caitmcg
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Posts posted by caitmcg
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2 hours ago, violet and green said:
Buddha is Australian. He lives and works in America currently, but he is Australian. Not sure if that is a general comment or a name mixup, but Amar is out of the competition, and Ali is from Jordan. There were only three Americans in the competition, Sara, Amar, and Dawn.
Buddha is from Australia, but he both makes his home in the US and was one of four (out of sixteen) who came to the season from the American Top Chef, which is what I was referring to. And no, I did not mix up Amar and Ali, nor was I commenting on the ultimate final four, just the late-season weight of the America-based presence.
As others have speculated, they may have had some inherent advantages thanks to greater familiarity with specifics of the format, language skills, and so on. Still, it has made a novel season less interesting than it could have been, to me.
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2 hours ago, ProudMary said:
I honestly believe that TPTB didn't like the optics of not having a woman in the final four and were determined to bring back the last woman standing.
Perhaps. As much as I don’t mind Buddha (and can appreciate his talent) and like Sara and Amar, I wish the competition weren’t so heavily weighted toward Americans. Not so global, after all.
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1 hour ago, ProudMary said:
When Padma was on Jimmy Kimmel Live a few weeks ago, she said that while they're filming a season of Top Chef, her calorie count is around 8,000 per day! 😯 Hers is higher than the other judges as she's eating both the Quickfire plates and the Elimination dishes.
And I’ve read in past interviews that hence, a bunch of her filming downtime is devoted to exercise.
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7 minutes ago, susannot said:
Another observation: Padma is really showing her typical Top Chef weight gain in that skintight blue dress. Good thing she got in shape for that fabulous Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.
Even weight-gain Padma is still ridiculously svelte.
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1 hour ago, Bastet said:
I either didn't know or had forgotten that Padma was the intended host from the beginning, and it was a scheduling conflict that caused them to go with Katie Lee instead.
And I didn't know Jamie works for the show now.
I found the sidebar about Padma regretting all her "I have to get this weight off" talk between seasons for the effect it had on her daughter interesting.
And, yes, Marcel, two things are true: You were bullied and ultimately physically assaulted, which is inexcusable, AND you were an annoying asshole.
Great article, with lots of interesting tidbits (like the judges' deliberation in the Aspen finale taking so long the ski lifts had been turned off, and they didn't know how they were going to get back down once they finally made a decision).
I had the same thought re Padma and not knowing she was the one they wanted in the first place.
I didn’t know Jamie Lauren was working behind the scenes either, but Lee Ann Wong had that same role for a number of years following her appearances as a contestant.
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16 hours ago, wingsabre said:
Ali's sauce issue is likely because he placed the sauce between the meat and the grains, and the grains absorbed the sauce. He should have plated grains, meat then sauce. It's almost like a few years ago, where someone plated on plates that were too hot and the sauce seized.
Ali’s sauce issue was mainly that he just didn’t have enough because his sauce over-reduced on the stove. The judges wanted more of it, but he couldn’t plate with more or he wouldn’t have enough to put that dab on every plate. (Tom walked into the kitchen to see if Ali was putting more jus on later plates.) So he may have plated it in the wrong order, but he didn’t have enough jus to work with in the first place.
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16 hours ago, Bastet said:
lobster thermidor
Which looks to actually be a crab dish with lobster jus, so …eh.
I can appreciate elevated comfort food as a thing, but their concept sounds like elevated for elevated's sake, and not half as witty as they pretend. If I’m going to Las Vegas and spending on a meal with a certain level of refined technique, I’m not attracted to their concept. But LV is a place thick on gimmicky attractions, so I can see tourists leaning into theirs, along with the Voltaggio name.
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In the Restaurant Wars thread, dleighg said:
QuoteI don't think leeks are root vegetables. Or at least it's a stretch; what we eat is pretty much all above ground. Onions sure, and garlic. But yes, we usually think "beets, carrots, turnips, potatoes, etc."
