My analysis of the Wil Myers three-team trade went up last night for Insiders, and I held my last Klawchat of 2014 today.

Two amazon sales of interest – Ann Leckie’s Hugo/Nebula Award-winning 2013 novel Ancillary Justice is just $2.99 for Kindle right now; I bought it yesterday, as I’m working my way through the Hugo winners. Also, the excellent iOS app version of Stone Age: The Board Game is still on sale for $2.99.

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We see Doug waking up Katsuji in the morning, after which he tells the camer that Katsuji “is the most bizarre person I’ve ever met, probably my favorite person in the house; I don’t know why.” Then we find out Katsuji’s wife is seven months pregnant with another little one at home, and she’s running their restaurant while he’s gone and probably cursing his name every twenty seconds. On a related note, I believe we call this “foreshadowing.”

* Quickfire: Gronk is in the house. He’s listed at 6’6”, 265, but he has to be bigger than that, no? He also turned Padma into a 15-year-old girl: “do you mind if I call you Rob? … you can call me honey.” Have we ever seen her blush like that before?

* Gronk says he’s Polish so he wants Polish sausage. The chefs get one hour to make the best sausage they can from scratch, during which Padma will continue to hit on Gronk. Does she know he slept with a porn star?

* When Gronk says “I’d eat a big sausage,” Padma pauses and smiles: “Me too.” I’m just going to leave that there.

* I didn’t hear which chef said it, but someone was surprised there was venison? That makes damn good sausage. I kind of thought wild game sausage was a thing now. There was a food truck festival in Arizona where one truck had sausages made from deer, boar, and even reindeer meat.

* Katsuji uses liquid nitrogen, cooling the mixture so the fat doesn’t break and can maintain an emulsion. I think that’s the first time we’ve seen him talk any food science on the show. Blais would be proud.

* I was surprised and pleased to see them all using the same KitchenAid grinder attachment I use. I assumed they’d have access to much better equipment.

* Both Melissa and George end up struggling to get the meat/fat mixture through the grinder – I haven’t had that happen, so I don’t know if they didn’t cut the meat into small enough pieces or something else went wrong – but while Melissa just ends up making half-sized sausages, George abandons the cases entirely and makes sausage patties.

* Doug says the casing “shouldn’t feel like a used condom.” It’s really the “used” that takes the analogy too far, isn’t it?

* Doug made the most traditional dish – a beer-braised pork sausage with onions and whole grain mustard on a roll. Gronk, who by the way comes off as very personable the whole time, says it’s “a good pregame meal.” Because, you know, before I work out I go crush something fatty with lots of onions. Melissa’s little sausages have wild boar and pork with lentils, cucumber, fennel, and red onion on top. Mei’s Asian-style pork sausage has ginger, garlic, and fish sauce, topped with avocado, coconut puree, yuzu aioli. Gronk loves the sauce – how could you not love a tangy citrus mayo with fatty pork? Katsuji’s sausage has brisket and pork with habanero, cumin, coriander, and saffron. Gregory’s pork and boar sausage has makrut lime leaves (see below), chiles, lemongrass, garlic, cucumber, and carrot salad. Gronk says it got spicier as he ate more of it; I’m shocked Padma didn’t chime in on that. George served his pork and veal sausage patty with a sunnyside up egg, flavoring the sausage with cumin and coriander..

(Gregory uses the common term “Kaffir,” which is considered a racial slur in many parts of the world, notably South Africa where it’s comparable to our n-word, while in Muslim societies it’s a derogatory term for non-Muslims. While the origin of the name of the fruit is hopelessly unclear, there’s no good reason to keep using the term when “makrut lime” refers to the same thing.)

* George meets Gronk and says he “can’t say I’m a fan of yours” before Gronk tastes the dish. What a dipshit.

* Worst: Melissa’s sausages were way too small, not surprising since Gronk emphasized that he likes traditional, oversized Polish sausages. Gregory’s had too much spice and toppings; do Polish sausages ever contain red pepper? I can’t think of one, but I’m not that familiar with Polish food. The best: Doug’s, of course, and George’s, which looked like a burger but was delicious. George wins, despite his inability to shut his trap, and gets immunity. Doug is clearly displeased since it wasn’t a real sausage in casing … but that was never a requirement of the challenge, was it?

* Elimination challenge: Tony Maws – great name for a chef – is in the house; he owns Craigie on Main in Boston and Kirkland Tap and Trotter in Somerville, which I will forever associate with “slummerville” even though it hasn’t been worthy of that nickname in about twenty years. The chefs must create dishes inspired by one literary work from any of a half-dozen New England writers. The diners should be able to visually see the story on the plate in some way.

* Gregory picks first and takes Edgar Allen Poe, which would be (I think) the most fun to work with because you can be macabre without needing gore. Katsuji takes Stephen King, whose work is gory and, more importantly, is not literature. George takes Dr. Seuss. Mei takes Henry David Thoreau. Melissa takes Nathaniel Hawthorne, but ends up not using The Scarlet Letter (as if anyone knows any of his other books). Doug gets Emily Dickinson by default and is unthrilled to have a “depressed chick poet from the 1800s.” But she has the most notable style of anyone but Poe, both in content and in the use of iambic pentameter in every one of her poems. “Because I could not stop for Death” has to be among the top ten poems every penned by an American, right? I need some poetry students/experts to weigh in on this, especially since I can’t put anything but “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at number one: “In the rooms the women come and go/Talking of F.P. Santangelo.”

* Doug – who jokes that Dickinson “wrote Pride and Prejudice, right?” after which I might have murdered him in his sleep – likes the poem “Bring me sunset in a cup” for its opening image. I don’t think he kept reading, though, or he would have used some honey, some turtle meat, and perhaps some quail or squab in his dish.

* George chooses One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish after Padma warns him not to serve green eggs and ham. Blue’s a tough color, though, so he ends up using purple potatoes. I don’t (or didn’t, at the time I watched) know how literal the judges expect the chefs to be, but if you ask any two- or three-year-old about colors, they’ll tell you in no uncertain terms that blue ain’t purple.

* Gregory chooses “The Raven,” and gives a rather scholarly analysis of its contents as well. HE plans to use grilled cornish hens, parsnips and beets for the snow and love, and some sort of nori “technique” for the blackness clouding the man’s soul. That said, I might have chosen “The Telltale Heart” and actually cooked something like beef hearts – but I’m writing that with the benefit of having already seen the judging.

* Mei’s drawing of her dish is cute – she or Bravo should take stuff like that and auction it off to fans for charity. Stick a frame around that and hang it in your kitchen for a conversation piece. She’s using charred onions to represent the soil, blending them to a powder with butter … like a graham-cracker or Oreo pie crust. I’m surprised it doesn’t just taste like ash, but I’ve never tried it.

* Melissa chooses a Hawthorne book I had never heard of called The Blithedale Romance. Even if you know and like the book, if the judges don’t, haven’t you just shot yourself in the foot?

* Francis Lam is a guest judge. Tom says the chefs’ efforts looked promising in his kitchen walkthrough, but the “proof is in the pudding.” Francis tries to correct him and claims it’s Shakespeare … but Bill never said that, and while the phrase is generally credited to Cervantes, it’s probably not his phrase either.

* Gregory serves first: seared beef tenderloin, grilled hen, parsnip puree, beets, and crispy nori. Tony’s beef was a little medium-rare, while the other four plates had it rare. Is medium-rare that big of a crime? Granted, beef tenderloin is kind of an overrated cut anyway.

* George’s Dr. Seuss riff has calamari, mussels, clams, pan-seared branzino, a seafood emulsion, and red peppers and purple potatoes for the colors. Gail says the dish feels a little “tight.” I have no idea what that means, but that’s four fish, not one or two.

* Mei’s plate has roasted vegetables on charred onion soil, coated with tom kha (I assume coconut milk flavored with lemongrass) “snow,” and a radish and carrot top vinaigrette. Gail says the soil and snow both add subtle flavor. Tom calls it “roasted vegetables ‘Walden Pond,’” which seems like an enormous compliment.

* Melissa’s dish has seared halibut, spring veg, morels, charred baby corn, asparagus, peas, with a mushroom broth served tableside. She claims it’s to represent the four seasons, with the charred corn symbolizing the increasing darkness of autumn, but 1) where’s winter? and 2) would anyone in that room have eaten her dish and said, “oh, man that is totally Blithedale Romance.”

* Katsuji splatters his red beet sauce on his dishes so it “looks like somebody just got killed on this plate.” He gets a reaction from the diners, but then forgets the title and author of his inspiration due to nerves.

* His dish is a fabada with white beans, chorizo, jamón serrano, short rib, veal osso buco, red beet puree and hot sauce (with his voice overdubbed to say the last two ingredients). It’s a long explanation of the connection between the story and the dish. Tom says the “most unappetizing-looking dish I’ve ever seen in my life.” Gail likes the “discordance” in the dish because Carrie is a horror story. No one’s going to mention that he had four proteins from three different animals plus beans in the dish?

* Doug’s Emily Dickinson riff is a carrot bisque with grilled carrots, orange, cumin vinaigrette, radish, and dandelion. The soup has an intense carrot flavor from his various methods of cooking the carrots. The judges rave about it.

* The judges seem to have liked all of the dishes, with a few slight preferences. Mei connected the work, the author, and the dish better than anyone, but Doug executed that almost as well. Gail argues for Melissa’s fish and presentation of vegetables, but again, no one points out the tenuous connection to Hawthorne. George’s presentation was a little underwhelming, but he has immunity. Katsuji’s was big and bold, but it was a mess to behold.

* Judges’ table: Tom says it was all really good, despite a hard challenge. Mei, Melissa, Doug are the top three. Mei wins, which I infer is for a great dish with the most inventive presentation; the “soil” and “snow” weren’t just gimmicks but added flavor to the dish.

* The bottom two are Katsuji and Gregory, with George safe due to immunity. Katsuji’s sauce was too thick, pureed beets rather than a strained “au jus” (sorry, Tom, but the juice itself is just the “jus,” without the “au”) that would have had a more vibrant color without the inconsistent texture. Gregory gets dinged for an overly symbolic dish that was not evocative enough of Poe or “The Raven,” yet Melissa’s fared no better in that department and she was in the top half. This feels a bit contrived, unless something else was amiss with Gregory’s plates beyond one serving of slightly overcooked beef.

* Katsuji is eliminated, as his food didn’t quite hold up to the presentation for Tom. Axing Gregory for an insufficiently literal interpreation of his inspiration would have been ridiculous.

* Quick power ranking: Gregory, Doug, Mei, George, Melissa. Doug may really be neck and neck with Gregory at this point – a little more precise, but a little less imaginative. He’s outperformed everyone of late.

* Last Chance Kitchen: The three chefs must cook with 20+ ingredients, Katsuji-style. Katsuji makes a mole, which is a great way to use twenty ingredients in one shot, and he ends up over 30 ingredients in his dish. Adam wins with a ceviche; Katie is eliminated despite Tom praising her tomato chutney, just saying the other two dishes were better.

Sorry this week’s recap was delayed, but I didn’t see the episode until Friday night due to the winter meetings and all-day travel on Thursday (I passed on taking a redeye home, and I’m not sorry about that part).

* We start with a window on last episode’s decision to send Keriann home rather than Katie. Gregory says in the stew room that “you don’t mix bananas and chocolate and call it a mousse,” to which Katie concurs, saying “that wasn’t a mousse.” Remember Tom and/or Barbara saying you could play hockey with it? Well, I guess we know now. I don’t think anything without whipped cream folded into it could be called a mousse; chocolate mousse has both that and an egg white foam (meringue) to provide structure and lightness by incorporating air.

* Gregory’s an ultra runner and has run 50 miles a couple of times. I’m not sure if I should be impressed or horrified. If I run 50 miles, it’s because there’s a large carnivorous animal chasing me.

* Quickfire: Jasper White’s in the house. I’ve been to his Summer Shack a few times and liked it. I’ve heard him credited with inventing grilled lobster, although I don’t know if that’s apocryphal.

* This is a sudden-death quickfire, involving clams, with a table full of buckets of clams available for the chefs. They’ll be making “chowdah,” as Padma says it, although I could have sworn it was said differently:

The chefs have to create their own unique versions of clam chowder. White wrote a book on the dish, called 50 Chowders.

* The winner gets immunity; the loser has to fight to survive. The chefs have thirty minutes, which isn’t much time to create strong clam flavors.

* Mei grabs the whole bucket of littlenecks, which apparently are one of the most desirable clams up there, but ends up sharing them with Adam when he asks … only to have Melissa swipe them right off her station when she heads to the pantry. That’s bad Top Chef etiquette, at best, and sleazy at worst.

* Gregory is making razor clams, which he chose because they’re juicy, tender, and really quick to cook. I’m light on clam knowledge here, since my wife is allergic and I eat clams maybe once a year when dining out.

* Adam is trying to make a light chowder, which would differentiate itself from everyone else’s, but he’s really just making a Manhattan chowder by using tomato water instead of potatoes.

* Melissa is using lemongrass in her chowder, which will taste like tom kha gai. Katie makes a black tea sourdough chowder, using the bread to thicken the chowder, which sounds like it’ll work for thickness but not for mouthfeel.

* Mei made a steamer clam and lobster chowder with yuzu aioli, celery, and fennel. Katsuji makes a green chowder with oysters, poblanos, jalapeños, and toasted garlic broth. Gregory’s dish is a razor clam and sweet potato chowder with bacon, dashi, and coconut milk broth. He grilled the clams and thickened it with the sweet potatoes, an idea I’ll definitely steal for something. Adam’s Manhattan chowder features red wine poached clams, boiled potatoes, carrots, celery, and tomato water.

* Melissa’s cioppino chowder has clams, shrimp, white wine, onions, leeks, and garlic. Doug made a grilled oyster chowder with a steamed clam broth using the clams’ liquor for flavor and fresh jalapeño. Katie’s clams in lobster stock with black tea and sourdough is a take-off on the bread bowl.

* Katie says “sudden death makes me think of death.” That might be taking it too far.

* The favorites are Adam, Gregory, and Melissa, with Gregory winning. Mos Chef is back … and has immunity. That’s his third quickfire win, with Adam apparently a very close second.

* Least favorite: Doug’s dish was very salty; Katsuji’s masked the taste of the oysters; Mei’s seemed underseasoned; Katie’s raw sourdough bread overpowered the soup and gave it a gummy texture. Katie ends up on the bottom and has to face…

* … one of the previously eliminated chefs. Those seven vote to pick one of their own to face Katie. George, who is Mike Isabella’s business partner and was eliminated in the very first quickfire of the season, gets four of the votes and wins the right to face Katie to get back into the competition.

* The challenge: cook rabbit. Katie hasn’t cooked with it in seven years, since culinary school. They have 45 minutes to cook any part of the animal that they want.

