Rachael vs Guy Celebrity Cook-Off Episode 4 Recap

This week, our five remaining celebrities - Lou Diamond Phillips, Taylor Dayne, Summer Sanders, Coolio, and Joey FatOne - are tasked with (wo)manning lunch carts. Rather than dishing out felafel or dirty water hot dogs, each team is responsible for 100 portions of three dishes, one of which needs to be on a stick, one in a wrap, and one in a bun. 

I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere, but I haven't had my coffee yet.

Rachel and Guy meet with their teams. Coolio immediately declares he knows exactly what he's making - another dish from his childhood - "soul rolls," basically ghetto eggrolls made with ground meat and cheese. But Coolio is crazy so he's talking about using alligator meat and making two different dipping sauces. Riiiiight. There's only 90 minutes to cook, dude. Teammate FatOne is far more sane and taking on something that he can make in his sleep - meatballs - and serving them as sliders. The two of them will work together on the bacon-wrapped shrimp skewers with chipotle bbq sauce that are suggested by Guy.

On Rachel's side, LDP volunteers to do sloppy Joe sliders. Summer wants to do something healthy, but Taylor pooh-poohs that idea, saying that when she visits a lunch truck, she wants meat, baby. Like a big juicy sausage. Summer says oh yeah, she loves sausage.

I know, I know - there's another joke in there somewhere. Coffee.

Rachel suggests that Taylor do teriyaki beef skewers, which prompts Taylor to tell us that she doesn't know how to make teriyaki, nor has she ever grilled. She demonstrates her lack of teriyaki chops when she disregards Rachel's suggestion not to add yet more soy sauce to her marinade by dumping in a whole other bottle. Taylor's perhaps hoping that some urban deer in need of a salt lick will stop by and vote for their team.

Over on the boys' side, Coolio is over-confident about his dish, and talks a lot about "coagulating" the flavors. He used that word last week, too. Cool, baby, it's not blood. He does a test eggroll and discovers that his frying oil is crazy hot, burning his creation in ten seconds flat. So while Coolio's busy turning down the heat, draining and replacing oil, poor FatOne is working on both his own meatballs (come on, you can think of a joke yourself) and working on the bacon for the shrimp dish.

Taylor also has temperature issues with the grill; her meat is too brown in some spots, too raw in others. She tells us again that she's never grilled, which I'm beginning to believe.

Once the 90 minutes of cooking time is up and the crowds converge on the lunch trucks, she feeds Guy some mostly-raw meat. And it's also too salty. As for the team's other two dishes: LDP's barbecue sloppy Joe sliders, not surprisingly, are a big hit; Summer's bland sausage wrap, not so much.

Meanwhile, Coolio and FatOne are getting off to a slow start. While they're struggling to get enough portions of food made, Taylor attempts to take advantage of the situation by luring Team Guy's hungry crowd over to Team Rachel's truck. FatOne tops her by getting out a megaphone and urging the crowd to come back. Eventually Coolio and FatOne get their shit together and prepare enough food. Rachel and Guy love all three of their dishes, the soul roll, the meatball slider, and the bacon-wrapped shrimp.

While the diners are dining, the celebs hand out comment cards and beg for votes. Team Guy must have begged nicely, because back in the kitchen, it is announced that they have won the challenge. This means that two members of Team Rachel have to do battle to see who gets to stay and who gets sent home. LDP's sliders were well-received, so he is safe, leaving Taylor and Summer to duke it out.

This week's Blind Tasting challenge is to create an amuse bouche in ten minutes. Taylor thinks Guy says, "moose boosh," which is actually what it sounds like he said. Think they serve amuses bouches at either of Guy's restaurants, Tex Wasabi or Johnny Douchebags?  Sorry, chips and salsa doesn't count. Anyhoo...they get to cooking. Both choose fresh figs, with Summer putting together a little tartlet filled with goat and mascarpone cheese, topped with a fig and a balsamic reduction, most of which she claims she's never eaten before. (!!!) Taylor thinks back to vacations she's taken and concocts a proscuitto and feta bruschetta with fig. All the while reminding us that she doesn't grill.

Guy and Rachel taste the dishes and seem to be fairly pleased with both, but in the end, Taylor's dish wins out once again. This gal has 9 lives! Summer goes home, leaving each team with only two members.

