mlp

I agree. I watched Cook Your Ass Off which he hosted (and which apparently wasn't renewed) and he didn't manifest any of those tics. He was actually pretty calm and pleasant.

I hope someone has sent a link to this blog to FN. Better yet, someone should send a link to Ree Drummond's husband. Maybe he'd go ballistic and insist that FN do something about it.

I don't dislike Richard Blais at all except for the whining so I would have been rooting for him if he'd been cooking against someone I can't stand like Mike Isabella. However, I love Marcel and I really wanted him to win. I had the opportunity to meet him last year and chat with him for about 10 minutes. He was very nice and personable, not arrogant at all. And he's darling in person. He has beautiful eyes. Just for the record, I like Spike too. Obviously, I couldn't taste the food but, based on what I could see, I would have given the first two courses to Marcel and dessert to Richard.

Last week, the home cook had three fingers bandaged by the end of the show but there was never any time out for medical attention. I was watching closely this week so I noticed the bandage right away and wondered how and when she acquired it. She didn't have it on when they first started. I was happy to see Kent win because I like him but bread pudding isn't remotely a souffle. I don't understand how someone can win if they disregard the parameters of the challenge. Were we to believe that the producers decided to give that woman an expensive piece of equipment when the judging panel gave her the win and some gofer just ran down to Walgreen's during the commercial and grabbed one off the shelf? Or did they decide to invest about $20K in the thing just in case she won? Phooey. I'll most likely keep watching because I enjoy seeing the celebrity chefs (most of them anyway) but I don't believe this show is on the level.

Thanks. He just looked like a nice guy. I thought maybe he was someone of special interest because the cameraman kept going back to him.

I'm normally not interested in sports but I stumbled on ANW a couple years ago and was hooked. I'm beginning to recognize some of the regulars but not all of them. During the very exciting Kacy run, the camera goes to one fellow watching several times. He's wearing a red tank top and, while she's on the poles, he says, "She's going to have to jump." He looks happy for her and almost in awe of her ability. Can someone here tell me who he is? Just curious.

I've subscribed to FN magazine since the first issue and love it. I like everything mentioned above plus the feature articles about celebrity chefs with photo tours of their home kitchens. I also get HGTV magazine which is just the same but with a HGTV theme.

The sisters seem sensible enough so I can't think why they keep using orange. That's not a color apt to be high on some buyer's preferred list. It looked terrible in the bedroom and I wouldn't choose it for a kitchen accent although it was less odd there. The brothers have skills but their excuses are wearing thin. So far, the married couple are my favorites but I didn't understand the way they positioned those appliances. The problem, I thought, was screamingly obvious. I keep glancing at the guy with the red beard and thinking for a split second that he's Kevin Gillespie.

That's pretty much what Jeff Mauro does on Sandwich King. He visits places in Chicago and then uses their special dishes as inspiration for his sandwiches. I think it works for Jeff because 1) he's a Chicago native and his enthusiasm for the places he goes is real and 2) he's not pretending to improve on or outdo the original dishes. He's making sandwiches. The people he visits seem happy to have him visit in exchange for the publicity. I'm not so sure a POV that implied that the original dish could be improved would go over as well.

Finally! I was overjoyed to see the last of Sarah. I'm inclined to think the final two are going to be Lenny and Luca. I haven't disliked Nicole all along but she's bored me. Tonight she rubbed me the wrong way. There was something about her attitude and voice that I found annoying plus watching her drink beer out of the bottle three times said "no class" to me. That's OK at home in the backyard but not on a TV cooking show. Lenny's pilot was good. If it weren't for what we now know about his videos, I'd be hard pressed to decide between him and Luca. I like Luca and I don't have much trouble understanding him. I hope he wins. I've noticed during every episode that Luca seems to be wearing a wedding ring so I assume he's married. I don't recall any mention of that being made at any time by anyone. I didn't catch who the woman was Luca visited in the Italian restaurant - chef or owner. Either way, she was gorgeous. I wonder if FN has ever tried to get her on a show.

I'm planning to make the dish Luca made with chicken thighs on the Rachael Ray show. I want to try his method of just sticking the rice in the oven for half an hour. I wish I'd noticed what he used for seasoning the chicken but I didn't so I'll wing it.

It's always interesting to me how peoples' tastes differ wildly. I seldom buy pop for home and when I do it's usually Diet Squirt. Mostly, I buy Diet Peach Snapple or Trop-a-Rocka. If I have a choice when out, I get Diet Pepsi. If not, Diet Coke. I think regular pop of all kinds is much too sweet and, if I can't get a diet variety, I prefer water. I'm not diabetic or anything. I just don't like sweet drinks.