* That’s probably the protein I’d least want to face if I were in a cooking competition – that or venison. I’ve never cooked rabbit, because there’s no one here who’d eat it (my daughter is horrified that people eat rabbit, even though I’ve explained that they’re vicious animals who will chew your face off without a second thought). I also don’t love rabbit, even though I’ve had it several times; it doesn’t taste like chicken, but I find its flavor unpleasantly sharp and gamy. I’ve had it at some pretty good restaurants, but I guess I need to keep trying it.

* Katsuji hopes Katie wins because “we know she’s not the best one,” while George might be better than anyone realized. He’s right, of course.

* Adam’s running commentary doesn’t spare George: “Did I hear glazed carrots? I didn’t realize this was a CIA cookbook from 1996.”

* George’s rabbit legs aren’t braising quickly enough, so he goes back for the loins because he can cook them in less than five minutes. Can you braise any meat in under 45 minutes? Duck legs aren’t big, and they take at least two hours to braise. Even though rabbit legs are smaller, the braising process involves very low temperatures (lower than what George was using on a burner) and long cooking times to dissolve collagen in tough cuts of meat where the muscles received more exercise while the animal was alive. The collagen forms gelatin, and its extraction allows the muscle fibers to separate more easily, producing a tender dish. If you let the braising liquid boil, you’ll let the proteins in the muscle unfold and relink with each other, which produces a tough, chewy result. I know you can’t braise anything in 45 minutes without using pressure; why don’t professional chefs know that?

* Katie serves a braised leg with a Moroccan tomato sauce. George serves his roasted loin sliced over barley risotto (although I could swear he said farro, not barley, while talking to the other chefs), glazed carrots, and a mustard jus. Jasper says the clearcut winner was George. Tom votes for George as well because his rabbit was perfectly cooked. That puts George back in the competition and sends Katie home.

* George sounds exactly the priest character on Gracepoint, which, by the way, we just finished last night. I thought it was spectacular, and now that Broadchurch is on Netflix I’ll go back and watch that too since the latter series is coming back for another season.

* Elimination challenge: The chefs will cater a tasting event for 75 Top Chef fans in the TC kitchen … except the four judges are doing the shopping, and the chefs won’t see the ingredients till tomorrow. Each chef is randomly assigned to one of the judges’ pantries via knife draw.

* Richard warns his two chefs, Adam and Doug, that “I hope you like the vitamin aisle.” Adam is displeased: “there’s going to be agar or some other playful molecular shit,” rhyming “agar” with “dagger.” Just because that’s what Blais buys doesn’t mean he has to use it all, right? Having just had a blood orange gelée at Blais’ Juniper & Ivy that I presume used agar-agar, I’m a big fan of the stuff.

* Blais goes bananas in Whole Foods, taking off with his cart and heading right through produce to the proteins, mocking the other judges for lollygagging over the produce, and saying that Padma probably doesn’t do her own grocery shopping, followed by footage of her struggling to carry two jackfruit into her cart. To be fair, those things are massive. The jackfruit, I mean.

* Richard buys lecithin, a potent emulsifier that’s found in egg yolks and soybeans, among other sources. What the heck do you do with pure lecithin? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in a non-dessert recipe.

* Padma gets her revenge on Richard by stealing his cart from the checkout line, spilling (wasting, really) a big cooler of fish. They’re all a bunch of dorks, by the way. I can only imagine the relief at that Whole Foods every time the Top Chef crew leaves.

* Richard’s pantry ends up also including liquid nitrogen (of course) and Versawhip, a modified soy protein that can replace egg whites or gelatin to create highly stable foams. I assume you all have this stuff in your cupboard right now. Adam’s concerns seem to be at least a little bit legit, although Blais did give him and Doug plenty of normal ingredients to work with.

* Melissa is making shrimp scampi with a salad, which the other chefs are pointing to as too safe. Adam, meanwhile, is doing some weird technique (hint: foreshadowing) where he’s not cooking the shrimp but scalding the exterior with very hot oil. I know some folks love raw shrimp (ama ebi, sometimes called “sweet shrimp”), but I find the texture to be gross – slippery and chewy, but with the feeling of breaking all those cell walls and proteins up with your teeth when that process should be started with heat. The only time I’ve ever seen this hot-oil trick was on an episode of Iron Chef America maybe ten years ago, where Chef Morimoto used it to crisp salmon skin by pouring the hot oil repeatedly over the fish, not just once.

* Doug can’t describe Katsuji’s dish without laughing, but says it makes sense because “Katsuji’s batshit insane.” I’d like to see someone font Katsuji that way rather than giving the name of his restaurant.

* Gregory tears open the jackfruit and says it smells like bubblegum. So maybe all those years I wanted to retch up the pink liquid amoxicillin, I didn’t realize it was just jackfruit-flavored.

* Did you know that Katsuji came to this country with just $5 in his pocket? I can’t believe he hasn’t mentioned that before. Seems like he’d want everyone to know that.

* Padma enters the kitchen with vertical striped pants that make her legs look like they’re about ten feet long.

* Richard drops a “plethora” when describing his Whole Foods trip to fans. If he were on every week, we could have a Blais vocabulary drinking game – take a shot every time he drops a ten-dollar word on the show.

* The food … Katsuji (Gail’s pantry): Tunisian potato salad and harissa-poached shrimp, plus a white sangria on the side. It sounds amazing, actually, and I usually think Katsuji’s stuff just sounds weird. Richard says it could use more heat, although he may have been mocking Katsuji there.

* Gregory (Padma): Coconut milk and chicken in Madras curry with jackfruit relish. Padma seems to love it and says the smells were “so authentic.” It’s pretty audacious to make an Indian dish for Padma Lakshmi.

* Adam (Richard): Peppadew piperade with flash-marinated shrimp, mushroom conserva, herbs, and aioli. Gail says her shrimp was just a few seconds undercooked, but that seems to be overly kind based on what the other judges say later on.

* How great is that father who brought his daughter, maybe 11 or 12 years old, to the tasting event? She ended up with Blais’ autograph and Doug gave her his menu board to take home.

* Melissa (Gail): Sauteed shrimp with harissa yogurt, roasted figs, fennel, dill, mint, artichokes, and a shaved root vegetable salad. Richard says it’s not spicy enough, Gail has it as just barely too salty. Richard calls it safe, beautiful for a cafe, not bold enough for a competition. Also, hasn’t she made something like this before? It’s Top Chef, not Top Shrimp and Salad.

* Mei (Tom): Charred eggplant puree with black garlic, rack of lamb, scallion-ginger relish, and lamb jus. The flavors are good, but the lamb starts bleating when she cuts it, a real turnoff for the diners.

* Doug (Richard): Chorizo-marinated mussels with sweet pepper and cauliflower relish, lemon preserve, and bacon crumble.

* Padma says her pantry “had enough chilis to kill a village.” Are we talking a small village or a medium-sized one? Asking for a friend.

* George (Padma): Beef/lamb kabob with green lentils and cucumber-mint yogurt. Padma and Tom praise this effusively.

* Everyone loved George’s, and Gregory’s. Gregory’s vinegar/jackfruit relish wowed Richard and he praised Gregory for introducting a new ingredient to diners. Doug chose his ingredients well (and I think the implication is that Adam didn’t, using the same pantry) and his mussels were well-cooked.

* Mei’s lamb was too undercooked and was light on flavor. Adam used a “mind-boggling technique” on the shrimp per Richard, producing “squeaky,” “slimy” shrimp, adjectives you probably never want used to describe your food.

* George, Doug, and Gregory are the top three. The winner was Doug, so Portland is dominating this season so far: one or both of Doug and Gregory has won, individually or on a team, six of the eight elimination challenges and four of the seven quickfires.

* The bottom three: Mei, Adam, and Melissa. Mei’s eggplant puree and salad were beautiful, but the lamb wasn’t cooked enough. She says she realizes now that she should have taken it off the rack to cook it. Adam says he knows the technique was risky, but Tom says beyond the shrimp being undercooked, the piperade was underseasoned. Padma asks Melissa an obvious (in hindsight) question: If she was cooking shrimp to order, so what did she do with the two and a half hours of prep time? “Knife work” is a weak answer, and I can’t remember anyone winning Top Chef based on knife work.

* Adam is eliminated. That wasn’t my guess at all – I assumed it would be Melissa for playing it safe, rather than Adam for taking a risk that didn’t work. He seems stunned too: “If you don’t love cooking enough to be an emotional mess on national television, put the knife down.” Seems like pretty sound career advice to me.

* Power ranking: Gregory, Doug, Mei, George, Katsuji, Melissa. Tough to say where George should fit, but the fact that he executed two dishes extremely well is at least a good sign. Mei slips one spot behind Doug, although I think the reason at this point is obvious.

* Last Chance Kitchen returns as well, with two episodes the first week. The first part features all the chefs eliminated before this episode, sans George, and they have to remake the dishes that sent them home. Joy, Rebecca, and James end up the top three of the seven eliminated chefs. Joy’s veal was slightly overrested, which knocks her out. Rebecca wins for her revised seared scallop dish, edging out James. Rebecca wasn’t on the show that long, but her boasting in the confessional interviews was unbearable.

* The second part pits Rebecca against Katie and Adam in taking dry and slimy ingredients, which is based on how Katie and Adam were eliminated, to make one appealing dish. Two chefs of the three will advance. One “slimy” ingredient is miso, which is crazy-high in the glutamates that produce umami (as are many fermented foods), so I’d imagine the chefs would want to grab that right away.

* Bacalao (dried salt cod) is also on the table; can you hydrate and desalinate it that quickly? I thought soaking it in milk was an overnight process.

* Adam makes a salt-baked oyster with pickled morels, nori, and white miso glaçage. Katie made morels stuffed with pancetta and mascarpone, with a tomatillo, cranberry, and pepita salad with miso vinaigrette. Rebecca made a warm octopus and confit potato salad, toasted pepitas, and pickled onions. Tom praises all three but says Adam’s was his favorite and Rebecca’s was his least favorite, so Katie and Adam advance, and Rebecca’s “you’re in my kitchen now” speeches fall flat again. Cook more, brag less.

My Insider post on the Markakis, Torii Hunter, and Saunders/Happ deals is up, and I’ll be chatting today at 1 pm ET.

Here on the dish, I rewrote my annual gift guide for cooks from scratch this year, covering just about anything I own and find useful in the kitchen, as well as a fresh list of my favorite cookbooks.

Now, to this week’s episode … it’s Restaurant Wars! This is always the best episode. I still fondly remember the Restaurant Wars of ’09, which left four chefs and a judge dead among several other casualties.

* Barbara Lynch is in the house. She’s the queen of the Boston restaurant scene … but in all the time I lived there I don’t think I ever went to any of her restaurants. My loss, apparently.

* The chefs draw knives to see which two will get to draft the teams. Melissa and Katie make the selections, with Melissa going first. She takes Doug, a mild surprise but perhaps a reaction to Gregory scuffling last time out, after which Katie takes Gregory. Melissa takes Mei and Adam; Katie takes Katsuji and ends up with Keriann by default. Lynch: “Stay focused and less is more.” Her cliché per minute ratio is quite impressive.

* Doug volunteers to be exec chef of his team. Mei wants the job too but says “we all know women are better line cooks.” I’m just going to leave that there. Meanwhile, Adam volunteers for front of house, which makes sense because he’s second only to Katsuji in the never-shutting-up department.

* Katie volunteers to be executive chef, saying that because she owns a pop-up restaurant business she knows what’s required to get a restaurant off the ground quickly. Keriann is front of house. Katsuji says Katie’s good at … “somebody help me to fill in the blank.” Not that I thought he was any kind of gem, but Katsuji reveals himself to be a complete pig in this episode, like saying Keriann’s a good choice for front of house because of how she looks in a dress.

* Katie’s team decides to do an “international menu,” which sounds a lot like “we each want to do whatever we want to do.” Katsuji worries about cohesion on the menu, but neither he nor Gregory (who admits to playing it safe after last episode’s mistakes) puts up much of a fight here.

* The chefs go shopping for furniture, décor, and flatware … which is boring. I’m sure it matters, I know it matters if it sucks, but it’s boring to watch. Let’s cook already.

* Whole Foods has no pork shoulder. How is that possible? I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a Whole Foods that didn’t have one. And I’m pretty sure every pig has two.

* Katie’s team takes their global menu concept and names their restaurant Magellan, apparently unaware that he was hacked to death by Filipino natives before he could finish circumnavigating the globe. The name turns out to be a perfect choice for the ensuing disaster, though.

* Doug’s team calls their restaurant 4 Pigs because they found four quirky piggy banks while décor shopping. There had better be a lot of pork on the menu, right? I’d expect a restaurant with that name to serve barbecue.

* Katsuji says of Doug’s role as head chef, “good for you little thing.” Later we hear him saying, “thirty minutes left … bitches.” And when Keriann has to make her crepes ahead of time because she’ll be front of house, Katsuji says in the confessional that he could offer to make them for her, but won’t because “I only care about myself.” That’s probably the wrong way to approach a team challenge. I’m just saying.

* Doug braises his pork shoulder in PBR. Wouldn’t you want to use a good beer for that?

* Mei freezes the butter for Melissa’s biscuits with liquid nitrogen, so now my own attempts at biscuit-making seem woefully inadequate. I need to make friends with some local chemists.

* Somehow, a whole hotel pan of cleaned clam shells to be used for serving Adam’s starter has gone missing. It’s probably with the pea puree. Meanwhile, he shucks another 130-plus clams to use … but are they really tossing all that meat just to use the shells?

* Team Magellan is already on the rocks. Keriann is training the servers, Katie doesn’t like the way she’s doing it, but she won’t take charge or even speak up. Around here we call that “foreshadowing.”

* Kristen Kish and Stephanie Cmar are there … but I don’t think we get more than two or three words total out of them the whole episode. That seems like a waste, since Kristen actually won her season and Stephanie was extremely funny in hers.

* I admit I had to look this up, but in the argot of the kitchen “all day” means “in total.”

* The server at 4 Pigs didn’t recognize the judges. Really, Padma Lakshmi walks in and you’re like, “oh, there’s an attractive woman I’ve never seen on my television a hundred times?”

* The food starts coming out, finally, with 4 Pigs serving first. Adam’s starter is salt-baked clams with ramps, bacon, and sunflower seeds. Mei’s is chicken liver toast with plum puree. Tom thought Adam’s was a little dense but otherwise strong. Mei’s is good, with some comps to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (attention Ken Tremendous), which I think may have been the idea – it’s the same concept of a smooth, savory spread with a sweet-tart complement.