Next week - a double elimination! Only one member of each team can go to the finale. I'm guessing it will be Coolio and LDP, but who the heck knows. The way Taylor's been going, she might end up the accidental winner.

Posted on Minxeats.com.

Cookin' With...Water

As I posted a while ago, I am now the proud owner of a SousVide Supreme. The manufacturer, Eades, calls it a "water oven," which I suppose is more accurate than "immersion circulator," which is what Top Chef and Iron Chef fans may be more familiar with. The modernist cuisine (today's favored term for "molecular gastronomy") technique of sous vide is a method of cooking food--sealed in plastic bags--in a water bath. Yes, I suppose folks have been cooking their Green Giant broccoli in cheese sauce that way for a long time already, but that's really just defrosting/warming and not really cooking. The term "sous vide" (soo VEED) actually refers to the vacuum-sealing of the food, not the cooking process itself, but has come to be used for both. In any case, the SousVide Supreme is basically a rectangular chamber rigged to maintain the constant temperature of water placed within it.

Sous vide cooking is especially good for proteins, which can be cooked to their ideal temperature of doneness without fear of overcooking. For example, if beef is perfectly medium-rare at 132F, and it is prepared at 132F, it can never reach temperatures of 140F or over and become overcooked. While I've tried cooking soft-boiled eggs in the SVS, I'm still a little intimidated about the idea of cooking meat in it. So...in my next attempt at using the thing, I cooked...vegetables.

The SousVide Supreme Web site offered an interesting-sounding salad of fennel and apples, so I gave that a whirl.

Using the vacuum sealer on the apples. Not a good idea, since the
sealer sucked the marinade out of the bag and all over the place.

Because I couldn't suck the air out of the bags, and apples and fennel aren't heavy, the bags floated in the water bath despite my attempts at weighting them down or using the rack that came with the device. (I need to buy a brick for doing this kind of thing in the future.) Eventually, I managed to get both bags mostly submerged and cooked the items for the requisite hour.

I skipped the greenery part of the salad and just served the apples and fennel with bleu cheese. It tasted pretty good, but the texture was a bit soft. Now I'm thinking I should have just run the fruit and veg through the blender and made a lovely purée of it. Next time....

Also next time...I need to get brave enough to cook meat. Maybe salmon.

Posted by theminx on Minxeats.com.

Top Chef Texas Episode 11 Recap

This week's episode opens on the chefs in the stew room after Restaurant Wars. They're just getting over the fact that the boys sucked and Jor-El was sent home when Tom comes in with a sour look on his face. He tells them they've been evicted from the Driskill because the other guests are complaining about the kimchi and beer smell coming out of the penthouse, so they are going back to San Antonio, toot sweet. The seven remaining cheftestants pile into their apparently segregated sponsorship mobiles and head out of Austin. The girls' car is eerily quiet because they are busy hating on winner Beverly.

The next day, they meet once again at the Le Cordon Bleu kitchen, where there seems to be a new contraption waiting for them. A conveyor belt, not unlike a tiny luggage carousel at the airport, is coming out of the back wall. Padma (wearing the most hideous jumpsuit since the camel toe delight that Santino created for Kara Janx in season 2 of Project Runway) comes out with this week's guest judge, Eric Ripert, and tells the chefs that the conveyor belt will be part of the challenge. Various ingredients will be sent out on it and the cheftestants each must choose three to incorporate into a sophisticated dish. It's kind of like a DIY version of Chopped, in which the chefs will have to make do with combinations like Cream of Wheat, Neopolitan ice cream, and gefilte fish, or enoki mushrooms, canned peaches, and chilled monkey brains.

There will be some really choice items on the belt - like the monkey brains - but they will most likely come out towards the end of the 30 minutes, so the chefs really have to manage their time well if they want to finish.

Some of them grab whatever off the conveyor belt and start cooking immediately, but Squinty Chris has noticed a pot of lobsters and tries three times to grab them before he is successful, since the monkeys working backstage keep whipping it off the belt after one pass. Beverly chooses three random ingredients fairly early on in the game; despite this, she doesn't get her curried rice krispies on the plate before time is called.

