Top Chef – Tre and Jamie got lucky

I guess I can understand the other contestants’ complaints against Jamie when she originally cut her finger a few episodes back and went to the hospital, but hearing them bring it up again and again is getting old. Even forgetting that the medic-on-hand advised her to go get it taken care of, they really need to get over it. Carla working though the pain after slicing her finger this week seemed to have opened up that wound for the chefs (no pun intended). And the tension seems to be getting to Jamie because her cooking was pretty bad this week.

How bad was it? Well … we don’t know. While her chickpeas never did get cooked right, her team won before she had to present her dish, thanks to the rules of this week’s challenge. In other words, she was damn lucky. The other team did not get off so easily, which is surprising considering they kept talking about having a foolproof strategy involving the order they’d go. Unfortunately, that fell through and they had no back-up plan — it was a pretty stupid idea.

About halfway through, I made some guesses on how people would do, but I was way off. I thought Casey would be in the top for her delicious sounding grilled pork tenderloin with farro and cherries, but the judges thought it was too heavy and the protein portion was too much. I really thought Fabio’s gnocchi would be too dense (and he just made gnocchi two weeks ago), but he was up for the win. Ultimately, it was Carla’s African groundnut soup that won out and her reward was a trip to Italy.

On the other side of the coin, Spike’s bland shrimp and his allowing Angelo to tweak his dish (am I the only one who finds Angelo super creepy?) that got him sent home. Funnily enough, Tre was called out by the judges for having the worse dish of the week (partially because Angelo once again “helped”), but he was saved by his quickfire immunity. He’s been strong up until now, so hopefully this week will be a wake-up call.

Clacked by Katie Schenkel
on Dec 24, 2010 @ 08:42 EST5EDT