* Magellan, meanwhile, is racked with service problems, with dishes going to the wrong tables, servers not knowing the table numbers, and the kitchen badly backed up. Gregory says there’s “no sense of unison” between the front of the house with the back – but he doesn’t speak up either. No one on this team seems to be willing to say anything to anyone else that might seem like taking charge. Katie at least goes to the front of house to try to clear it up, going right to the servers to try to troubleshoot – but really, at this point they’ve taken on too much water to save the ship.

* Doug’s braised pork comes with baked beans, pickled red onions, pickled mustard seeds. So it’s basically a grown-up pork and beans dish, and everyone loves it. Melissa serves seared scallops with radish salad and grapefruit. But the scallop is way too salty and Padma’s face does that thing that cartoon characters used to do when they would accidentally eat alum. Mei’s second dish is fried Brussels sprouts with an anchovy vinaigrette. The judges seem to be picking apart some of the details – maybe a little too much acid – but I just think that’s a dish I’ve seen on lots of menus in the last two years.

* Mei compliments Doug on his expediting skills. Every season one of these restaurants hums and one is a dumpster fire. That may just have been evident a little earlier than normal this year.

* Melissa’s dessert looks unreal – buttermilk biscuit cobbler with apples, mixed berries, and cardamom cream. That is fall in New England all the way. Did Magellan serve a single dish that was really creative, though?

* Back to the circus, Keriann seems to pin the blame for all the trouble on the kitchen. Stephanie Cmar gets some screen time, but it’s just her looking miserable. Meanwhile the judges are left waiting out front because Keriann is busy putting out fires, which always goes over well with Padma.

* The next disaster – I know it’s hard to keep count – comes when Katsuji tries to plate Keriann’s dessert, but finds the banana mousse unspreadable. Gregory and Katsuji do chip in here with ideas to fix it, so there did come a point where they abandoned their me-first stances this episode. Ultimately, Katie takes Gregory’s suggestion to warm the dish up and has Katsuji reheat the crepes in a skillet over simmering water while they also warm the mousse.

* The edit was a little jagged, but we see Katie being completely indecisive between Katsuji and Keriann when debating how much food to send out to the judges at once. You can’t be a leader of any team, even one of four people, if you let everyone push you around, but that’s what happens here – she accedes to any argument she’s given.

* Katie’s starter is roasted beets with Sri Lankan curry, toasted coconut, and pickled cauliflower. The judges all agree that nothing worked together – and you can even see it on the plate. I’m also not sure I’ve ever had a good beet dish without some kind of citrus involved. Katsuji’s hamachi sashimi with roasted poblano, blistered tomato, garlic chips, and citrus-habanero (there’s no tilde over the n, Keriann) salsa seems to just not be awful, while his dry “posole” with chilis, dungeness crab, and chicharrones at least gets points for a creative concept.

* Gregory’s seared haddock with spiced tomato, garam masala, and pickled mushrooms is cooked well, but Tom says should have stopped at fish and tomato. Has Mos Chef hit a midseason slump?

* Gregory’s second dish is better – a hoisin-glazed pork tenderloin, with bay scallops, xo sauce, and broccolini. I just don’t get the love for pork tenderloin. I do eat it, but it’s among the least interesting cuts of pig for both flavor and texture, and the shape means you’ll never really get the whole piece to cook consistently.

* Meanwhile, the grey team barely breaks a sweat as they finish their service. I’m not surprised by Doug, Melissa, and Mei all executing and working well together, but this is two straight challenges where Adam, who was all mouth while Aaron was around, has been a consummate team player.

* Keriann discovers her dessert is hot, not cold. It’s the same components – a vanilla crepe, burnt banana mousse, macerated cherry, ginger, and pistachio – but the temperature change alters the whole dish. There’s no color on the crepes, which is also odd, because color means flavor. Barbara says “you could play hockey with this.”

* Keriann is furious and tries to confront Katie, but Katie just wilts and avoids eye contact. Katsuji, of course, can’t redirect the blame to Katie fast enough.

* 4 Pigs faces the judges first for an entirely positive review – even Melissa’s scallop dish, which may have been their only subpar offering, doesn’t earn a mention. Tom basically says he likes things that are great and good things are fantastic.

* Magellan, on the other hand, might as well have left judges’ table in flames. Tom just starts with two words: “Rough service?” Katie nods and you can see everyone hanging their heads. Padma asks where Keriann was all night because she didn’t see her enough on the floor. Keriann is answering all of the questions, not Katie, even when the latter clearly should be answering if only to say she abdicated her responsibilities. Her beet dish never came together. Keriann’s crepes were soggy, which prompts her to explain that that wasn’t her original dish. Katsuji drops his new catchphrase, “it’s not my call,” at which point Katie at least makes an actual statement, saying “this was not mousse in my opinion.” She didn’t call Keriann for a consult, and Keriann didn’t run back to demand they fix it.

* Keriann didn’t train the staff well, showed no sense of urgency, and her dish was hijacked. Katie tried to fix a bad dish, didn’t hold the team together, wasn’t a leader, and was in over her head. Barbara Lynch just says, “I had a problem with her,” without really elaborating, but it seems like she’s just angry to see a leader fail to lead.

* 4 Pigs win, and the individual winner is Doug for his dish and running the team well. There isn’t much surprising there – Adam could have won for front-of-house service, but usually it’s the team leaders who win or face elimination in Restaurant Wars.

* Magellan loses, and here’s where it gets interesting. Keriann is eliminated for failure to train the staff properly or run the front of house well, but Tom also says she had the “worst dish on the team.” Is it fair to send her home when her dish was altered without her approval, and when she wasn’t the team leader, who, by acclamation, didn’t lead and prepared just one dish that the judges also didn’t like? If front of house is a problem, isn’t the responsibility shared between Keriann and the chef who was, for the purposes of the challenge, her boss? I thought Keriann was the weakest contestant remaining, but based on what we saw on the episode and the history of Restaurant Wars challenges, the decision to send her home rather than Katie seems inapt

* Rankings: Gregory, Mei, Doug, Melissa, Adam, Katsuji, Katie. That top three seems pretty solid at this point. Next week we get both the return of Last Chance Kitchen and the possibility of the return of a previously-eliminated chef (anyone but Aaron, please).

Klawchat today at 1 pm ET.

* Everyone is glad that Aaron’s gone. That’s before he was arrested, too. But the entire episode feels different without him around – there’s no bickering, no obvious conflicts, no enmity among the chefs still there. I’m sure eventually that will pop back up, but it was a clear shift in tone even if it’s a temporary one. At some point someone will tell Katsuji to shut the hell up, I’m sure.

* Adam says he’s concerned about Dougie, Melissa, Gregory, and Mei as his main competition, which sounds about right. He also calls Katsuji “a mess in a dress,” which I don’t understand.

* Melissa talks about her girlfriend back home, and the love/support notes she gave her before the show. So Melissa is Asian and gay … am I wrong to think that was probably not an easy childhood? It seems like a disproportionate percentage of Asian-American contestants on both Top Chef and Project Runway share a story of parental disappointment at their career choices. (That could be producer selection bias, I suppose.)

* Tiffani Faison from season one walks into their condo. (There’s a great profile of her from a recent issue of Boston magazine.) I had no idea she had a Texas-style Q joint in Boston, called Sweet Cheeks BBQ. Have any of you been? Texas Q ain’t nothing to fuck with. It had better be good.

* So they drag all the chefs down to a cranberry bog, probably down by Lakeville towards the Cape. The quickfire challenge is going to involve cranberries, and the sponsor/partner is Ocean Spray … and maybe for the first time ever, I’m completely on board with a product placement on this show. Ocean Spray is a cooperative, owned by its farmers, which has its own challenges – during my brief tenure in consulting right out of college, they were a client of my employer and I was on that case for about two months – but at least means the people doing the actual growing are able to reap the rewards of their work. I still think there’s a lot of untapped potential in the firm and the product, even now about twenty years later; people just don’t know what to do with cranberries because you can’t eat them raw (hot cranberries > raw cranberries, Ken), so you have to educate the consumers with products. Why not cranberry yogurts? Ice creams? Jams or preserves? That would have made a great challenge for the show, now that I think about it. But I digress.

* So we see a bog that’s been flooded for the harvest; the chefs have to put on waders and run back and forth to gather the berries (about six million floating in a closed loop on the surface), and the first four to fill their buckets get an advantage in the next challenge. I’m not a fan of challenges on this show that reward size or athleticism, which doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with cooking.

* Mei is 5’2″ and can’t swim. It’s not that deep, but I can understand her fear of the water if she can’t swim. We more or less forced our daughter to learn with lessons at age four, right when we moved to Arizona, because we viewed it as an essential life skill, especially in a state where every other house has a pool. You just have to know how to swim, right? I’m not winning any relays for my team out there, but I do know how to swim from A to B.

* So it turns out that Katie is a great athlete; apparently cooking was a way for her to move to Lake Tahoe and ski all the time. She wins the challenge, but after her it’s three boys – Adam, Gregory, and Doug. Meanwhile, Katsuji is mugging for the cameras, rolling around on the ground like he needs CPR.

* The actual Quickfire challenge is to create a dish that highlights the “unique flavor of the cranberry.” The top four harvesters get to use the high-end pantry, with better proteins, fresh herbs, and produce; the rest are much more limited by the low-end pantry. Fresh cranberries, dried (and sweetened) cranberries, and juices are available for all nine chefs. The winner gets immunity.

* Doug grabs pork tenderloin; isn’t that kind of a boring cut? It’s lean and pretty one-note, especially if you don’t have time to brine it.

* Katie is doing a cranberry borscht, a dish that’s typically sour anyway due to the use of vinegar. Doug thinks it’s a terrible idea, except he chose pork tenderloin, so maybe I’m not going to worry about what he says this time.

* Stacy explains away the low-end/high-end pantry difference by saying that if you’re a chef, “you should be able to work with anything at all.” That’s true, but if your ingredients are better, won’t your dish taste better?

* Katsuji is using skirt steak for tartare. Is this just a case of not knowing your ingredients? That’s a very tough cut with long muscle fibers, and needs to be cooked very very quickly over high heat to be chewable. There’s a reason it’s one of the cheapest cuts of cow at the butcher counter. I really like it, but only, you know, cooked.

* Adam made a bourbon and cranberry sauce-glazed strip steak with cranberry-infused mushroom fricasee. He lost the liquid he was going to use for a couscous element, and chefsplains it to Padma and Tiffani, who tells him not to talk about the mistakes like that. Gregory serves an Arctic char (a salmon-like fish) with sweet and sour cranberry sauce, trumpet mushrooms, and fresh pear. Keriann serves a carrot soup with cranberry and crab; that doesn’t sound remotely appealing to me, three ingredients that probably shouldn’t even appear in any combination of two. Doug does a bourbon and cranberry-glazed pork tenderloin, crisped Brussels sprouts, and cranberry mustard. Tiffani says it “tastes like fall in New England,” but neither she nor Padma have any praise at all for the pork, just everything around it.

* Melissa serves fried turkey with apple butter, cranberry compote, pecans, and fried sage. Katie’s borscht comes with creme fraiche, charred Brussels sprouts, and pancetta. I don’t think I’ve ever had real borscht, btu I love beets, and everything about her dish sounds fantastic – beets need acidity to balance their sweetness, and they play well with all kinds of fruits. I love a beet salad with orange supremes and a citrusy dressing. Katsuji’s steak tartare with chile de arbol mayo, olives, and cranberry hot sauce presents some mastication problems for the judges. Stacy made a curried cauliflower soup with a smoky pepper cranberry relish, but gets dinged for having too little sugar with the berries. Mei serves a sweet and sour pork with pickled mustard seed and apple salad. She’s unconcerned about the low-end pantry problem: “my fucking dish was great.” I don’t doubt it. And if I did, I wouldn’t tell her, 5’2” or not.

* So one more thought on cranberries: They’re too astringent to eat raw (just try it), but are high in pectins, which means they form a gel easy in the presence of heat and sugar; and in tannins, which are very bitter on their own and may interfere with some nutrient absorption (mostly proteins, which their structure of three to five carbon rings allows them to hold together in pairs) in the human GI tract. Tannins are what create that unpleasantly dry sensation in your mouth after you drink red wine or black tea. In On Food and Cooking, which every home cook should own, Harold McGee suggests sugar as a cover for the astringency of tannins; adding milk, gelatin, or another protein to keep the tanning busy so they don’t suck up the proteins in your saliva; or adding ingredients rich in pectins, gums, fats, or other oils to “take some tannins out of circulation” or slow their binding to proteins. That’s why cranberry sauce, which is high in sugar and gets those pectins active, isn’t astringent while the raw fruits are.

* The worst dishes were Katsuji’s because they couldn’t chew it; Adam’s, because he practically told them to hate his dish; and Stacy’s, whose soup was underseasoned and clunky to eat. The best dishes were Doug’s, a great fall dish that didn’t really push the boundaries on the key ingredient; Katie’s borscht is hard, which did push the envelope, swapping cranberries in for one of the signature ingredients in the dish; and Mei’s, which was complex and elegant. The judges didn’t specifically say that Mei’s “fucking dish was great,” but I think we know that’s what they were thinking.

* Katie wins, however, for her creativity, and gets immunity. Given the elimination challenge, that’s probably a big deal this time around.

* That elimination challenge: Cook an authentic Thanksgiving meal, historically accurate from ingredients to cooking implements, at Plimouth Plantation. They’re working as one giant group to make a traditional feast, and are only told up from that they’ll be limited to native ingredients and what the colonists brought with them. I *love* this – no gimmicks, no truffles or bacon or fish sauce or liquid aminos or whatever, no mounting everything with a stick of butter or a cup of cream. It’s as honest as food gets. Although I did wonder one thing: Did colonists bring salt and spices? The second Anglo-Dutch war in the East Indies didn’t occur until about forty years after the Mayflower reached what is now Massachusetts; at the time the ship left England, Banda/Run was still under British control, I think, so they should have had access to some of the spices from that region, notably black pepper and nutmeg.

* The diners will include James Beard winner Ken Oringer (of Toro, Clio, and La Verdad, the last one a taqueria right behind Fenway that I recommend for a pregame meal); members of the two Wampanoag tribes; and descendants of pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower.

* Gregory refers to Doug as “a little guy, very cute and a little fuzzy.” So he’s a Muppet? Or maybe a chinchilla? It sounds like he needs his own chew toy.

* The chefs arrive to find a lot of squash, legumes, and shellfish, tons of duck fat, and several containers of goat’s milk. There’s a fair amount of land-animal protein available, but it’s less traditional meats – venison, goose, and rabbit in particular. There’s one hearth with a pot, fire pits, and a lot of cast iron cookware. Adam and Doug are all over the spit-roasting set – Adam mentions catching and cooking with the drippings, which is both historically accurate and delicious. There’s a new Adam in this episode; he’s all camaraderie and teamwork this week, so maybe all he needed was for A-A-Ron to be gone. I don’t even think Adam told us where he was from in this episode.