Indeed, in the most recent LCK, where the challenge was cooking with root vegetables, Tom looked askance at Nicole saying she was including leeks in her dish because they are roots. And actually, I don’t believe I’ve heard anyone refer to onions or garlic that way, even if what we eat are technically the roots, vs. just referring to them (along with leeks, shallots, etc.) as alliums.
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20 minutes ago, dleighg said:
I don't think leeks are root vegetables. Or at least it's a stretch; what we eat is pretty much all above ground. Onions sure, and garlic. But yes, we usually think "beets, carrots, turnips, potatoes, etc."
Taking my reply to the Last Chance Kitchen thread, where it applies.
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6 hours ago, sistermagpie said:
No, he returned to NYC and made the Hilltop ad that we saw.
Right, from the very last scene of the series finale, where we see Don meditating at Esalen and we close on his dreaming this up:
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5 hours ago, kristen111 said:
Too much office.
I believe some of us thought the office was the strongest part of the show.
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22 minutes ago, DonnaMae said:
Yes, that was a nice scene, but how did they get that together so quickly? Did they save that tiered cake from the hotel?
We saw Sr Veronica exasperatedly say that the cake was wrongly delivered to Nonnatus House, as well as the flowers, so the cake was already in Poplar. (The chances of this actually happening — wedding accoutrements delivered to a random address across town rather than to a posh hotel in Chelsea — seem rather slim, but that wouldn’t serve the story.)
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2 hours ago, Salacious Kitty said:
No Karlie? It looks like Christian is hosting.
I assume it will be like last season, no Karlie, but also no host. Instead, Christian and the judges variously introduced the challenges and guest judges, and the judges announced the weekly winners and cuts.
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On 5/6/2023 at 9:56 PM, Badger said:
Shelagh and Lizzie are talking away from the dinner table. Shelagh says that Lizzie must allow them to pay for the dinner; Lizzie says that Uncle Li would have her guts for garters. She then says that she didn't know how any of this was going to turn out but that she realized that if you go where love is, that's where life is. Shelagh says she realized the same thing once and that it was the beginning of everything.
This was a particularly glaring cut, given that later in the episode, Shelagh refers to and quotes Lizzie saying “if you go where love is, that’s where life is.” I wondered at the time whether I’d missed something. Turns out I did, but only because it wasn’t there.
40 minutes ago, Quilt Fairy said:Does anyone know, when the season goes over to Netflix, is it the edited episodes or the complete ones?
Netflix shows what airs on PBS. The only ones we see broadcast in the US without cuts are the Christmas specials, apparently.
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1 hour ago, Suzn said:
I don't understand tomato tea. It looked the color of white wine and I don't know how red tomato juice can be made to look like that.
If you squeeze the tomatoes and strain out the liquid through cheesecloth or a very fine strainer like a chinoise (versus puréing them) you end up with tomato water — clear like that, but with some tomato flavor. Buddha then steeped it with lemongrass, it sounded like from the description.
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4 hours ago, buttersister said:
Not sure that Gabri's cauliflower would have saved him because he mentioned a puree and the judges wanted a different texture. Still. having to punt clearly put him off.
He mentioned both a purée and a garnish, so perhaps the latter would have added some textural contrast.
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On 5/3/2023 at 7:12 PM, natyxg said:
Matthew is such an eeyore. I find him exhausting. And the problem is the actor, he has no spark whatsoever.
At first, I read eeyore as eyesore, and was slightly flummoxed because, whatever else, Olly Rix is certainly conventionally attractive.
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10 hours ago, Yeah No said:
Gabri's experience in Canada makes me wonder if that was some oddball cheffy variation he had once while there and was trying to duplicate.
I think it was just his oddball cheffy variation.
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Honestly, I’d rather a dumb movie tie-in on TC than their being forced to cook with some brand of mediocre prepared food.
