Reviews @ PXDCO

It's Thanksgiving on Top Chef, and you know what that means - time to whip up some tiny, overwrought, nearly inedible dishes in microwaves and serve them to douchebag rockstars like Taylor Hawkins. Does that guy like anything? I guess I'd be a little bitter if my lead singer was a better drummer than I'd ever be, too, but there was no reason to be such a jerk on television about it. More Top Chef after the jump…

 

I've got a turkey to brine here, folks, so let's cut right to it. The Quickfire was judged by James Beard Award winner Grant Achatz, and after a quick knife pull from the big wooden block, the cheftestants were assigned to 're-imagine' a recipe from the Top Chef cookbook, one of the many gratuitous product placement plugs of the night. However, halfway through everyone's mad scramble to get their shit together, Princess Padma and Grant yell for everyone to stop. They've changed their minds, and now the chefs have to translate whatever dish they were working on into a soup. Everyone visibly freaks, of course, but their worries are soon quelled by yet another product placement. Look, everyone - Swanson's Chicken Broth!

 

Before we get to everyone's Swanson's-based creations (look everyone - Swanson's!), I have to add that I am somewhat of a soup junkie. Soup has been a favorite food of mine ever since I was a child, and while the other kids in my neighborhood were getting waffles and ice cream bars as their afterschool snacks, I always had a can of Cambell's Chicken & Stars for mine. Sometimes I'd even eat it without adding any water first, for some godawful reason. As more and more of the custom-designed soups were rolled out for Padma and Grant, I felt as if I had just come home from a long day of coloring and naptime, ready to dig into my favorite snack of all - soup. Let's see who made the grade.

 

Ariane's lamb soup with couscous looked absolutely divine - thick, hearty, and chock full of one of the most delicious animals of all. Daniel blew my mind a little bit by creating the first ham n' eggs soup I'd ever seen, and he even served it in a cute little lidded pot. Cute! I'm fully able to admit that I am a total crockery whore, especially when it's full to the brim with hot yummy soup. I think I may need to ask Melissa to marry me now that she's shown her ability to whip up an Italian wedding soup from scratch, and after we are married, Radhika can be my mistress and serve me her curried white bean soup in between passionate sessions of Bollywood musical-themed lovemaking.

 

Grant looked genuinely impressed by a good portion of the improvised soups, but in the end, it was the rather pale-looking white asparagus concoction of Leah's that won the challenge. See, this is where it's difficult to truly get a handle on who should win challenges on Top Chef and who shouldn't. Different foods may look like one thing, but taste like something entirely different. Leah's soup didn't look like much, but apparently, it was much more than its milky-white hue and dollops of olive oil and tuna floating on top. Sorry, but no. Cold soups rarely do it for me, but a cold soup with tuna tartare? I pass. I'll stick with the Chicken & Stars, thanks. Hold the water.

 

In any case, Leah wins immunity for the Thanksgiving-themed Elimination Challenge, and speaking of which, here come the Foo Fighters. Turns out that everyone in Dave Grohl's second-best band are fans of the show (well, everyone except Taylor Hawkins, who looked like he'd rather be eating 7-11 hot dogs in an alley somewhere), so for this episode's challenge, the chefs are given a copy of the band's tour rider (the list of stuff they want to eat while they're out on the road) and asked to create from it a full Thanksgiving meal, complete with desserts. The chefs are asked to split into two teams, and whichever of them wins the challenge will get to stay for the show the Foo Fighters are playing that night. The losers, on the other hand, will take a cue from the awesomeness that is Gordon Ramsay's 'Hell's Kitchen' and clean up everyone's mess down in the bowels of the sports arena the band is playing.

 

They're all bussed out to shit-ass Rochester, NY so they can cook at the gig, and the kitchen they encounter is a little less than what you might expect. To be blunt, they'll be cooking outside in the rain using microwaves and toaster ovens. No, seriously. I've seen tailgate parties with better facilities. The chefs decide on their teams, and they make the split and reconvene into Team Sexy Pants and Team Cougar. Quickfire winner Leah is made to pick her team, and she picks Jamie, Hosea, Stefan, Melissa, Fabio, and Radhika. You can call them Team Sexy Pants, though, mostly because Stefan and Fabio are on it. Euro manlove FTW! Ariane, Alex, Carla, Daniel, Eugene, Jeff, and Richard are Team Cougar, and how they arrived at calling themselves that based on Ariane's MILFness alone is beyond me. Nothing says Thanksgiving like a middle-aged woman's sexual identity, I guess.

