Top Chef All Stars: Night at the Museum

Last week Elia was eliminated for redoing her elimi-dish, but forgetting to cook the fish. Woops! Richard was DQ’d (sadly, not Dairy Queened) for going over a time limit probably because of some haters. Read about all of the fun here. 

First up we have a guest in the kitchen, and Spike is quick to tell us that the guest is a Jonas brother. Ha. He calls them Rock Stars. Is that true?

Quickfire: Make a midnight snack for kids (at The American Museum of Natural History ) (45 minutes) 

Spike: Uses a deli meat slicer thing really quickly to make his potato chips and it makes me feel a bit ill. Fingers! Homemade potato chips and carrot chips

Antonia: White Chocolate and Cherry Muffin

Jaime: Mini Cheddar Biscuits

Stephen: Snickerdoodle sandwich

Tre: Crackers. Seriously! Ok, there was some fancy stuff on it, but who cares. Way to phone it in!

Dale T.: Stole the whole thing of sugar from the pantry. Not cool. Corn cake with a whipped maple topping. I am leaning towards ick on that one.

Tiffany:  Coconut rice pudding.

Richard: The “growing up” picture they show of Richard is really cute. He describes himself as “husky”, which is so quaint. His dish is White Bread, Spiced Apples etc.

Marcel:

Fabio: Apples dipped in chocolate.

Angelo: Cheese crisps.

Tiffani: Rice krispy treat snowball- this one looks like a chunky ball of mud.

Jen: Bacon Ginger Taffy. Why god, why?

Casey: Chocolate and Bacon Lasagna…here comes the noise!

Dale L.: He describes his dish as “crack for small children”. Count me in. Sweet tart nuggets and cave man boulders.

Mike: Chocolate coconut corn bar. Not the best name on that one.

Hootie (Carla)

Ok: Marcel and Hootie are blank here because they didn’t show us what they made. I watched it twice. WTF?

 Bottom 3: Tiffany D. – hers was a mess and fell apart. Mike - his chocolate was not so good. Stephen, a cookie sandwich is dumb.

Top 3: Spike and Tiffani. Joe Jonas can’t make up his mind and/or the producers pre-planned this and they will be deciding the winner at the museum at midnight by child vote. The only fun thing with this they pick teams to make the stuff for the night and Fabio gets picked last.

Elimination Challenge: Create a breakfast for the kids and their parents.

 The challenge starts immediately after the hoarde of kids leaves. The chefs are all super tired. One team gets to cook T-Rex inspired foods (meat) and one will cook with Brontosaurus foods (not meat). Yes, it was about as clumsy as that sounds. The chefs sleep in a hall of mammals over night.

Team T-Rex: Tiffany, Tiffani, Jamie, Jen, Dale L. Antonia, Casey, Tre

Jamie cuts her finger while they are prepping and she leaves to get stitches. People get angry that she leaves to have her skin sewed back together. They are breaking into teams and come out with four dishes. A frittata, a salmon dish, pork belly and steak and eggs.

The dishes they show are: Mini frittatas (3 types), Salmon with shrimp and apple smoked bacon sauce, Braised bacon and hard boiled eggs (this one looked really underwhelming), Steak and eggs with hollandaise. Negative comments on the “bacon and eggs”, and on the sauce that Tre made for…something. They do like the steak and eggs.

Team Bronto: Spike, Carla, Marcel, Dale T., Fabio, Stephen, Richard, Angelo, Mike

They also break into teams and create four dishes, including gazpacho and gnocci. Marcel is concerned that Angelo is messing with his plums. The jokes write themselves here!

Here are the dishes we get shown: Fresh corn gritzs with stewed peppers, Banana parfait with fruit, Gazpacho (I really don’t like gazpacho..soup should be hot, damnit!), and the Potato gnocchi with leeks, spinach and mushrooms. Mostly good comments from the judges and the kids…the banana parfait in particular was well-liked.

Judges Table:

Team Brontosaurus wins the challenge. Praise all around…the winning dish is the banana parfait (made by Angelo, Marcel and Richard). It doesn’t seem like they actually win anything. Other than pride.

This makes Team T-Rex our losers. The constant previews hint at some judge’s table craziness, and it delivers. The frittata’s were severely undercooked. The steak and eggs was tasty, but too easy. Tre’s sauce was way too salty. Jen has all sorts of attitude at the judging. She tells the judges that they should be “smart enough” to ask for a different plate when they are handed a pile of goo. Yikes. Jamie gets called out for leaving for two stitches (by her teammates, the judges do not comment at the time).

The final knifing goes to…Jen! Hooray! She was nothing but annoying. 

Other Notes:

• Shit I learned last week: Apparently Elia cooked with a “Ti” Leaf, not a “Tea” Leaf like I said. Upon further reflection, it makes sense that “tea leaves” are not 1 foot long. My bad! Also Fabio’s heterboyfriend’s name is Stefan, not Stefano like I said. Another mistake? Ramen is spelled with an e, not an a.
• The Noise Award is something that I will be handing out each week. The Noise is a fabled occurence where someone (my mom) makes a terrible, yet hilarious noise while trying to eat something they find disgusting (in the original case, it was a walnut-laden yule log). The Noise Award this week goes to Casey with her Chocolate and Bacon Lasagna. 
• I am always afraid when people other than Richard use the big scary tanks of liquid nitrogen. He obviously knows what he is doing, but I don’t think the rest of them do. I think I was scarred by an elementary school demonstration about what liquid nitrogen can do to a rubber ball (and what that frozen ball can do to your hand).
• The Quickfires always blow my mind. The can do so much so quickly!
• Quote of the week comes from Dale L. “I chopped off a big chunk of this thumb like two years ago—I just duct taped it and kept going”.
• If someone calls your food worthy of a “cruise ship”, that is not so good. Unless you love the flavors of El Carribe!
• New guest judge: Katie Lee. Apparently she hosted the first season of Top Chef. Padma is better, obviously! I thought Bourdain would be the standard third judge. A rotating judge is ok too, I guess.
• Jen was trying really hard to make me dislike her. Mission. Accomplished.
• I have no idea what “mise en place” means. I am not looking it up.
• 04718            1444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444445299994Y76666666666666666666 NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNJ111111111111 (This is what my cat contributed to the recap while I was out of the room. Who am I to argue with this? I like to think at the end there he was writing “Jen”)
• Speaking of Jen, she seems to flip out as she leaves the Stew Room. Fun!
• Recaps will go up on Tuesdays from now on!

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