Following last night’s Top Chef, my girlfriend and I made an agreement that can only be attributed to the ridiculously appetizing dishes the cheftestants made during the episode’s Quickfire Challenge: every week now, we must each make a dish neither of us have made before and does not include bottled spaghetti sauce, packaged spaghetti noodles, or anything remotely spaghetti-like. I’m pretty sure if grated Parmesan cheese is involved, it’s disqualified. My first contribution will be Irish shepherd’s pie made with lamb I’ll marinate in Guinness beer, which means next week I’ll be reporting here that I served my girlfriend an Irish brick of burned lamb that smells like boiled Guinness.

Back on topic, or, rather, back to that Quickfire Challenge I referred to. Padma sent the cheftestants, including last week’s Elimination Challenge winner, Stephanie, to Chicago’s Green City Market to wrangle up five and only five ingredients to make a dish of their choosing. Chef Wylie Dufresne of wd~50 served as the guest judge, but I’m pretty sure this guy was just an extra who wandered off a Tim Burton movie set. He certainly looks like the kind of kooky cat the Impresario of Cinematic Weird would dig.

Besides being freaky looking, Wylie is also an infamous molecular gastronomist from New York, which made it all the more tragic for poor Richard, who keeps going on about how he’s a fancy-pants molecular gastronomist, too. But RIchard couldn’t get the guy’s attention with his botched dish. Instead, Mark, who was clumsy enough to leave an ingredient at the farmer’s market, won the challenge and immunity during the following Elimination Challenge. Don’t you just love how producers lead you to expect one thing, then turn that expectation on its head like you didn’t entirely see it coming?

The Elimination Challenge was a lot more stressful by comparison, as evidenced by how my girlfriend sighed every time something went wrong. She could never be a chef: no patience. Cheftestants were broken down into three-person teams in order to cater a cocktail party for 200 people at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Each team was assigned an animal -- lion, bear, penguin, vulture, and gorilla –- and told to craft their dishes around the unique diets of each species. No, that doesn’t mean banana soup, though Stephanie did make a kind of banana bread. An oldie but a good, right? I made some yesterday, in fact (Trader Joe's box mix is da bomb!).

Ultimately, Andrew, who had his ego shoved in his face last week, was crowned the winner, while Stephanie, Valerie, and Nikki wound up in the bottom three. Nikki had done a bang-up job of looking like a bad lunch lady even before Dale interfered with her dish, but Stephanie and Valerie didn’t even look like they knew their ways around a kitchen this week. For making blinis -- a made-to-serve food –- hours in advance, resulting in soggy finger food, Valerie had to pack up her knives. My question: what the hell is a blini?

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