* Gregory is going to cook the goose. I know there’s a huge layer of fat under the skin, but he says the meat itself is leaner than turkey meat. I had no idea, although I guess duck dries out pretty quickly (you can’t cook duck breast past medium or it’s a brick) so this makes sense.

* Doug is spear-roasting the rabbit, and wants the meat to spoon-ready because there are no forks for the diners. That’s thoughtful, though I imagine the pilgrims and their Wampanoag hosts weren’t squeamish about using their hands to eat.

* Katie is making a stuffing with lobster, walnuts, cranberries, and pickled blueberries. She’s taking a “big big leap” due to immunity. I can’t even imagine what this is going to taste like. I don’t really like fruity stuffings. That just sounds wrong.

* Melissa is just making a vegetable side dish because everyone else is cooking proteins. She says she’s showing off her execution and knife skills, but is that really what carries you once you’re halfway through the season?

* Mei is making a trout vinaigrette for cabbage she’s roasting with duck fat. I love this and want to try it immediately.

* Keriann was going to make a blueberry pie, but scraps it because the dough won’t stay cold, instead switching to venison and repurposing her filling, which at least she hadn’t sugared yet.

* I may have missed it, but I don’t think anyone at the table referred to the Wampanoags as “redskins.” It seems like such an easy way to honor them, too.

* Anyone else dig all the earrings Philip Wynne, one of the Wampanoag members at the table, was wearing? I might draw the line at the ring through the septum, though. I think I’d always feel like I have to sneeze.

* The dishes: Doug’s spit-roasted rabbit with garlic, ramps, hazelnuts, chestnut, and radishes required no forks, but the Wampanoags say they usually serve rabbit whole and just tear it apart at the table. The spit-roasting flavor is a winner, though. Katsuji served roasted pumpkin (or butternut squash?) with poached lobster, chestnuts, and ancho chile butter. That sounds amazing, but half the diners at my house next week wouldn’t touch it. Another of the Wampanoags says that they usually use lobster as bait to catch fish, not as food for themselves. Stacy’s ramp-smoked clams with butternut squash, roasted lobster, sesame seeds, and fresh ramps has some flavor that Gail and Padma in particular don’t like, although Tom praises her for finally “dirtying up” her food. She plated on the ground, though, which seems a little unsanitary. You can take the authenticity thing too far. Melissa’s roasted vegetable medley included parsnips, green beans, zucchini, and charred ramps with a vinaigrette. All four good but I’m not hearing a lot of praise for Melissa’s

* Tom mentions how, as a kid, his family’s Italian-American Thanksgiving always started with lasagna. It was the same in my house – often baked ziti rather than lasagna, but the same idea. And no one was really that hungry afterwards. We haven’t continued that tradition in my house, because no one can feel good after eating all of that.

* Doug steps in to help Gregory finish the goose, in part because they’re buds from PDX, but also because he loves that Gregory insisted on getting a bird on the table. It’s more of the camaraderie I mentioned above – it’s like Bizarro Top Chef where everyone gets along.

* Adam does a twist on succotash, with beans, corn, summer squash, wilted spinach, and spiced goat milk. Several of the Wampanoags say they love it, particularly as a twist on a dish (succotash) that’s very traditional for them. Katie’s blueberry stuffing with blue-cornmeal cornbread and sauteed lobster is a huge hit after all.. Gail says it’s “wacky-looking” (is that like crazy business?) but they all love it. Mei’s duck fat-roasted cabbage with trout vinaigrette also goes over well; she usually uses anchovy for salinity in the dressing, but Ken says the vinegar “just pops.” Is it just me, or are we seeing more vinaigrettes than ever this season? Gregory’s roasted goose, goose thigh confit with herbs, green beans, and gingered onions was just fair, as the confit wasn’t tender enough. Keriann’s seared venison loin with blueberry compote and buttered/herbed hazelnuts seems to have fared well, so her choice to switch worked out. Nobody really did poorly; Tom says, “There’s not a bad dish on the table.”

* Adam says to the group that “us nine absolutely nailed this as a team.” No true New Yorker would ever say anything so sappy. Come on, man.

* Padma’s favorite was Mei’s cabbage. Gail’s favorite was Doug’s. Padma also liked Katsuji’s squash. Tom loved it – calling it “sticky, gooey, savory.” He also loved Katie’s stuffing, although he says it didn’t need the lobster.

* Melissa’s vegetable medley was light on flavor. Ken questions her choice of dish; with two plus hours to cook on open fires, this is what you do? Gregory’s confit was a little dry and rough. Keriann’s blueberry sauce was too sweet on its own. Stacy’s stuffing upstaged the clams, but more importantly, it had that flavor a few people didn’t like. Tom kind of sounds bummed that they’ll have to send someone home for a dish that was only a little flawed, rather than an easy call on an outright failure.

* Doug, Katsuji, Mei are the top three. Katsuji produced intense flavor with just a few simple ingredients. Doug’s rabbit was successful because of the flavor of the wood-fired meat. Mei’s cabbage had crunch, smoky flavor, and a “pure comfort food” feel even though I at least don’t think of cabbage as comfort food. Katsuji wins, although it’s just bragging rights.

* Stacy, Melissa, and Gregory on the bottom. Padma pauses before saying Gregory’s name, but I can’t imagine anyone was surprised. Ken compliments Gregory’s cojones; Gregory said tradition made it important to get a bird on the table. Chefs rarely get sent home for taking too much of a risk, at least not this early in the competition. Stacy’s had a flavor that turned the judges off, and someone speculates that it might have been dirt from her plating.

* Stacy goes. Tom says her dish was very tasty, just the least favorite of a good group. She was probably the weakest competitor left anyway.

* Quick ranking, top to bottom: Gregory, Mei, Doug, Melissa, Adam, Katsuji, Katie, Keriann. Melissa’s been more potential than production, though.

* Next episode: Restaurant Wars! And Last Chance Kitchen is coming back! I believe we’re off next week, so my next recap will be the Thursday after Thanksgiving.

The elephant in the room right now is the fact that Aaron, the villain on the show, was arrested last week for allegedly shoving his girlfriend, after which his employer tweeted that he no longer worked for them. Hating the guy in the context of the show is one thing, but if he did indeed assault his girlfriend, then this is no longer a laughing matter.

* Quickfire: Jamie Bissonnette of Coppa/Toro is in the house. I don’t know him directly, but I’m a big fan of his work – the meatballs with lardo at Coppa might be the single best thing I’ve ever eaten – and we have a few friends in common. He’s all punk rock on Twitter but it turns out he cleans up OK, wearing a suit and sporting a crisp haircut.

* It’s the Reynolds challenge, so the chefs have to cook using various Reynolds products, although at least this time they didn’t waste a few hundred pounds of foil wrapping up the entire kitchen. Bissonnette says they use foil in his kitchens to diffuse heat for hot- and cold-smoking. The chefs get paired up for head-to-head battles; the first chef picks the opponent, the opponent picks one of the available cooking methods.

* Katsuji picks Aaron; Aaron chooses smoked salmon for their battle. Doug picks Adam, who chooses steamed mussels. Keriann picks Stacy, who chooses trout en papillote. Melissa picks Katie, who chooses smoked BBQ (note: if it’s not smoked, it’s not BBQ). Mei draws Gregory by default, and he chooses steamed dumplings, saying he believes his will have much more flavor than hers even though she’s been making dumplings since she was about seven.

* Keriann talks about how cooking in parchment means praying the fish cooks in time. She doesn’t mention how cooking in parchment produces the blandest-tasting fish imaginable. I love fish, but if you’re going to cook it, you need the Maillard reactions from direct heat, or else you might as well have let it go spawn.

* Gregory serves steamed shrimp dumplings with ginger and herbs, but no dipping sauce. Mei serves pork dumplings with black vinegar, of which Padma is a big fan.

* Katie serves grilled chicken breast with pine nuts cooked in the style of baked beans, while Melissa serves a smoked and seared scallop with charred corn, smoked bacon, and grilled fennel.

* Katsuji, who wants to show Aaron how a real chef acts (if he only knew), serves a sake-infused chipotle broth with smoked jalapenos and salmon. Aaron serves a “lightly smoked” (that’s a tipoff) wild salmon with tarragon creme fraiche and pickled shallot. He says he “brined” the salmon for five minutes. Why not just show it some pictures of salt instead?

* Keriann serves trout with white wine butter sauce, fennel, serrano, bell pepper, and shallot – so, a ton of aromatics to make up for the total lack of flavor you get in the parchment. Stacy serves her trout with heirloom tomatoes, basil, onions, and spinach.

* Doug serves steamed mussels in orange/saffron butter with lemon preserve and roasted sweet red peppers. Adam serves his mussels with vadouvan (a curry-like spice mix), fresno chili broth, apples, and toasted pepitas. Adam is being a total dick to Doug in front of the judges, going past chest-thumping to flat-out insulting him. So you’re a New Yorker; that doesn’t justify being an asshole right before the two people who decide your fate and your opponent’s.

* Judging: Aaron’s salmon didn’t have enough smoke flavor (shocker), so Katsuji wins. Doug did a better job cooking his mussels, while Adam’s pepitas “really sung,” but Doug wins. Keriann’s trout had more texture and flavor, with more balance in the dish, so she beats Stacy. Katie scores the upset win over Melissa, as Jamie loved the pine nuts cooked down like beans. In the dumpling battle, Gregory wins, and Mei looks really upset. That might be your finals preview right there – or at least the one I’d choose to see at this point.

* The overall winner is … Gregory, of course, winning a $10K prize as well. He’s going Full Qui on this season. Jamie says, “If you had a New York City dumpling truck, there’d be a line around the block.” I’ll pay someone to stand in line for me, cronut-style.

* Elimination challenge: The chefs split into two teams, the winners on one team (blue) versus the losers (red) from the quickfire. The winning team will be safe from elimination. Teams offer up one chef for each challenge, but we end up with a lot of rematches because the chefs hear “strategy” and think “revenge,” at which point everything should be served cold, right?

* First battle: Adam vs Doug for a rematch. Adam bullies his way to that spot. Second: Katsuji vs Melissa. Third: Gregory vs Mei. Fourth: Keriann vs Stacy. Fifth: Aaron vs Katie. Aaron’s mad because he didn’t get to face Katsuji again and I think he feels like he was relegated to the last spot (which he was). Chefs say they don’t come on this show to make friends, but playing a little bit well with others has its advantages.

* The big twist: Each team has $1000 total to spend to serve 100 guests the next day at the Watertown Arsenal, so that’s $2 per plate. How do you economize for this? My first two thoughts were to avoid meat or fish, and to avoid pricier flavoring agents like Parmiggiano-Reggiano (which brings salt and umami but can easily run to $20/pound).

* Gregory is buying fresh turmeric (he says “toomeric,” like most people, but there’s an “r” in that first syllable). Have you ever seen fresh turmeric? It looks like giant maggots. I’ll buy mine powdered, thanks.

* Katsuji is putting charred cauliflower in the tostada. That cooks the exterior, but won’t it be raw inside? When I cook cauliflower by roasting it, it takes an hour-plus to cook through as a whole head and at least a half-hour as florets, and I have to work to prevent the exterior from burning before the interior softens.

* Melissa is having problem the texture of her gazpacho, and I believe this is what we refer to around here as “foreshadowing.”

* Gregory says Adam “just loves to talk shit.” Truer words were never spoken.

* Aaron’s pot of dashi broth ends up on the ground somehow. Mei, an actual team player, lends him “instant dashi mix” so that he’ll have some moisture in his meatball/noodle dish, but says it won’t be the same for flavor. That’s a lousy break for Aaron, but given what we know now, I couldn’t muster a lot of sympathy – I just want him off the show.

* Hugh’s back, always a win for the viewers. He was in rare form with the quips this week, asking Jamie if he brought a musket to the Watertown Arsenal, informing everyone that “you can open carry a musket in most southern states.”

* Adam says “it’s gonna be a bloodbath out there.” I get it, we do violent metaphors in sports too, but unless you’re making black pudding, that’s a bit much.

* The dishes: Doug serves beef tartare with ginger aioli, radish, chili oil, and cilantro. Tom says the “meat could be a little more seasoned,” which seems like a death knell for a raw beef dish. Adam made salt and pepper grits with cheddar cheese, a poached egg, and bacon and onion jam. Hugh, saying he’s had a lot of crappy grits on Top Chef, points out that “those are not crappy grits.” Adam wins unanimously.

* Doug says in the confessional that “I don’t know who won the battle of Lexington and Concord” but guessing it was the U.S., saying, “Go ‘Murica.” Gotta love the state of education in our country.

* Katsuji made a tostada with charred cauliflower, goat cheese, olives, dates, and a tomato and chili sauce. The judges say it was a little rich with the oil and the fat of the cheese, but it had a good texture and the cauliflower was cooked well (so I missed something in that process). Melissa’s chilled white gazpacho with cucumbers, mint, green grapes, and marcona almonds was, as expected, thin and watery. Katsuji wins 3/4, with Padma the dissenting vote.

* Katsuji said a few times there that he was having a panic attack … if he was, and I don’t mean to doubt him, I wish he’d gotten to explain more about what he was feeling.

* Tom says something very dismissive to Padma about this dish; did anyone catch it? I rewound a few times but couldn’t hear his words. His facial expression said a lot, though.

* The third battle is Gregory versus Mei again, and unsurprisingly, they both nailed their dishes. Gregory made shiitake mushrooms in a coconut milk-curry broth with turmeric and fresh dill; Jamie says it’s great Thai food for hot weather. It’s pretty weird to our palates here to have a hot dish in hot weather, but in Asia it seems like it’s quite common. Mei makes a quick kimchi with a New York strip loin and scallion salad; her beef was perfectly cooked and Tom loves the kimchi. But Gregory still wins the battle.

* Tom praises Gregory effusively, saying “he has a way of balancing a lot of different things … all of these aromatics that just … perfectly go together.” That might be some foreshadowing for the season finale.

* Keriann serves an herbed meatball with red onion jam, ginger mustard, and port reduction. Padma loves the jam, but Tom looks like he wants to reach for the ipecac. Stacy served marinated beets with pecan sage yogurt, horseradish brittle, and fresh horseradish. The judges say the beets were well cooked but the yogurt was bland, and I just don’t see going to battle (pun intended) with roasted beets – shouldn’t there be a LOT more to this dish? I feel like I’ve had more ornate beet dishes at a dozen restaurants. Stacy runs the table, though, because Keriann’s dish just sucked. The producers get what they wanted, though: A deciding fifth head-to-head.

* Tom says, “the war always comes down to the last battle.” Well, except for the War of 1812.