As per the routine, Padma and Eric go around and taste the chefs' dishes. When they get to Bev, they feign disappointment and ask to taste her missing component, which they really pretend to enjoy. Eric then tells the group that he didn't particularly like Chris', Grayson's, or Paul's dishes, but he really liked Lindsay's and Sarah's. Padma says that if Beverly had gotten her krispies plated, she would have won "by a mile." What a horrible way to tease that poor child! Hasn't she been bullied enough, Padma? Lindsay is given the win, and immunity from elimination. She seems annoyed that while she won the challenge, she seems to have actually come in second.

The Elimination Challenge this week is to create a dish fit for a queen. Squinty Chris immediately starts thinking of Queen Elizabeth, which of course leads to thoughts of Princess Kate and naturally to her sister Pippa's ass. I'm thinking real queens: Bruce Vilanch, Neil Patrick Harris, Hugh Jackman. Now wouldn't that be fun!

But no. It's Charlize Theron, who is neither a Queen nor a queen. Nor is she wearing McQueen, for that matter. Instead, she's playing a fictional queen in a movie.

BO-RING. (Speaking of whom...I miss Kal-El!)

(Theron is a beautiful woman, no doubt, but her hair looked like overprocessed straw and her dress appeared to be a pillow case with head and arm holes cut out of it.)

Ms Theron is playing the White Queen in the upcoming film, Snow White and the Huntsman, which also stars hunky Chris "Thor" Hemsworth, and Kristen "One Facial Expression" Stewart.

Charlize says she looves food, which is hard to tell by looking at her. She tasks the cheftestants to create a seven-course meal of wickedly beautiful dishes that involve real indulgence and risk-taking. The chefs seem really inspired by the idea and rush off to shop with $250 in pocket.

After shopping, we see Squints call his wife. Once upon a time, this would mean he was going home within the next thirty minutes, but these days, it could mean he wins. Who knows? At this point, scenes like that have become non sequiturs.

The next day, the chefs convene at the Southwest School for Arts and Crafts to prepare and serve their meal to Charlize, Padma, Tom, Emeril, and Ripert.

Ed serves his dish first - a tuna tartare with two sauces representing good and evil, garnished with fried fish scales, which look spiky. Charlize says she could eat this dish every day. Paul then serves an "enchanted forest" with about 114 different items including bacon, foie gras, and beets all squashed onto one small portion of the plate, garnished with a "bloody" handprint.

Again, the judges love the dish. Bev serves halibut - to prove that she can cook the fish properly - with black forbidden rice and a red curry sauce. Once more, there's nothing but praise in the air. The same goes for Lindsay's sea scallop with "witch's stew," Sarah's red wine risotto with lamb heart, Grayson's black chicken complete with claw, and Chris's cherry-filled baked apple with rice krispie maggots. Tom declares it the best meal they've had all season, and that picking a winner and a loser will be very difficult.

Padma calls everyone out from the stew room and each are praised in turn. Paul has created the favorite dish, and not only wins the challenge but two tickets to the world premiere of Snow White and the Huntsman, starring Charlize Theron, coming to a theatre near you!

Is it me, or are the auxiliary prizes crappier than usual this year? Next week, they'll probably give away a trip for two to Cleveland.

Ed and Chris are safe, as is Lindsay who has immunity. That leaves Bev, Sarah, and Grayson potentially on the chopping block. While their dishes were amazing, the judges found things to nit-pick about each of them. Sarah and Grayson had overly-salty elements, Grayson's quail egg and foie didn't really work with the rest of the plate, and Bev's curry sauce had a disgusting texture. Her plate wasn't quite macabre enough, either, and despite coming on so strong in the last challenge, she's the one who gets sent home.

I suppose it was inevitable that Bev get eliminated before too long, but I kinda hoped to see her, Ed, and Paul in the finale.

Posted on Minxeats.com.

Fried Chicken and Bloody Mary Butter

The recipes for last Sunday's episode of Rachel vs. Guy Celebrity Cook-off are finally available.

Here's Coolio's recipe for My Mother's Fried Chicken and here's the recipe for Taylor Dayne's Bucatini with Tomato Basil Sauce. The one I'm most interested in is Summer Sander's Bloody Mary Butter for rib eye steaks. And if you don't know how to make a proper grilled cheese sandwich topped with a smiley face, here's Joey Fatone's recipe.

Posted on Minxeats.com.