melissa, and Radhika. Team Cougar (interesting name considering the team is 5/7 male): Alex, Ariane, Carla, Daniel, Eugene, Jeff, and Richard.
The surprise guests of the week are the Foo Fighters (eliciting a solid WOO! from Nirvana fans everywhere). The Foo enjoy the show and are coming for a Top Chef Thanksgiving meal with an entourage of sixty. The teams go to the concert arena where the cooking will take place and they’re horrified to discover the giant wall of microwaves and toaster ovens. They also get the pleasure of cooking outside…and it starts to rain! Anyone else find the concept of a microwave Thanksgiving a little depressing? Eugene from Team Cougar is the only chef who creates a makeshift grill, using a chafing dish and charcoal. Points for ingenuity!
Team Sexy Pants gets raves for their vegan stuffing (very smart choice since there are some vegetarians in the crew), pumpkin Tiramisu (sounds yummy), and whatever the other dessert was (fruit crisp?). I didn’t hear any serious negatives. Team Cougar gets raves on the moist turkey and bacon mac n’ cheese (Dave Grohl luvs him some bacon!). They get jeers for the fig spoonbread, crunchy mashed potatoes (the thought of which made my teeth hurt for some reason), pumpkin mousse berry parfait, and banana s’mores with a saliva-like cream topping.
Team Sexy Pants pulls out the win and gets to see the Foo Fighters perform while Team Cougar cleans up the mess. Eugene took the loss especially hard, letting out a string of expletives in protest: “That’s f*cking bullsh*t!.” It would have been more accurate if he’d said: “That’s f*cking s’more spit!”
While the judges decide who deserves the boot, Jamie shows Daniel what happens to those who blob peanut butter on her kitchen floor by ceaselessly harassing him. Her cool arrogance amuses me. In the end, Richard’s love and praise of Tom Colicchio as a gay bear icon was not enough to save him from his nasty dessert. He made a weepy but endearing exit.
“No more barfaits.” –Taylor Hawkins