* Aaron serves an Asian pork meatball with scallop noodles, but he’s too clever by half as there’s no texture in the noodles – plus he did something similar in the elimination quickfire challenge against Katie. He admits the dashi disaster, but I don’t think he buys himself anything with his honesty. Katie takes a risk by making dessert, making an imperial stout chocolate cake with pomegranate molasses-macerated strawberries, smoked sour cream, and basil pink peppercorn oil. Hugh says the cake is classic and good but “not that exciting.”

* Aaron’s comments about dessert being a “copout” get him some flak from the judges, and when he says he can’t see going to war with chocolate cake, Hugh asks if he could imagine going to war with scallop noodles … Aaron can’t take it as well as he can dish it out, apparently.

* Katie wins unanimously, so the blue team takes the title, and one of the red team is going home. Mei and Adam should be safe. Stacy won her challenge, so if that’s enough to save her, it’s Aaron or Melissa. There’s no question whom I’d like to see sent home, but watery gazpacho isn’t helping anyone’s cause here. Jamie says he would have flunked Melissa’s gazpacho in a home economics class; do they actually still teach home ec in schools? I got a bad grade on one home ec test because the teacher insisted that peanuts were a “meat” (because they contained protein), but I refused to put the wrong answer and wrote they were legumes. Fight the power, folks.

* One interesting note from judges’ table: When the judges ask Adam and Mei if they ever thought to dissuade Aaron from trying a dish so ambitious he might not execute it, Gregory speaks up from the sidelines, saying “I would never have allowed that (the scallop noodles) to happen.” He didn’t deliver it in a condescending tone – although you could argue saying anything at all was out of line – but that just made it even more incisive to me. That did have the benefit of shutting Adam up for the first time all season.

* Aaron is eliminated. That’s fortunate for all concerned at this point, even though this was filmed months ago. He says a lot of the right things on the way out, with a few excuses thrown in. I might have been sympathetic, given what he’s told us about his childhood, before his recent arrest, but now I’m just glad he’s off the show. Melissa skated on a pretty bad dish, though, and Keriann might have been bounced if her team had lost.

* Rankings: Gregory, Mei, Doug, Adam, Melissa, Katie, Katsuji, Keriann, Stacy. There’s a big gap after Mei, and it’s starting to look like there’s a big gap after Katsuji, too.

Just a reminder that I’m on vacation this week, so I’ll be sparse on social media and not reacting to anything that happens in MLB. I’ve filed all of the buyers’ guides already, so they’ll continue to appear for Insiders. Today’s was on outfielders.

Those of you who’ve argued that this isn’t a great group of chefs got some validation in this episode; it wasn’t a terribly inspiring collection of dishes overall, light on creativity in particular even for chefs who nailed the execution. Meanwhile, we see that Keriann misses her family (don’t they all?) and Aaron is complaining about Katsuji trying to get in everyone’s head (I think he just talks a lot, with no real aim in mind, which makes him rather well qualified to deliver hot sports takes too).

* The quickfire takes place at Cheers! Lame. Mediocre show that somehow has glommed on to the identity of Boston without anything particularly Boston about it.

* Guest judge is … George Wendt. Even more lame. He was disappointingly unfunny here and didn’t seem to offer much food knowledge. Maybe the producers really wanted Hugh Laurie but just asked for the star of House.

* Quickfire: By law in Boston all bars must serve food. So a bitters bar like Sother Teague’s Amor y Amargo in Manhattan couldn’t exist? Also lame. I love a lot of things about Boston, but the state’s puritanical attitude to alcohol ain’t one of them. (And the way local retailers can dance around the three-store limit but Trader Joes can’t is downright corrupt.) The challenge is to make a bar snack in thirty minutes, with the winner getting immunity.

* Katie wants to make pickled cheese curds. How do you “pickle” anything in 30 minutes? In thirty minutes, all you can do is marinate it. That’s all. Stop calling it a fucking pickle just because you stuck it in acid.

* The real buzzword of this season is “spin.” Every plate is a “spin” on something else. Or maybe they’re just providing “spin” to the judges.

* Aaron is making a peanut butter and mayo burger, which a friend made for him once. He admits it sounds gross but says it tastes great. It does sound gross, but I imagine the heat of the burger makes the peanut butter into a rich sauce … I still wouldn’t do it, but I can’t knock it since I haven’t eaten it.

* Rebecca didn’t put enough glaze on her chicken wings. This might have made more sense if we’d seen more of her cooking – the editing of the quickfire this week really left us without much context.

* Aaron’s burger also has caramel bacon and a fried egg. That had to be an absolute mess to eat – the juices from the burger mixing with mayo, the runny egg yolk, and the liquid peanut butter. Katie fried cheese curds (beer-battered) with lemon and lime zest and fried olives. Stacy did an arugula pesto with prosciutto chips, balsamic tomato jam, and burrata as a spin on a BLT. Rebecca’s wings with spicy ponzu glaze didn’t have enough sauce. Keriann’s beer-battered onion rings were topped with crab salad and spicy hollandaise. Once again, she’s talking about her dish too much – spinning it instead of just letting the food talk. Wendt is “a sucker for crab meat.” That’s #analysis.

* Mos Chef has his first real stumble when all of the stuff on one of his burgers falls off the plate as he walks out to serve it. Pro tip: Try a toothpick next time. Or some epoxy.

* Adam made black bean chilaquiles with fried egg and avocado; probably not Boston bar food, but actually that and a brown ale sounds pretty good to me. Mei made fried chicken wings with lime-chili vinaigrette and pickles, probably the most appetizing thing I saw in this challenge. James made pickled and grilled carrots with red bean puree. How is that bar food? It’s rabbit food. Do rabbits go to bars? Can you ferment carrot juice? Maybe that’s what the White Rabbit was really getting high on. Katsuji made a mahi mahi and tuna ceviche with roasted tomato and jalapeno salsa. Now that is bar food – eat it with a salty tortilla chip, so the salt and acid make that beer taste even better.

* Down: Mos Chef, although Wendt says “Woody’s a vegan anyway.” James, because it didn’t feel like bar food. Up: Katsuji’s was creative and “yummy” (#analysis), and Keriann’s because it had crab meat. Winner … Katsuji, who, given how he’s performed to date, might need that immunity for his next twenty-ingredient special.

* Elimination challenge: Chef Michael Schlow of Via Matta is on hand, and the chefs will cook at Via Matta for sixty diners, working in teams of three to prepare a three-course Italian menu, which Padma calls “antipasta, pasti, and secondi.” I’m pretty sure that second course is “primi,” meaning first – antipasto means before the meal, then you have the first course (pasta or another starch, typically) and the second (protein). Diners will pick from the four menus, and the team whose menu is ordered the most wins the challenge; the others are up for what will be a double elimination.

* The chefs make their own teams, which can be a little awkward for chefs who don’t get “picked.” Adam, Doug, and Mei teamed up together fast, which says a little something about the mutual respect there, especially since we know Mei is very sharp. Mos Chef ends up with Katsuji and Aaron, who’ve already fought once, which means he’ll be playing traffic cop more than he should have to.

* Katsuji says they should use “macerated” on the menu instead of “marinated” because there’s no difference, which isn’t true. You macerate a fruit; you marinate anything else. So they’re right to say “macerated” peaches, even if it means no one will understand it. (At the table, Tom jokes that it looks like “masticated.” No, Tom, I don’t think that’s the word people will see when they misread it.)

* Melissa, James, and Keriann form the Grey team. James wants to cook lamb, but one or both of the women says not to use lamb, doesn’t think it’ll sell. James is Italian and cooks Italian; he says not to go seafood-centric but is outvoted. I believe this is known as … foreshadowing.

* That is a HUGE kitchen. Given what they usually have to work with, it must feel like chef heaven.

* Aaron is arguing for space with Mei/Adam. Then he’s bickering with Katsuji. In other words, it’s a day ending in -y.

* Mei says “at work I’m actually known as the Fish Bitch.” Seems proud of this. I guess it’s okay if you want to call yourself that.

* Melissa is making fresh ravioli in two hours. Katie (on the blue team with Rebecca and Stacy) is making fresh pappardelle. Is the challenge here the rolling and cutting? It doesn’t take that long to make the dough and rest it, and it cooks in two minutes, so I can only assume the difficulty is in rolling out the sheets and cutting or shaping it.

* Stacy discusses the difference between serving whole steak pieces versus slicing it before serving. Slicing means you can pick out fatty/gristly pieces, but she doesn’t say that it cools off much faster that way.

* Schlow is expediting and has to tell Katsuji and Aaron to shut up. Mos Chef says, “I feel like a dad in the setting with my two bickering sons.” I wish we’d heard Schlow say whatever he was thinking, probably something like, “who let these two clowns in my kitchen?”

* The celebrity diner is Emmy Rossum. Blais is back too, always a good thing.

(Rossum was also recently a guest judge on Project Runway, where she seemed to have a little more insight into the content. I mention watching Runway from time to time, and usually get some troglodyte responses that the show is gay or just for women. Rossum, who is very attractive, dressed as nearly all of the starlet guest judges do, in a short skirt or dress. The host is Heidi Klum, still one of the hottest women on the planet. The models are …. you know, models. A bit tall for me, but still, models. So, hey, if you want to tell me this show isn’t for you while you sit around on Sundays and watch big sweaty men grind their bodies against each other for six hours, be my guest.)

* Blais points out that the first item on the orange team’s menu has radicchio, which is a mixed bag: “Radicchio to the general public, it’s a tough sell,” since it’s so bitter. Also, does the general public really know what it is? I don’t think I knew until I saw it on Good Eats when I was about 30. And it took me a while to figure out how to prepare it in a way I liked. (You either need to brown those bitter heads like radicchio and endive to get some sugar out, or balance it with fat and acid like a bacon vinaigrette.)

* The purple team – Mos Chef, Aaron, Katsuji – is getting a lot of early orders, Aaron credits the scallops, because it’s his dish. Cool story bro.

* Rossum is gluten-free and has been for 15 years due to celiac disease (sprue), which she explains as an “allergy” on air. It ends up a last-minute twist for the teams, each of whom had prepared a traditional primo course with pasta. Katie improvises with zucchini ribbons; Melissa does risotto, which is very traditional for a primo. Katsuji just “deconstructs” his ravioli, giving Rossum the filling and sauce but no pasta. You do have a few options if you have time – rice and corn (polenta) are obvious ones, zucchini or vegetable ribbons less obvious (although Blais has a recipe like this in Try This at Home), and if alternative flours were available you can make pastas out them. Chickpea flour works surprisingly well, and they’re quite common in southern Italian cuisine (called ceci). If they had the right pan, chefs could have prepared farinate, a crepe made with chickpea flour that is outstanding and crispy without feeling heavy. Granted, I’m thinking of this at a keyboard, not a grill station with a clock taunting me.

* Purple team is up first. Aaron serves seared scallops with macerated peaches, pickled ramps, and crispy speck. Solid reviews all around. Katsuji just does a deconstructed ravioli – without the pasta. Emmy sees it for what it is and no one is amused. The pasta dough in everyone else’s spring pea and goat cheese ravioli is very dry. Mos Chef’s secondo of peppercorn-crusted strip loin with sweet onion compote and roasted tomato, cured olives, and herbs gets raves. Don’t call it a comeback.

* Orange team (Mei, Adam, Doug) is not getting many orders. They serve the judges next.

* Blais is “anxious” for Doug now because of the radicchio. Doug’s salad comes with warm pancetta, goat cheese vinaigrette, and hazelnuts. The judges seem to like it, but “not a bad little salad” is not what you’re going for. Adam served a bay scallop with fennel linguine, and swaps out a polenta cake for Rossum (good call). The Fish Witch (can’t do it, sorry) serves a gorgeous branzino with lemon jam, salsa verde, and radish. The skin is crispy too. I want this recipe.

* Grey team is also not getting a lot of orders. “Chilled wild shrimp” is not that appetizing a description, really. James’ salad is really a chilled seafood salad with shrimp, mussels, and clams along with arugula and wild orange. Sounds boring, although I admit I’m not a big chilled seafood guy unless it’s raw fish. Melissa made a homemade spring pea ravioli with ramps and bacon-parmiggiano broth, substituting a stunning bright-green fresh pea risotto for Rossum. Keriann made a pan-seared halibut with with olive oil, potato, warm asparagus salad, and pistachios. I wonder if Melissa was dragged down by her team here, as her dish was lauded but the structure of the challenge didn’t give us much positive feedback at the end.

* Aaron is incredibly messy in the kitchen, but at least he’s pleasant to work with.

* Blue team is up. Rebecca’s scallop with “charred” fennel, orange, and arugula starter is not very creative; Blais doesn’t even like the concept, saying she didn’t understand the ingredients. Katie hand-cut pappardelle and served it with a basil-walnut pesto and confit tomatoes, swapping in those zucchini ribbons for Rossum, who loved the idea and the dish itself. I think Katie should at least get points for the most creative gluten-free solution of the four. Stacy’s ribeye with king trumpet mushrooms, asparagus, and a kalamata olive vinaigrette is kind of a disaster; the steak was sliced too thin and the vegetables were brutalized from overcooking.

* The judges’ discussion, which includes Rossum and Schlow, overall feels like they were all a little underwhelmed. Purple team: Blais liked Aaron’s scallops, and Tom did too. Padma liked everything except the pasta, which was dry. Orange: Doug’s salad was not the prettiest, but was delicious. Schlow says it would have been a “satisfying” salad if you had a large serving, but it wasn’t great. Five years ago I might have argued there was no such thing as a “satisfying” salad, but I know better now. Blais loved Adam’s pasta, which reminded him of growing up on Strong Long Island. Grey: Keriann and Melissa are safe, but James had the worst salad of anyone’s. That’s where I wanted to hear more on Melissa’s dish. Blue: Rebecca’s scallop dish was the least inspiring of all for Blais, who said it felt “totally incomplete.” Stacy’s vegetables were destroyed, although Blais liked the olive vinaigrette. That reminds me of the strangest viniagrette I’ve ever had: chicken-liver vinaigrette, at Ludivine in Oklahoma City, one of my favorite restaurants in the country. It’s a great example of something I never would have thought to make, and was even reluctant to try, but then loved once I ate. I wish I hadn’t been such a closed-minded eater for the first 25 years of my life.

* Judges’ table: Tom says he would have preferred to see teams take more risks on their menus, which was my sense just watching the dishes and descriptions, too. Italian cuisine doesn’t have to be safe or boring. The purple team wins, but Katsuji looks totally bummed, even before Tom tells him that he would have gone home if he hadn’t been safe twice over.

* Blais tells the orange team they have to work on their menu-writing skills, because they didn’t get many orders but their dishes were all good. They’re safe.

