{"id":286,"date":"2008-06-26T19:30:37","date_gmt":"2008-06-26T23:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=286"},"modified":"2008-06-26T19:30:37","modified_gmt":"2008-06-26T23:30:37","slug":"the-next-food-network-star-week-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/26\/the-next-food-network-star-week-4\/","title":{"rendered":"The Next Food Network Star, week 4."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just playing a little catch-up here&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I said last time that this show is about humiliating the contestants, and this week was no exception. How exactly did the first challenge &#8211; do a one-minute instructional video on a topic you may or may not be familiar with and have only seconds to prepare &#8211; relate to the challenge of being a TV chef? Are the instructional videos we see on FN.com unscripted? Are they all successfully shot on the first take? Giving the contestants a few minutes to think or jot down some notes would have been perfectly reasonable and avoided a lot of the ugly things that we saw, like Aaron going totally off the rails on presentation.<\/li>\n<li>I thought he had the easiest task, too; dismantling a pineapple is a snap. Hardest was either Kelsey&#8217;s &#8211; she totally cheated by taking the bone off, since Frenching means leaving the rack intact &#8211; or Shane&#8217;s, since you can&#8217;t dismantle a coconut in sixty seconds. Alton Brown even suggests baking them for 20 minutes.<\/li>\n<li>Nipa needed to go, clearly, but she caught a pretty raw deal this week, since she clearly doesn&#8217;t cook much with seafood, and may not really need to if her idea is to bring Indian cooking to the masses. That said, she didn&#8217;t carry herself well, had poor presence, and like Michael Symon I was offended by the way she wasted most of the meat on that trout.<\/li>\n<li>Symon said one of the most profound things you&#8217;re going to hear on this show when he pointed out that even if you don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re talking about, you need to act like you do. We all know that the air of authority can cover up the stench of ignorance.<\/li>\n<li>The frustrating part about watching Jennifer is that her problem is totally fixable: When you&#8217;re on camera, don&#8217;t think. If you start to think through what you&#8217;re saying &#8211; or worse, what you just said &#8211; you&#8217;re lost. And it goes pear-shaped very quickly after that.<\/li>\n<li>Kelsey&#8217;s pretty clearly taken the lead, not just because she won both challenges, but because the judges are saying that they liked her new persona this week. I thought from the start that white chocolate would be my choice of the <strike>bullshit<\/strike> Iron Chef ingredients, since it&#8217;s full of cocoa butter, a fat with great mouth-feel. She made another good call with tilapia, which is pretty versatile.<\/li>\n<li>Adam: Crepes plus halibut cooked two ways in sixty minutes? What are you on? A crepe takes at least 75 seconds to cook, and doing two at once in adjacent pans still means almost 20 minutes just to cook the crepes. Bad idea.<\/li>\n<li>I distinctly remember saying &#8220;stop crying,&#8221; but no one listened.<\/li>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just playing a little catch-up here&#8230; I said last time that this show is about humiliating the contestants, and this week was no exception. How exactly did the first challenge &#8211; do a one-minute instructional video on a topic you may or may not be familiar with and have only seconds to prepare &#8211; relate [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,7],"tags":[857,846,130],"class_list":["post-286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cooking","category-food","tag-cooking","tag-food","tag-food-network","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}