Egad. Even Nicole looks frumpy in that outfit and she's actually quite pretty unlike the other two. Do we know if contestants bring their own clothes or if they're dressed by wardrobe?

All I can say is that your intuition was right all along. Geeesh. LOL!

I wondered if anyone besides me was watching that show. Then it was renewed so I guess someone is but I never saw anyone here mention it. I didn't request a forum for it because I didn't think many people were watching it so I haven't known where it wouldn't be off topic to say something about it.

There's something very fishy about this show. The home cooks have everything already prepped and measured and the pros start from scratch. The timing is questionable. For example, Kena had one finger bandaged when she was downstairs being introduced to Stefan. They showed her hands seconds after she got upstairs and started working and she had two fingers bandaged. At the very end, she had *three* fingers bandaged but there was never any time out shown for a medic. The conversation among the "judges" is stilted. I thought the young girl was Ahran from Master Chef when I first saw her.

I've had my share of minor disasters but the worst happened back in the 70s and I can still recall it vividly. I was cooking ground lamb patties in the oven in a glass baking dish that may or may not have been Pyrex (don't remember). The glass broke and a large quantity of lamb grease hit the floor of the hot oven and went up in smoke. LOTS of smoke. LOTS of BILLOWING smoke. I opened all the windows and it smelled so bad that the woman next door came over to see what had happened. I was glad nothing caught fire but it still took forever to get the smell out of the drapes and the furniture.

I don't have any Parmesan on hand but I'm going to try this as soon as I can get to the store. Thanks.

I'd never heard of Caesar pasta but that sounds like something I'd really like. What are the proportions? Would anchovy paste also work?

I watched part of the video after I saw the mention on one of the FNS blogs and before everyone started talking about it. I turned it off in disgust shortly after the vulgar language started so I didn't see anything about corn and I think I'm glad of it. I just went to the FN FB page and was surprised that I didn't see many comments about the video. Either I didn't find the right thread or the video hasn't spread like wildfire as I thought it would. What I did see was that 3/4 of the comments seemed to be negative responses to Sarah including many complaining that FN isn't listening to viewers because they haven't got rid of her yet. I see this kind of thing every year - people not comprehending that the episodes were made months ago and FN can't change them now. Why is that so hard to understand? It baffles me. The only thing they can control now is the finale.

Sarah absolutely defines vapid. Also, she has no business calling herself "Chef." I now dislike her even more than I did before I looked at her page.

I liked both Max and Tommie Rae so I would have been happy with either one winning. I sort of thought they might give the girl an edge if her food justified doing so because the first two finalists are boys. I was very glad they eliminated the other girl. She was way too impressed with herself.

That makes it even worse in my book. He looked a lot younger and fatter and I thought he was maybe mid 20s and still juvenile when he made it. I shut it down rather briskly so I didn't think to look at the date. I thought those kids who refused to eat Luca's dish looked like they're probably brats who have their parents bamboozled in real life. I think that parents these days cater far too much to their little darlings rather than being the adults in charge. My younger daughter decided at age 2 that she hated pretty much everything. I put whatever the family was having in front of her. If she ate it, fine. If she didn't, she went hungry until breakfast. I knew she wasn't going to starve overnight and I never made any fuss about her eating so it didn't become a contest or an attention-seeking thing. She grew up perfectly healthy and is now 6' tall and 45 y/o and she still won't eat anything except, oddly, fish, bread and vegetables (as long as they're not red). Shrug.

I'm probably older than you are as Lenny is younger than my kids; however, speaking of YouTube............................. I was reading Justin (the obnoxious) Warner's blog post about the episode and someone in a comment below the post mentioned a video Lenny had up that was very unsavory. I watched it for a couple minutes then turned it off in disgust. In it, he's slicing up some beef and, as he finishes slicing, he makes some very vulgar comments. I could see that he was a lot younger when he made the video but still, he should have had more class than to make something like that public. So I am now entirely off the Lenny train. Go Luca.

I read that about his background weeks ago and never did think he was a "real" cowboy in the sense that someone like Kent Rollins seems to be. However, he really does work on a ranch, duded up as it may be, and his persona is part of his real job, not something he came up with for FNS like "Butcher Babe." So I'm OK with it. I mean, Roy Rogers wasn't a "real" cowboy either. I rather doubt that Loreal is a real butcher for that matter. Based upon her time on the show plus the interview in her local paper, I'm inclined to think that she works in the meat department in a grocery store and maybe breaks down chickens and cuts things up as instructed and sorts ground beef into one and three pound packets. Nothing she ever said or did convinced me that she knew much more about meat than the average home cook. I still haven't figured out what Sarah is supposed to be an authority about. Texas? Is not a cuisine.