* The blue team was the judges’ least favorite – Katie, Stacy, and Rebecca. Stacy said in the kitchen she knew her vegetables were overcooked, then lies to the judges about it and says she thought they were good. Blais says “there’s a difference between standing behind a dish and being honest … the vegetables were annihilated.” Man I am I glad to see Blais call someone on that bullshit. Just tell the truth, don’t make excuses, and you won’t make them hate your dish any more than they already did.

* Rebecca’s fennel wasn’t charred and the dish reminded Blais of mediocre room service. James’ salad barely had any olive oil, but wasn’t it also just a boring salad? He talks about “team harmony,” but how does that justify a badly executed dish? Be a team player AND make a good salad.

* Rebecca and James both go home, so Stacy barely skates by. James says he should have done a “louder, more seasonally relevant dish,” so at least he’s not blaming his teammates. If you cook something great, you don’t go home, not this early.

* Power rankings: Mos Chef and the Fish Witch seem like they’re miles ahead of everyone else right now. Adam, Doug, and Melissa make up the next tier, ahead of Aaron and Keriann and Katie. Stacy and Katsuji are on the bottom, probably with Katsuji most likely to get the boot next.

My latest column for Insiders is on the Giants and Royals using the draft well, especially in the first round. I also had my weekly Klawchat.

This week’s safe word is “hammered.”

* So we start in the stew room with Aaron and Keriann still sniping at each other and Ron telling them, “don’t act like fucking children,” which, of course, makes them act more like fucking children.

* Meanwhile, we get some bio info on Aaron, saying he grew up in a broken home with no discipline, no father figure, and apparently not a very active mother since he says his sister helped raise him. That could certainly build empathy for him if he wasn’t treating half his colleagues like peons. He says, “People view me as the cocky little asshole who likes to talk shit,” without any apparent irony or self-awareness. Maybe they view you that way because that’s what you are and what you do?

* Quickfire: Ming Tsai (of Wellesley restaurant Blue Ginger) is here for another sudden death QF. It’s a tea challenge, since we’re in Boston, but Tsai reports the myth that Americans drink coffee because tea culture died after the Tea Party and the association of tea with the Brits. (It’s more likely that we became a coffee-drinking country because importing coffee from Brazil was cheaper than importing tea from China.) The challenge is to make a dish highlighting tea, where each chef is randomly assigned a type of tea, some of which turn out to be incredibly awful.

* Adam is complaining that he got monkfish cheeks because Adam snagged the yellowtail. I thought cheeks were a desirable cut of any meat or fish; shouldn’t a chef on this show be thrilled to get them?

* Rebecca tells the camera that she’s a real double threat because she can do savory dishes and pastry. That sort of bragging always ends well on this show.

* Varieties of tea include lemongrass pomegranate rooibos (a tisane, not true tea because it isn’t from the Camellia sinensis plant), white tea with strawberry, chocolate salt tea, and toasted nut oolong, alongside more traditional varieties like gen mai cha, a Japanese blend of green tea and toasted rice that is actually amazing even though it sounds so strange.

* We see some of the dishes, but not all. Melissa’s seared duck breast with tea-infused jasmine rice gets very high marks. Katsuji did a gen mai cha broth with brown rice crusted tuna. Katie made a golden honey black tea panna cotta with poached asian pear in tea and lemon, certainly among the most visually appealing dishes and easiest to understand around the use of the tea. Mos Chef does a tuna crudo with strawberry white tea and young coconut; Ming says he normally hates fruit and fish combinations, but loves this one. Ron does a tea-crusted duck breast with polenta and a chocolate-salt tea mole. Padma hates that tea (so do I – chocolate teas are gross) but likes the use in the dish. Aaron seared the monkfish … and Padma says that the fish is “hammered,” overcooked nearly to the point of inedibility. James made a crispy skin trout with quinoa cooked in tea plus a prosecco and tea buerre blanc. Rebecca made a tea-infused cake with strawberries and fresh apple; Ming says she needed more liquid to drench cake and he doesn’t taste the tea enough.

* Top three were Melissa, for the tea-infused rice; Mos Chef, for the balance of the tea and fish; and Ron, for the use of the tea in the mole. The winner is Mos Chef, thanks to the precise use of the strawberry flavors in the tea.

* The least favorites: James’s dish had too much sauce, Aaron’s fish was way overcooked, Rebecca’s didn’t have enough tea flavor. Aaron is named the worst and the crowd goes wild … or they just smirk and nod and hope this is the end of Mr. Congeniality. He picks Katie for the elimination one-on-one and proceeds to insult her in front of everyone by saying “it’s an easy choice.” Keriann points out that his bluster about cooking her “under the table” wasn’t enough for him to choose her for this battle. The challenge is to cook without any heat other than the pots of boiling water on the stove.

* Katie says Aaron is young and immature (true) and that it would be “ridiculous” to lose to him (don’t say that).

* Aaron play on a spring roll, cooking shrimp wrapper in a ziploc in the water. Katie says he’s young and immature, would be “ridiculous” to lose to him. Making pasta, cooking veg in a bag to make sauce.

* Mos Chef says “everyone is secretly rooting for Katie,” and that Aaron is kind of a loudmouth. It doesn’t seem like he wants to come out and slam the guy, which speaks well of him … but I admit I’m enjoying watching everyone turn on Aaron for being such an ass.

* Aaron makes a spring roll using pureed shrimp that he boiled in a ziploc bag as the wrapper, filled with cucumber, carrot, mint, and raw peanuts. Katie made hand-cut saffron pappardelle, smoked mozzarella, tomato sauce, and fresh cherry tomatoes. Hers needed more sauce and salt, but I think Aaron using the gimmick of the shrimp as wrapper is why he won. We knew this anyway from last week’s previews, which showed him fighting with Katsuji in the stew room.

* Elimination challenge: Cooking at Fenway Park. The chefs must choose a classic ballpark snack – peanuts, pretzels, popcorn, fried dough – as inspiration for a fine dining dish. They have three hours to prep that day and an hour to finish the next day at the park.

* The guest diners will be … Dennis Eckersley and CHB. So, a guy not particularly known for his Red Sox tenure, and a writer known for atavistic, retrogressive viewpoints that run completely counter to the entire ethic of the show. Good choices, guys. How do you not go get Pedro Martinez for this? I’d listen to Pedro comment on anything. He could be a guest judge on Project Runway and it would be entertaining.

* Baseball is dying, but it seems like half of these chefs profess to be serious baseball fans. Ron takes his son a couple of times a year. Keriann’s a fan, Stacy’s a fan, Katie’s dad (who died last year of cancer) “loved slash hated” the Twins.

* James grabbed pretzels because everyone else was grabbing peanuts. He says he doesn’t like this challenge because he doesn’t eat much junk food; his restaurant uses ingredients from farmers and foragers.

* Watching Mos Chef use the mandolin terrifies me. I own two different kinds, and I use them, but there’s no question I’m going to slice off a finger at some point with one of them. You could probably shave with that blade.

* Katie is making thick free-form creme brulee and doesn’t know if it’s set. This also appears to be … foreshadowing. Meanwhile, Doug points out in the confessional that Keriann is nuts to try to cook short ribs in under three hours. Does nobody like to use the pressure cooker any more? If I were going on Top Chef, I’d make damn sure I knew how to use a pressure cooker to make all kinds of things. You’re facing timed challenges and it’s the best time-saver in the kitchen.

* Mos Chef is doing either yoga or tai chi in the morning; he says that earlier in his career, he was using drugs and partying too much, which cost him jobs and burned a lot of bridges. When he decided to get sober, he made a plan for the person he wanted to be and made “a lot of amends” with people he’d hurt or let down in the past. I don’t mean to compare drug addiction to anxiety, but his discussion of taking control of his recovery and of his initiative in rebuilding damaged relationships certainly reminded me of my own experiences.

* Look, Fenway just isn’t that nice. It’s not. It’s cramped and old and dirty. I get the nostalgia angle, and the current ownership group has made it way better than it used to be … but it’s still a really uncomfortable place to watch a ballgame.

* The concession stand kitchen is tiny. This shouldn’t be a shock. They should see the visitor’s clubhouse; I’ve seen studio apartments bigger than that.

* Katie has soup rather than brulée, and has to call an audible, whisking it into whipped cream to make a sort of soft mousse. Aaron, meanwhile, says that, “Miss Culinary Instructor bit off more than she can chew.” As Russell from Fat Albert would say, that guy is NCAA: No class at all.

* CHB starts bloviating the moment he sits down. “It’s like a church to (Sox fans). We’re sitting in church.” No, it’s not. It’s a baseball stadium. You’re sitting on a lawn, in a baseball stadium. Maybe I went to the wrong church growing up, but I don’t remember parishioners getting hammered, grieving widows telling the priest he sucked, and fights breaking out in the pews.

* Someone says “Oh Katie” – maybe she said it herself. She’s an emotional wreck at this point.

* First group serves: Aaron made a pretzel-wrapped rillette and spring pea tendril salad. Blais loves the presentation, Tom likes the sauces and sides, but Ming said the meat was too soft and mushy. Ron made a popcorn soup (which looks thicker than day-old grits) and a breaded fish croquette, with dill pickled celery and sun gold tomatoes. Ming likes the popcorn flavor in the soup, but the consensus is that the croquette, which was supposed to symbolize the baseball itself, was too big. Katie apologies before even saying what the dish is, which is usually the worst possible strategy. Don’t ever apologize before anyone’s even had to chance to tell you your dish isn’t good. You’re just showing weakness. And as it turns out, everyone loves the dish – popcorn mousse with blue cornmeal salted shortbread and a beer molasses pomegranate something something sorghum honeycomb something. Really, I have no idea what was in that.

* Good news – Hugh is there! Him, Blais, Tom, and Padma is the Murderers’ Row of Top Chef judges’ tables.

* Eck mentions giving up Kirk Gibson’s homer as his worst moment as a player, that “no one would look at” him as he walked off the field. Padma says he “should have played for the Yankees.” Like you didn’t already have enough trouble in Boston, Padma.

* Next group: Doug did a seared scallop with grilled corn, sweet corn sauce and popcorn, and piment d’espellette. Keriann’s beer-braised short rib with horseradish parsnip puree, crispy pretzel shallot, and fondue was, in fact, undercooked, and underseasoned. I’m still flabbergasted that Blais didn’t get up and drop a pressure cooker on her head right there. Katsuji did a savory bread pudding (using the fried dough) with mushroom, bacon, and braised-then-deep fried pork belly. Blais loves the repurposing. Hugh says belly is tough and “desiccated.” Maybe Katsuji shouldn’t have put those little “DO NOT EAT” packets in the braising liquid. I don’t think Katsuji is very long for this show, which is too bad, because I love his accent.

* Melissa made a corn and ramp soup with pickled ramps, fried calamari, truffle butter, and bacon popcorn. It’s a big hit – Ming loves the corn flavor, Tom loves the pickled ramps, everyone likes the surprise of the bacon popcorn. Mei made a seared pork loin with braised peanuts, peanut sauce, herb salad, and peanut brittle, but (shockingly for her) the pork is a little overcooked. Stacy did a seared scallop (is this Top Escallop?), pickled peanuts, and a peanut and sunchoke puree/emulsion. Hugh loves it, loves the pickled peanuts, loves the Thai flavors. Blais says maybe she’ll get to throw out a ceremonial first pitch at Fenway, after which Tom warns her that you “can’t bounce” a first pitch – and my respect for Tom just tripled with that comment. (Stacy had the perfect response: “I can throw a ball.” Like, don’t throws-like-a-girl me, bro.)

* If this set of contestants had to form a baseball team, Aaron and Adam agree Katsuji would be the catcher. Adam says the mask will get him to shut up for a minute. I just thought Katsuji was the one guy who was built like a catcher – short and stocky. Although Buster Posey doesn’t look anything like the stereotypical catcher and he seems to be doing okay.

* Mos Chef’s duck breasts look amazing. The color is pristine across every single piece. I don’t think they’re that easy to cook, at least not at that level of precision, because the gap between “not browned enough” and “burned” is so narrow.

* Third group: Rebecca did a roasted salmon with mustard and honey glaze and toasted pretzel streusel, pickled shallots dill and watercress, and a mustard creme fraiche underneath. Blais calls it a “clean, classy little dish.” That sounds like Philip Marlowe describing a woman. James’ lobster cake with pretzel panzanella and avocado buttermilk mousse came out mushy, which means either it wasn’t cooked to a high enough temp or he had too much filling and not enough lobster meat. Adam’s watermelon curry with peanut oil poached halibut, jalapeno and fresno chili salad didn’t fare well because the fish was – wait for it – “hammered.” Tom says he let up a homer in the 9th inning, but maybe he was just pitching to the score, Tom. Mos Chef made those seared duck breasts with peanut nam prik pao, peanut brittle, crispy shallots, anchovies, and a fresh herb salad. Hugh loves the pears, the scallions, all the bright flavors. Blais called it “Moneyball” because it was “a smart dish right here.” He actually used the term correctly, which is why we love Blais. CHB would have used the term Moneyball to insult a dish that walked a lot and couldn’t field.

* Tom begins the judging with the awkward “Fenway Park is a great metaphor for today’s challenge” line. I don’t know if that’s worse from a baseball perspective or a literary one.

* Today’s theme was badly cooked proteins. Katsuji’s pork belly, Mei’s pork loin, Keriann’s short ribs, Adam’s fish, James’ lobster, Aaron’s pork rillette. Top two reasons chefs get sent home on this show: incorrectly cooked proteins and improper seasoning?

* Aaron making more friends in the stew room, saying “shut the fuck up for a moment” to Katsuji, who sort of interrupted/commented on Aaron’s self-loathing. “Bread pudding is what five year olds cook.” My daughter’s eight and she hasn’t mastered bread pudding yet. Should I give up on her?

* Katsuji tells him, “people are starting to hate you, you know what, embrace it!” I couldn’t be the one people hated. Just be nice. It’s so much easier to be nice. Being this much of a prick would require a lot of effort.

* Mos Chef, Melissa, and Katie are the top three. Padma tells Katie, “I think your dad would be so proud of you and I’m sure he is.” Tom was wowed by her recovering from her mistake. Melissa gets praise for the simplicity of the dish, surprise of the bacon popcorn. Says she wanted refined and complex but simple and that didn’t make a lot of sense but I guess it tasted good. Gregory wanted to incorporate all the ingredients, make it all round and work with each other. He’s so freaking calm. I just played in a little concert in front of fifty people and I was more nervous than he gets cooking for his life on this show.

* Winner is … Mos Chef! The man is on fire. New York/Delaware reprazent.

* Ron, Keriann, and Katsuji are the bottom three. There are lot of relieved faces in the group of chefs who didn’t get called out. Tom says it’s all basic mistakes, of cooking meat wrong, of portion problems. Keriann, why cook without a pressure cooker? I’m glad someone asked. Hugh says it was really tough and something about not being a sabertoothed tiger, which I assume was like saying he needed a chainsaw to get through it. He also says Katsuji “needs to be a better editor.” Ron’s dish seems to get the most criticism – the soup wasn’t soup-like, the croquette was too big, and what they don’t say is that it looked unappetizing.

