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But Sarah's ice cream was melting even as she dished it out indoors, and she acknowledged she didn’t use enough liquid nitrogen to adequately chill it—in contrast to Buddha, who was able to serve his in neat quenelles, though he was dinged for his whole dessert being serves too cold, even served outdoors.

Chicago has a reasonably sizable Mexican immigrant community and a thriving Mexican restaurant scene (beyond Rick Bayless), but it doesn’t surprise me that Damarr wasn’t familiar with cactus varieties given the range of his experience. They liked Sarah’s dessert, but faulted her a bit on her melty ice cream. I think they were more impressed with the others' (though there was some criticism of Buddha's for not having deep enough flavor). All the same, it was clear their judgment of the savory course was going to trump dessert, and Damarr's first course was really the only one that came in for any criticism at all.

I believe they’ve actual built animatronic dolls in a few instances (like for Susan the thalidomide baby). And the real infants they use are only a couple of weeks old, so they don’t resemble the huge (relatively speaking) three-month-old “newborns” you see on other shows.

Well, obviously I didn’t remember him, either. Honestly, I don’t remember much from S3.

The most memorable thing about Dale to me, all these years later, is his temper.

Padma has only been a part of Top Chef since the second season, so no, she didn’t have anything to do with creating it or it getting to Bravo in the first place. At some point she and Tom became executive producers (which, as I understand it, is more about financial compensation than anything hands-on), but Padma replaced Katie Lee as host after Season 1. Tom and Gail have been judges since the beginning.

To be fair, they were also a bunch of younger women, at an age when that is young women's MO. Even a few years later, when Val arrived, they no longer really did that.

Squid doesn’t need nearly as much cooking as octopus to be tender, and I think people more often are dinged for overcooking them so they’re rubbery* (in fact, that’s what I first assumed when Padma complained about it), but Ashleigh's squid tentacles looked a little larger and probably needed a few more minutes on the grill. *The rule for tender squid is to either cook it very quickly or braise/stew it for a while; otherwise it will be tough.

I’m sure they must have, but with them all sitting together and in close proximity to the judges as well, I doubt they said anything, knowing it’d all come out in the wash.

Vancouver and Toronto seem like no-brainers. Although I don’t know if staying in North America could really be considered “global.”

I recently watched that episode, and when Sister Evangelina opens Shelagh's suitcase (which she says was put in the vault in 1948, so 10-12 years prior), she pulls out the shoes and says Shelagh can't wear them, because they’ll look so outdated. Then she says she'll spiff them up the best she can.

They’ve just begun filming the next season, and technically, the Christmas episode marks its beginning. Not only do we in the US get to see it at the same time it airs in the UK (Christmas), I believe it’s the only episode they don’t cut.

I don’t know, both my middle-class grandmothers worked at least part-time through most of their children's childhoods in the 1940s, ‘50s, and in my paternal grandmother’s case, into the ‘60s. Many of their neighbors and peers may not have worked, but I don’t think they were necessarily giving side-eye.

She mentioned his being with her foster mother.

If rice is mixed with a sauce, it’s not going to float free. They were supposed to avoid thin liquids. As for turning to stews, it made sense to me. After all, the challenge wasn’t to create something space-themed in a gimmicky way: they were told they should make flavorful dishes that would please astronauts on a three-year mission, so of course many turned to well-spiced comfort food (very successfully, in Evelyn’s and Nick's cases).

Yeah, we all understood that he was paying a high compliment, but in the context of the song it was a bit jarring.

They are in one house together. At the beginning of this episode the six of them are together at the house and someone (Ashleigh?) recalls when there were a bunch more of them and they had to fight for space on the couches or at the dining table, and they all came out of their rooms the next morning to find the card from Parma. The show just isn’t spending a lot of time showing their downtime outside the stew room.

You can use water instead of the coffee in the cake. Beatty’s chocolate cake is identical to the classic Hershey’s black magic cake, and its close cousin, the Hershey’s perfectly chocolate cake uses plain milk (vs. buttermilk) and boiling water instead of coffee. You can just leave the instant espresso powder ouf of the chocolate frosting.

At the WF meat counter, she asked for rib eye, which is a standard cut for bulgogi. I think she actually sliced it too thin, then overcooked it. It almost seemed as if she was braiding it, rather than searing it.

I kind of came into the LCK finale rooting for Sarah, just because, except for her one loss to Ashleigh, she’s been killing it. Once they both outlined their creamy, crispy, chewy dishes I had a feeling she’d take it. Besides, every time she goes to one of her signature menu items, it’s a winner. You had to love how surprised the final five were to see her, of all people, still there. She didn’t make much of an impression in the main competition, but she clearly can cook.

The Houston Farmers Market only featured in the QF, which was unrelated to space food, but was simply their creative spins on Tex-Mex fajitas (hence tortillas). The space food only featured in the elimination challenge, which didn’t involve either HFM (they shopped at Whole Foods) or Chipotle.

She was costumed in such shapeless clothes, whatever shape she had was obscured, which definitely added to that impression.

Melissa was one of the chefs for the Met Gala dinner.

Not that we saw. At the hospital, it went from she’s quite pregnant and we’re running blood tests to her water breaking and her going into labor. Given the cliff-hanger nature of the episode, maybe there will be followup next week.

In the very first scene with the Corbetts, his wife remarks that he has headaches all the time and if he’s not careful he won’t be able to see to drive the train (his response is, “I’m just getting old”). He then takes a couple of white pills, so I’m assuming it’s just aspirin he’s reaching for in both cases. In light of the headache remark, it could have been a seizure or aneurysm.