 

Alright, enough chatter - let's cook! After a brief shopping session, the teams head back to their shitty outdoor kitchen and start planning. Ariane's put in charge of the turkey for Team Cougar, and Stefan takes on the bird for Sexy Pants. Ariane's working against the odds here after finding herself on the chopping block for the last two consecutive weeks, but surprisingly enough, she seems to be holding it down fairly well. Stefan's bossing around the Sexy Pantsers, Daniel's barely cooked mashed potatoes look like absolute shit when they don't cook sufficiently enough in the crappy toaster ovens, and Richard's bringing up the rear (no pun intended) with his banana smores. They don't look very appetizing (especially because the clotted cream on top of them hardened into a paste that looked a bit too much like spit), but hey - they're smores. Smores are our friends.

 

The three allotted hours for cooking pass quickly, and before long, the band and their entourage arrive. It's time to serve, and what's more, time to be judged. My favorites by a long shot were Ariane's turkey with mushroom gravy, Alex's five-cheese macaroni & cheese with big, beautiful chunks of bacon in the middle, Eugene's maple smoked pork loin that he cooked on an improvised smoker outside in the rain, Radhika's vegan cornbread stuffing, and Fabio's ridiculously delicious-looking roasted pumpkin & honey tiramisu for dessert. It was a close race in the end, but Team Sexy Pants took the win and some decent seats for the show that night. Meanwhile, the Cougars were hip-deep in dirty roasting pans while the concert raged on right over their heads upstairs.

 

Judges Table, bitches! The Cougars make a line in front of Tom, Padma, Gail, and Grant, and right off the bat, Ariane, Daniel, Carla, and Eugene are let off the hook. Curiously enough, Ariane was the only one of them who got any praise from the judges at all for the magic she worked on the turkey. It's not easy to make a Thanksgiving turkey taste good using nothing but a toaster oven and a microwave, so even though her first two weeks on the show totally sucked, I have to give her credit. That leaves us with Richard, Jeff, and Daniel, and even though Jeff was a total mess as a leader and Daniel really should've found SOME way for those uncooked mashed potatoes to work a little better (what's Thanksgiving without mashed potatoes?), Richard got the boot this week for his completely flat attempt at banana smores. They looked fairly decent (kinda), but once again, a Top Chef dish seemingly lost a little something in the translation from kitchen to television. Bye, Papa Bear. I guess you finally freaked out Tom enough for him to pull a few strings behind the scenes and boot your ass.

 

On the topic of smores, though, Grant Achatz made my favorite comment of the night - if you're going to do smores, do them right, dammit. Smores aren't rocket science, for chrissakes. Graham crackers, burnt marshmallows, and chocolate. Lots and lots of gooey, icky chocolate. Most importantly, though, they need to be served HOT, something that Le Cellier (my favorite restaurant at Epcot Center, thanks very much) doesn't seem to understand. They serve their smores ice-cold, slathered in some sort of red and green candied sauce, peppered with candy sprinkles, and run through with a giant popsicle stick with a whole marshmallow on the end. Uh, that's not a smore. That's a party hat. 

 

LEFTOVERS - 

 

Still more Euro manlove from Stefan and Fabio. Now that Richard's gone, I think the two of them should get honorary memberships to Team Rainbow.

 

What happened to Pat Smear during the tasting? I saw him in there for a few seconds, but then he was gone. Did he get food poisoning or something? Maybe he had to bow out after catching a few germs. Heh. See what I did there?

 

I love how renowned chefs like Grant Achatz can bust out a line like 'I really think this needs some acid' and send everyone around him scurrying around in horror. Why, Grant? Going to a Phish concert later, or what?

 

Wow, Dave Grohl really likes looking in the camera, doesn't he? Almost as much as Princess Padma likes saying the word 'Foos'.

 

I was sorry to see Papa Bear Richard go so soon, but at least he made one valiant contribution to the season before he left - Leah really does have a nice rack. Good call, dude.

 

Happy Thanksgiving, one and all. You know why no one ever gets laid on Thanksgiving? All the coats are on the bed.

 

-littlebigmouth.