* Tom says even the two remaining need to step up your game to remain in the competition. Ron is eliminated. Messy dish. Soup looked like porridge on screen. “I’m better than what I showed today.”

* Ron is eliminated. “All these little miniature entrees that these kids are doing … that’s not what I do.” Yeah, but that might be what wins. And I’ve eaten Blais’ food – those aren’t miniature in size or scope. I’ve eaten at one of Hugh’s places and the same applies. That’s a silly stereotype.

* Rankings: Mos Chef, Mei, Melissa, Adam. I think Aaron’s going to last longer than we’d like because he provides drama, but he’s struggled in three straight challenges now. Bottom three: Katsuji, Katie (despite the comeback), James.

Programming note: I’m going on vacation starting next Wednesday, so I’m not sure when next week’s recap will be up.

Mei says her win in episode one proves to the other competitors that she’s a “force to be reckoned with.” Every challenge winner on every reality show gives one of two speeches – this one or the “this shows that I deserve to be here” speech. Come up with some new material, people. Your competitors are busy trying to win challenges and not get eliminated, not thinking about whether you belong on the show.

* Katsuji is embarrassed. I feel like Embarrassed Katsuji has a lot of meme potential.

* Aaron says molecular gastronomy is “the evolution of food.” This is the equivalent of baseball “true SABR” arguments. If MG doesn’t make the food better, then don’t use it. I want Aaron to say this in front of Blais next week.

* Don’t let the outside shots fool you. Boston weather looks like that maybe twenty days a year.

* James has a Patrick Swayze tattoo and I can’t even snark this. That said, in a house of virtual strangers of both genders, I’m probably not coming down to the kitchen wearing only my boxer-briefs.

* Guest judge: Todd English. He used to be among the best chefs in boston, but his flagship restaurant, Olives, really went downhill when he expanded with more restaurants and TV/book projects. It is the first place where I ever tried molten chocolate cake, and both that and their vanilla bean souffle (which I saw him make on a TV show with Martha Stewart, which taught me how to combine the two parts of the souffle batter, and also featured him saying that the eggs from her chicken coop were too fresh to work with) are among my favorite desserts to cook for a small group. I think both recipes are in the out-of-print The Olives Dessert Table. More important, however, is that his face no longer moves when he talks, which I find disturbing.

* Quickfire: Make the ultimate surf and turf dish. There are two lanterns, and two displays of food. When just one lantern goes on, chefs get to pick a “land” ingredient; two lanterns means they get to pick a sea ingredient. Each display is first-come, first-serve, which sucks because suddenly it’s a brawl to get to the ingredients and your size and agility matter. Winner gets $5000 and no immunity, but no one seems to mind that tradeoff.

* Land first. How does no one get killed in these scrums?

* Katsuji grabs sweetbreads, which are one of the few proteins I’ve tried (notably at Animal in LA) and not really liked.

* The land light goes on again. Mei gets the ramps and says she is “amped as fuck,” which is pretty amped. She’s making a compound butter with the ramp tops. I’d like to see more about that – did she blanch and purée them or just include them raw?

* James gets wild boar bacon. He had me at “bacon,” really.

* Katie plows into Katsuji and he spills his chili sauce all over the place. That’s Katsuji’s version, at least. Maybe he was too busy adding ingredients to see her there?

* The “sea” ingredients become available with under 15 minutes left. Adam misses the cattle call … I mean, the lanterns, and ends up with “dried crab snack.” I don’t even know what that is. I tend to avoid anything “crab-flavored” that isn’t actually, you know, crab.

* Land ingredients become available one more time. Why is velveeta one of the options? That’s not even food. What chef is ever going to use that in a high-end kitchen? And are viewers really interested in what a highly trained or accomplished chef is going to do with a combination of whey, seaweed extract, and preservatives? I’m not. That stuff is disgusting.

* We see some of the dishes, as is par for the course this early in the season. Adam made a shoyu-marinated flank with pretzel dashi (what?) and crab snack. Mos Chef made grilled lamb chops with aromatic soy and bluefoot mushroom salad. Padma says it was salty. Melissa did a fritto misto with pollock and razor clams, which seems a little mundane. Joy made a marinated buffalo strip steak on a veal cutlet with warm slaw and sea salt garnish. That sounds like a lot of meat, and not in a good Ron Swanson sort of way.

* Stacy made a pork shop with skate cheeks, black radishes, and arugula but overcooked the pork. That’s bad. James made sautéed mussels with a boar bacon broth and sautéed fiddlehead ferns. Aaron did a smoked bacon shiro miso dashi with pork meatballs, fish cakes, and nori, along with black garlic and gochujang. I was pretty sure Mei would be in the top three with her pan seared haddock, ramp tomato nage (like a court bouillon), wasabi tobiko, and shaved fennel salad. Katsuji made poached sweetbreads, quail egg, uni, caviar, hot pepper jelly. He’s praised for his “restraint,” which is more like a warning not to try to use every ingredient in the kitchen.

* Least favorites: Joy, because it was odd to have bison and veal together (obvious, no?). Stacy, because her pork chop was underseasoned and overcooked. Favorites: Katsuji, for the beautiful pepper jelly sauce and great uni. James for handling a potent ingredient like wild boar bacon handled so well and cooking the mussels perfectly. James is the winner. Giving someone the prize for including uni seems like cheating anyway. Some ingredients just get overexposed on this show. We don’t need foie gras on everything, and if you’re that good a chef, you shouldn’t need it to make a great dish.

* Elimination challenge: The guests are the Boston police and fire commissioners, Bill Evans and John Hassan. There’s no shopping: Each team (four of three chefs each and one of two chefs) will get to pick a basket of ingredients available in the kitchen at Il Casale in Belmont, then have two hours to prep and cook. Mei gets Katie and Katsuji and is not happy to have both of the bottom chefs from previous elimination challenge on her team. She seems really strong, but probably a bit quick on the judgment draw here. That’s my job. Meanwhile, Aaron and Keriann, who were squabbling in the stew room after the previous challenge, are on the same team, which had to make the producers happy.

* Evans’ only condition for the chefs: “No gourmet donuts. We have enough donut jokes.” That’s fair. Then again, this is a town that treats Dunkin Donuts as haute cuisine when all they really serve are stale donuts and acqua sporca as coffee.

* Adam, who came off horribly in week one, has a real moment of humanity when he talks about September 11th. His mom worked on floor 78 of tower two, and when that building went down, he was “100% certain she was dead.” He didn’t hear from her until two o’clock on the morning of the 12th; she had been stepping off the E train when the plane hit.

* Mei says to no one in particular that “it doesn’t need to be a forty ingredient dish,” which seems a little passive-aggressive with Katsuji on her team. She’s taking charge, though, showing some of Michael Voltaggio’s influence on her personality.

* Then we get Aaron, who is either a straight-up misogynist or just a lunatic, essentially picking a fight with Keriann for refusing to gameplan around ingredients they don’t have – specifically if it’s a basket of dessert options, since their team will pick last. Saying to her “you seem pretty fucking confident” and “I’m not being an asshole right now, trust me, you’ll know when i’m an asshole” makes me wonder how much worse he looks when he thinks he’s being an asshole. Also, he said they should discuss “hypothetics,” which is more proof that you shouldn’t use two-dollar words when you don’t have two neurons to rub together.

* Il Casale is right on Leonard Street in Belmont, a stone’s throw from where I used to live, and a street down which I’ve walked dozens of times. So, yeah, that was a bit nostalgic for me. Of course, they didn’t show what that street looks like in mid-January when dirty snow is piled two feet high on the sidewalks.

* Team 1 is Mei, Katsuji, and Katie, and they get first pick. The baskets all have amazing produce, something I appreciated a lot more about living near Boston when I moved to Arizona and couldn’t get anything close to this quality. Locals would complain about the cost of Wilson Farms in Lexington, but produce of that caliber should cost more.

* Katsuji and Mei squabbling over the sauce. It’s like the chefs never watched the show before applying: One, you don’t parcel out tasks before making the whole to-do list. Two, if you fight on camera, it will go on air. Always. So try to work it out.

* Team 2 (Rebecca, Adam, Mos Chef) takes a surf and turf box, with some insanely large chanterelles, filet (yawn), and scallops. Mos Chef already plans to make a leek vinaigrette.

* Team 3 is the two-man operation of James and Doug. They choose a basket with pork chops and a lot of produce. There’s a lot of stereotyping in the discussions of what to make for cops and firefighters, as if they’re all blue-collar meat-and-potatoes white men, but of all the baskets I saw on camera, this was the one that jumped out at me because of the fruits and vegetables in it.

* Team 4 (Joy, Melissa, and Ron) chooses a basket with veal, salmon, and kale. This leads to a discussion of how the veal has to be cooked, and Joy’s concern about their thickness, which is something that we refer to around here as “foreshadowing.” She wants to take them off the bone, but Ron and Melissa crush that idea and rightly so – you expect chops served in a restaurant to come on the bone. Ron suggests a “hint of vanilla” in the sauce or the root purée they’re making, which is basically the worst idea ever, because there is no such thing as a “hint” of vanilla. It does not play nice with savory ingredients. This is like saying someone is wearing a “hint” of Drakkar. Putting vanilla in the sauce for your pork chops is like halving a vanilla bean and sticking the two pieces in each diner’s nostrils.

* Team DISRE5PECT is Keriann, Stacy, and Aaron. They choose the chicken and short rib basket, but say there isn’t enough time to cook the short ribs. Ninety minutes in a pressure cooker wouldn’t be enough? Granted, I never cook short ribs that way, but if you can braise them in two to three hours, an hour-plus under pressure should do it. Meanwhile, after Keriann asked him not to force his molecular gastronomy obsession into the dish, Aaron insists on making a chorizo/onion jam with agar agar, then tries to order Keriann not to put onion in her corn salsa because he’s doing onion jam. She wasn’t blameless here, but Aaron seemed much more stubborn than Keriann. Meanwhile, did Stacy really not step in and try to get these two knuckleheads to work together? Not that they would have listened, given how much they hounded her over her preparation of the chicken.

* Mei tastes Katsuji’s sauce and says it’s “really fucking good,” which means it was probably really fucking good. Give her credit for de facto admitting she was wrong about Katsuji.

* Team 1, the red team, serves a pea and coconut purée (Katie) with sautéed halibut (Mei), pickled rhubarb, and a cherry and grilled rhubarb sauce (Katsuji). Everything here was great, especially the sauce. Tom said “everything made sense.” These writeups are easier when chefs screw up, by the way.

* Team 2, the blue team, does a grilled filet (Adam’s – and with the meat’s huge grill marks the pieces look like large slices of chocolate layer cake) with a parsnip purée (Rebecca), pan seared scallops (Mos Chef), and a leek marcona vinaigrette (Mos Chef). All proteins were perfectly cooked and Tom loved the vinaigrette, especially because Gregory didn’t let the leeks brown. Two for two.

* Team 3, the grey team, did a grilled pork chop and grilled stonefruit salad with morel mushrooms and walnuts. The pork chop was seasoned and cooked well and Gail loved the grilled apricots. She always loves some element that no one else mentions. I think that’s a good thing. It’s worth pointing out that we never saw these two chefs (James and Doug) bicker over anything – and I believe the editors would gladly have shown us even the slightest disagreement between them. Three for three, but it’s downhill from here.

* Team 4, the yellow team, was a mess, sending out veal chops that Melissa can see aren’t cooked. They served maple and vanilla wood-roasted chops (Joy) with a citrus kale slaw, vanilla-scented celery root purée, and pickled radishes. There’s way too much vanilla in this dish for me; it had to taste like drinking a bottle of perfume. The diners can’t even cut the meat because it’s raw in the center. Tom says we are all “conditioned to want sweet” when we taste vanilla. It’s a fucking dessert ingredient. This is not complicated.

* A policewoman at the judges’ table, Shana Cottone, tells of being at the finish line at the bombing of the 2013 Boston Marathon, and one of the two survivors she helped ended up having her attend his (I believe she said “his”) wedding. Seems like the producers made a great choice with the guests for this challenge.

* Team 5, the green team, is still arguing in the kitchen before service, with Keriann and Aaron both haranguing Stacy about her chicken and then sniping about her (within earshot) when she declines help she doesn’t need. Yes, it’s coming to the plates at the last second, but doesn’t it have to be? You want it hot but not sitting to carry over past 160 degrees, when it’ll begin to dry out. Meanwhile, Aaron is so busy yelling at his teammates that he doesn’t notice that his “marmalade” (no, douche, a marmalade usually has citrus peel and definitely doesn’t need agar) is watery until right before plating, and tries to warm it up and thicken it further with yet more agar agar. Like pectin, another polysaccharide, agar agar has a funny texture when it’s kind of on its own – you want its gelling properties but not its specific mouthfeel. I make a lot of jam and preserves and never add pectin for that very reason; I use recipes that give me enough pectin from fruit (e.g., a grated green apple) to make the finished product set. In conclusion, I don’t like Aaron.

* The green team serves pan-roasted chicken breast (Stacy) with a bourbon onion jam (Aaron) and a fresh corn salad with serrano (Keriann). The judges universally say that Stacy’s chicken is best thing on the plate. Padma doesn’t like the corn or the raw onion in the salad. Tom hates the jam and says Stacy should be pissed off: “You cooked a perfect chicken and the garnishes on that plate were terrible.” He kills Aaron’s relish for sliding across the plate. When Keriann lies about lack of teamwork and implies everything was fine, Aaron says, “Keriann was pretty erratic, made some bad moves, made some bad decisions.” Wow. Keriann finally stands up for herself after he throws her under the bus a second time.

* Back in the stew room, Aaron tells Stacy that Keriann is “such a bitch, dude. Like, such a bitch.” Sorry, but even if she was unpleasant to work with, there is no place for that – and a woman who stands up for herself is not a female dog. Later she calls him a “lying sack of shit.” Accepting that editing can skew our perceptions of the chefs, Aaron’s behavior in the parts we did see was reprehensible, beyond any justification. The preview of next week shows him similarly dismissive toward a male chef, so I’m not sure it’s just woman-hating – more like misanthropy.

* Judges’ table: The red and blue teams were the favorites. The judges loved the avocado in Katsuji’s sauce, Mei’s halibut was great, and Katie showed a “lot of refined technique.” The blue team’s surf and turf was perfectly seasoned and cooked, and Tom loved Mos Chef’s vinaigrette. Blue team wins – Tom says that every bit of that dish was “precise” – but we don’t get an individual winner, which robs of us some bitter commentary in the confessionals.