The teams' strategy of focusing on claiming proteins showed how much they’re all stuck in that flesh-as-centerpiece mindset, whereas the all-vegetables yellow team had to be more intentional, and it paid off. All three of those dishes looked and sounded delicious.
Buddha keeps proving himself an exception to the TC rule that making a dessert is high risk, with little chance of reward. He’s probably the most confident about his sweets of any contestant I can recall, but apparently with good reason.
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1 hour ago, Shermie said:
As much as I sympathize with the father being ashamed of his skin condition
My sympathy only goes so far, given that he apparently hadn’t even tried to have it checked out. He told his son to go to the working children's clinic, but he won’t go to the doctor himself.
1 hour ago, Shermie said:Surprise pregnancies were pretty common back then; I hardly think women planned their pregnancies in the 40s and 50s (when that mother had her children). Most kids would qualify as “mistakes” at that time.
Except my own Catholic grandparents, who managed to have five evenly spaced over the course of around a dozen years. My mother told me she considered my father’s mother highly disciplined, and figured she must be, given that!
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Netflix in the US is releasing the 2020 docu-series Miriam Marogolys: Almost Australian. Here’s a review in the Guardian. Apparently she did a similar show i the US, and per IMDB, she has one coming about Scotland.
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9 hours ago, Athena said:
Minka Kelly wrote a memoir about her difficult upbringing and rise to fame. She confirmed that she and Taylor Kitsch dated but it was “toxic” on-and-off. She said that there was awkwardness on set when they were off the relationship.
This explains so much including their intense chemistry. Like many people, I didn’t understand why Tyra came back in the finale when Riggins only ever seemed to care about Lyla. This explained why Minka didn’t want to come back even for a short scene.
Minka Kelly did return for an episode in Season 4, though, where a major plot point is Tim and Lyla reuniting while she’s in town, and it pretty much puts a button on their relationship. When Lyla leaves, their goodbye is understood to be her having moved on from life in Dillon and from Tim, so I was okay with her not coming back in the finale from a story standpoint.9 hours ago, Athena said:Has anyone been listening to the podcast? I haven’t gone through it yet but they have a lot of guests on it.
I’ve been listening to both Clear Eyes, Full Hearts with Derek Philips and Stacy Oristano (Billy Riggins and Mindy Colette Riggins) and It’s Not Only Football with Scott Porter, Zach Gilford, and Mae Whitman from the beginning.
CEFH has reached the beginning of Season 5, and they have had a lot of guests, both behind-the-scenes people and actors (main players like Adrianne Palicki, Gaius Charles, Taylor Kitsch, Jesse Plemons, and Zach Gilford, and also a lot of folks playing parents, coaches, etc.). They also answer fan questions. It’s been cool hearing about the behind-the-scenes aspects and learning about the backgrounds of some of the more minor characters/local actors.
INOF is pretty chatty, though Scott Porter tends to try and rein them in a bit. So far, I’m finding the behind-the-scenes info interesting, especially Scott Porter's contributions. When they’ve had guests, Mae Whitman usually sits it out (I assume so there aren’t too many voices). She is there as the “super fan,” though she does have some ties via being in Jason Katims's next show, Parenthood, and she and Zach Gilford playing spouses in Good Girls. I like her as an actor, but she bugs a bit on the podcast because she tends to ramble on, and she has not managed to train herself to avoid constantly inserting “like” into her speech.
I’d listen to CEFH over INOF.
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2 hours ago, dleighg said:
I thought that spoiling LCK was off-limits here. I don't care because I watch it, but not everyone does.
But last week's LCK (the afternoon tea that Dale won and Begoña lost) was part of the main show, so everyone watching saw it.
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2 hours ago, LtKelley said:
42 would be young for Shelagh to be in menopause then. At least compared to me.
Perimenopause at that age is certainly possible, but pregnancy is not at all a stretch.
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The Baking Topic
in Food & Drink
I’ve used parchment liners when baking upside-down cakes, and it does the job.