* The yellow and green teams (4 and 5) are on the bottom. The yellow team had problems “with conception and cookery.” Oh, is that all? Meanwhile, Tom points out that the green team was “doomed to fail,” that you “can’t talk past each other,” and “need to check (your) egos at the door.” This is advice for life, not just Top Chef team challenges.

* Aaron’s jam wasn’t jam at all, as the agar didn’t work. Tom is incredulous: “That’s what you did in two hours?” You can thicken jam in under an hour of cooking; using agar is just forcing a technique, and Aaron couldn’t even make the technique work. Onions do contain pectin, and adding a little bit of a base (like baking soda) extracts even more of it. Don’t use molecular gastronomy unless you first pass chemistry. Meanwhile, Keriann says she knew the corn was starchy but left it raw anyway. That’s usually the type of answer that makes Tom’s head turn into an overripe tomato.

* Gail says the yellow team’s vanilla completely overwhelmed the dish, and on top of that, the veal was raw in center. Joy accepts responsibility for the veal, but nobody on the team bothered to taste the entire dish. (That’s another one: Have you ever watched this show? Chefs who don’t taste their own food go home. Like, every other episode.) Absolutely nothing about this plate appealed to me. “Some raw veal covered in flowery perfume, sir?” “Thanks, I’m stuffed.”

* Padma says Aaron and Keriann should really thank Stacy because her chicken saved them from being the bottom team. That means the yellow team is on bottom, and Joy is eliminated. She blames herself for not speaking up more, which I assume is a reference to her agreement not to debone the veal. But if you can’t cook that piece of meat, one, don’t volunteer to do it for the team, and two, how are you here?

* Time to start ranking these cats … Top three: Mei, Mos Chef, and Adam; James gets an honorable mention. Bottom three: Ron, Keriann, and, because I kind of expect him to overreach again, Katsuji.

Sorry this post is a day late, but playoffs plus podcast plus Klawchat made for a busy 24 hours.

This season of Top Chef moves to my old hometown of Boston, a great food town with many celebrity chefs and a broad spectrum of ethnic cuisines. But will the contestants have to cook their pasta in dirty water?

* Hey, it’s Richard Blais! I’m a fan of his work, and had the pleasure of meeting him in San Diego this spring at Juniper & Ivy. He’s looking very studious with glasses; if he were a pitcher, we’d say he was cerebral. And he’ll be judging quite a bit, apparently. That’s a good thing, but I just hope we don’t lose any Hugh Acheson as a result.

* We meet some of the chefs, at least some of the contestantswith interesting backgrounds. Katsuji, a Mexican-Japanese chef, runs a kosher taco place in Beverly Hills. Mei Lin is the sous-chef at ink, the LA restaurant run by Top Chef winner Michael Voltaggio. Adam was previously at Jean-Georges’ (Vongerichten, but he doesn’t say that because, you know, first-name basis and all) upcoming vegan restaurant, ABC Home, which doesn’t seem to be open yet. Keriann introduces herself in front of anyone by saying she won some world’s greatest young chef award in 2008, which, while true, isn’t quite how you should greet your new housemates. George’s partner is Mike Isabella, former Top Chef All-Stars runner-up. Joy is head chef at a farm-to-table restaurant in Fredericksburg, Virginia, called Foode, not too far from where the Potomac Nats play.

* The big new twist this season: Some Quickfires will be sudden death quickfires. If you lose, you “face” immediate elimination – although that phrasing was deliberate. Anyway, shit just got real.

* Quickfire: A mise en place relay. Four tasks for each of four teams of four. Prep three lobsters, 20 oysters, eight mackerels, and 21 littleneck clams – one chef per task. Each ingredient should take the same amount of time to prep, according to Padma, although given the chefs’ reactions I don’t think they concur. The slowest chef on the slowest team will be “up for elimination.”

* Adam bullies Keriann straight off, trying to claim the right to break down the lobsters. There’s a clear male talking down to female thing here, and Keriann backs down, as I think most women would when confronted with an aggressive and much taller man. However … this is Top Chef, so this may be what we refer to around here as “foreshadowing.”

* I wish we saw more close-ups on the chefs breaking down the lobsters, just for my own education. Mei Lin is just ripping through the big pink cockroaches and finishes first. Meanwhile Adam is struggling to get through his lobsters – who saw that coming?

* Doug, who is short, starts talking about how he needs to be Napoleon in the kitchen. Starting to think Doug might have failed 19th century French history.

* Ron zipping through mackerels. Lot of blood in that fish. Blue still in lead. Yellow jumps to second.

* Katsuji is the closer for the blue team (Mei Lin’s), but it turns out that he has no idea how to open clams and starts banging the end of the knife’s handle on the table. Are they not allowed to tell him how to do this?

* Adam refers to Keriann as his team’s “beautiful blonde thoroughbred.” So, he’s defining her by her looks, and then referring to her as an animal. Maybe I was wrong to expect better from a guy raised by a single mom. That said, she jumps into the lead when tearing through the clams and they win the challenge, so maybe he’ll stop pushing her around.

* Gregory hacks up the mackerel, and then George, who wanted the mackerel, can’t shuck the clams. They barely finish behind the blue team, and George took the longest to complete his task, so he’s … facing elimination.

* So now we find out what that means: He gets to pick any chef in the room to face in a sudden death cookoff – if he wins, they both stay; if he loses, he goes home. He picks Gregory, because he wanted the mackerel, but Gregory took it and struggled with it. They get twenty minutes to cook, using any of the mise en place ingredients.

* I’m not sure how I feel about this. Getting whacked for a quickfire seems harsh, and I can’t think of any point where I felt like I wanted the show’s format to change. But also, what’s Gregory’s motivation? He’s playing for pride, but George is cooking for his life. Gregory says “if you come for me, you better come correct,” and suddenly I feel like I’m watching Mos Chef.

* This challenge happens so fast and is so heavily edited that we don’t see much of the cooking. I actually do watch to see people cook, you know. I might learn something.

* George does a pan-seared mackerel with fennel salad. Gregory makes a chilled trio of mackerel, oyster, and lobster. Adam refers to this move as a statement of, “Hi I’m Greg and this is how big my dick is.” Adam appears to use his dick to supply his mouth with all of its thoughts.

* Gregory’s actual dishes: Oysters with yuzu ginger minionette, mirin marinated mackerel with bonito, lobster with chilled coconut and spiced tomato sauce. That is a hell of a lot to do in 20 minutes, isn’t it? The oyster/yuzu combo is pretty cliche, but the other two dishes seemed really clever.

* Blais says George’s dish was more elegant, but needed more heat. Gregory’s was bright and refreshing, although Blais cautions that “when you do 3 dishes instead of 1 you give yourself two more opportunities to fail.” He would know, since he was always churning out duos and trios. Gregory wins, George goes home. We hardly knew ye.

* Elinination challenge: The first-ever Top Chef food festival, featuring all the remaining contestants plus some of Boston’s best chefs and restaurateurs: Todd English, Barbara Lynch, Ken Oringer, Jamie Bissonnette, Ming Tsai, Lydia Shire, Jasper White, Kristen Kish. They didn’t miss with that invite list. Except they didn’t invite me to come eat. I need to discuss this with my agent.

* The actual challenge: Prepare an updated version of the first dish you remember cooking, with three hours to prepare that day. It’s being held at the Museum of Science, which I think is the best museum in the city.

* We see too much talking by the chefs and not enough cooking.

* Michael is making sriracha pearls to put in his chili corn soup. He clearly likes using molecular gastronomy tricks, but it seems like they’re just tricks for him, or gimmicks, not ways to elevate the food.

* Mei Lin is making congee with stewed pork. Her grandfather made congee (a thick porridge of heavily cooked rice), and she says all the men in her family cooked – as it should be.

* Katsuji is making some bizarre sauce based around cheese and squid ink. What. Blais and Tom look totally perplexed. Tom says “I’ll let you get back to work” but means to say “because I have no idea what the hell you’re doing.”

* Keriann says “Bend over and grab your ankles, honey. It’s about to happen.” Really? Anal rape jokes? When did that shit become funny? I didn’t think it was funny when Dr. Dre used it to mock Eazy-E in the “Dre Day” video, and that was 22 years ago.

* To the dishes… Joy made creamy yellow grits with sauteed greens and crispy chicken skin. She says she went for a simple approach vs “fine fine cooking.” I’d order this.

* Rebecca made a citrus tart with ginger cherries and chantilly cream. Blais and Padma say they’re not getting ginger flavor in the cherries. It seems a little too simple, maybe?

* Adam does fish (cod) and chips with a tri-color salad and mustard mayo with nori aleppo pepper and cumin seed. Lose the nose ring dude. You’re in a fucking kitchen. I don’t want your rhinogerms in my food.

* Stacy made a pulled chicken salad with sweet pea green coddess dressing and cranberry mostarda on thick-cut potato chips. I thought this might end up near the top, given the complexity and presentation.

* Ron does an odd twist on a shrimp cocktail, adding strawberries, shaved fennel, curry, and pickled jalapeños. Padma thinks it’s “over the top” spicy – so clearly instant feedback is a new feature of this season, which the chefs are not expecting.

* Boston Mayor Marty Walsh is in the house. For once, I wish Menino was still mayor, just for the unintentional comedy value of it.

* Doug (“call me Dougie” – no, thanks, Doug) made fried chicken with pickled jalapeños and watermelon. Tom likes the sweet and sour combination, and it sounds like he did the best job of keeping the chicken hot and crispy.

* Katsuji made … I’ll give this a shot: “petroleum shrimp” with a cheese sauce that includes orange peel, chipotles, white wine, and squid ink, along with saffron couscous and serrano aioli, served on a tortilla. Padma says eating it was complex. Wasn’t this what sank Kenny a few years ago – he executed well but everything had twenty ingredients?

* Keriann made a sweet corn soup with bacon jam, truffle crumble, and olive oil snow. Blais hates the snow. It’s fascinating to see Blais come down on chefs who use techniques we might associate with his cooking – but it’s evident that he feels there’s a right time or place for those tricks, and that overusing them earns you demerits.

* James made a crispy harissa chicken thigh with creamed corn, bbq spice, and watermelon. Apparently I missed out, growing up in the northeast, becuase fried chicken, some kind of corn dish, and watermelon (plain or pickled) is a popular combo here. I won’t complain about my mom’s cooking, but damn, that seems like a good thing to grow up eating.

* Melissa does a spicy ma-po tofu with pork over spiced rice, szechuan peanuts, and pickled cukes. We don’t hear much feedback but the description caused my palate to spontaneously ignite.

* Mei made a congee with caramelized pork, fish sauce caramel, and black garlic puree. Gail likes mix of raw herbs and scallions with dark caramel. It’s pretty stunning to look at. I can’t quite wrap my head around fish sauce caramel, though.

* Katie made a broccoli salad, with tamarind aioli, cured black olives, bacon powder. Blais said it was more of a side dish than appropriate for the event and that the bacon powder doesn’t serve any purpose. Also, it looks like a mess.

* Michael, who grew up in Russia (where soup cooks you!), made a chilled corn soup, with pickled cherries, salmon roe, and sriracha caviar. Tom doesn’t like fishy finish and doesn’t get much heat from sriracha. Michael’s response: “What went wrong with their palates?” Yeah, it’s their fault. I believe comments like that qualify as … foreshadowing.

* Mos Chef does a Haitian stewed chicken with fried bananas, spicy pikliz, and scotch bonnet chili relish. Padma making a face. “So strange and funky,” but she really likes it. She confesses to Blais after walking away that she nearly hated it – I guess you had to get every component together to appreciate it. It sounds like a ton of heat; I imagine I’d get blown out by it, having grown up eating virtually no chili pepper in anything.

* Aaron made a twist on bacon and eggs, serving pork belly braised in tamari, miso poached egg yolk, and birds-eye chili caramel. He didn’t set aside any of the better pieces for the judges, and ends up serving a very fatty piece to Padma, who almost immediately spat it out – right in front of him. She tells him, “clean up your act and your station.” It’s even worse that he dissembles when she points out (before tasting it) that her piece is nearly all fat.

* Their favorites: Gail cites Doug’s as her favorite fried chicken. Padma and Tom seem to like Gregory’s. Blais cites Mei’s congee. No huge surprises, based on the instant feedback.

* Their least favorites: They all killed Katie’s broccoli side dish. “That’s your showcase?” when it’s not appealing to look at. Michael’s corn soup was fishy due to the fish eggs – ” an unpleasant surprise.” Gail and Padma have a little moment, though: When Padma says that Aaron served her a piece of pork belly that was all fat, Gail kind of rolls her eyes and says that pork belly is mostly fat anyway. There was a trace of contempt in that whole exchange. Padma acts like it never happened, though, and just presses her complaint further, saying she almost never has had to spit any dish out in the history of the show. Katsuji’s dish gets bashed as too weird and sloppy.

* They call everyone in from the stew room. All praise and shaming will now be public, apparently.

* Tom says overall the effort was fair: They got a lot of rustic and homestyle dishes, but only some chefs pushed it farther than that. Blais is a little more positive, maybe because he knows what it’s like to be on the other side.

* Top three: Doug, Mei, and Gregory. No surprises there. Mei’s congee was spot-on. Mos Chef’s dish had a million things that could have gone “crazy bad” (Padma) and it was all crazy good. Blais spins this motorcycle chase analogy for Gregory’s stew, and shortly after the episode his monologue was optioned by TLC. Doug’s was bright and fresh and chicken so crispy and well seasoned. His was probably the easiest dish for me to understand, given my own limited experience with congee and with Caribbean cuisine.

* Winner: Mei. Blais says it was appropriate for a food festival and a fine-dining restaurant too. She jokes she has her job for another day.

* The bottom three: Katie, Michael, Katsuji. Aaron, who served Padma the big piece of pork fat, isn’t among them.

* Katie’s felt more like a salad, but she says she lost her focus with the bacon powder. I think she lost her focus at the conception: if you want to make broccoli salad your starting point, serve it with a protein where you get to show off. Michael’s soup had a great concept and base but all anyone tasted was the salmon roe. He says he tasted it, found it was “a little fishy,” didn’t think it was too bad … and Tom jumps on him. You can’t talk your way out of anything at judges’ table. Tom has absolutely no tolerance for bullshit. Katsuji’s dish had some solid elements but way too much going on.

* Michael is eliminated. Tom says it just didn’t work with sweet corn and fishy salmon roe.

* In the confessional, he says he tried to be original and out of the box, but it backfired. He should have stopped there, but then says, “Maybe Tom should be more open-minded… you’ve gotta grow with age or get left behind.” Dude, nobody liked your dish, not just Tom. Do they not realize the most incendiary things they say are guaranteed to make it to air? Have they never seen the show before? Before you go on Top Chef, you should read my recaps, because then, if nothing else, you’ll know just how ridiculous you’ll look when you say stuff like this.