{"id":293,"date":"2008-07-02T09:55:56","date_gmt":"2008-07-02T13:55:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=293"},"modified":"2008-07-02T09:55:56","modified_gmt":"2008-07-02T13:55:56","slug":"the-next-food-network-star-week-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/02\/the-next-food-network-star-week-5\/","title":{"rendered":"The Next Food Network Star, week 5."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Notes on episode 5:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> The first challenge was even more inane than usual. Asking a cook to describe someone else&#8217;s dish and then docking them for not guessing all the ingredients correctly is more than a little absurd. At the end, the judges criticized a few contestants for not &#8220;owning&#8221; the dishes, or &#8220;taking ownership.&#8221; Hey, news flash, they didn&#8217;t cook the dishes they were describing. I have more ownership of the Taj Mahal than they had of those dishes.<\/li>\n<li>Cat Cora is a verbal train wreck &#8211; &#8220;your describing skills,&#8221; &#8220;the reason I&#8217;ve chose you&#8221; &#8211; and I&#8217;ve seen shorter roots on a hundred-year-old tree. Having her judge the candidates on presentation was not a good decision. Seriously, when Aaron said &#8220;coq de vin,&#8221; I&#8217;m sure she thought, &#8220;Yeah, that&#8217;s right.&#8221;\n<\/li>\n<li>Adam&#8217;s decision-making sucked; bone-in chicken breasts can be cooked in 45 minutes in an oven, but not on a grill, and polenta takes a solid 45 just to cook, plus a few minutes to finish it.\n<\/li>\n<li>The key to the second challenge was deconstruction. For the coq au vin, I would have done roasted chicken breasts wrapped in some form of cured pork (probably bacon or pancetta) with a sauce of red wine, butter, shallots, and thyme. Lisa&#8217;s idea of duck confit for the turducken was great, as was using a poultry sausage, although I would have used the sausage gambit to get credit for chicken, which has the least flavor of the three meats involved.\n<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I can&#8217;t believe that happened&#8221; \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 no, Jen, I can&#8217;t believe YOU did that. Who the hell bangs a glass jar on a cooktop &#8211; or ANYWHERE &#8211; to get it open? You have heat sources everywhere. Run the lid under hot water for ten seconds. It&#8217;s not that hard. If she bangs glass jars all the time, I&#8217;m surprised she has any blood left in her system.\n<\/li>\n<li>The complaint about the white onions and beige pastry was the stupidest thing I&#8217;ve ever heard in my life. I cancelled my <i>Bon Appetit<\/i> subscription four or five years ago because their recipes were slipping, and this is probably why: They care more about colors clashing on the plate than, you know, <b>how the freaking food tastes<\/b>. Unbelievable. I&#8217;m not sure what world they live in; maybe a world where Andrew&#8217;s hair is actually stylish.\n<\/li>\n<li>Shane and Kelsey won this in a walk; I have to give Shane credit for coming off as older than nineteen every time he&#8217;s on camera. Still not sure I could stand 22 minutes of Kelsey.\n<\/li>\n<li>The judge who made the point (to Aaron, I believe) about self-editing was spot on: You can&#8217;t do that while you&#8217;re on camera. It&#8217;s not writing, where you can go back, delete, re-word, and so on. You have to just keep going, even if what you just said was wrong or stupid or boxed you into a corner. Fight your way out if you have to, but don&#8217;t stop or pause or think about what you just said. The camera is still rolling while you think.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Unrelated link: Starbucks <a href=http:\/\/dailybriefing.blogs.fortune.cnn.com\/2008\/07\/01\/starbucks-has-a-bitter-plan\/>to close 600 stores<\/a>. I wonder if <a href=http:\/\/www.theonion.com\/content\/node\/29030>this location<\/a> is one of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Notes on episode 5: The first challenge was even more inane than usual. Asking a cook to describe someone else&#8217;s dish and then docking them for not guessing all the ingredients correctly is more than a little absurd. At the end, the judges criticized a few contestants for not &#8220;owning&#8221; the dishes, or &#8220;taking ownership.&#8221; [&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":[84,857,846,130],"class_list":["post-293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cooking","category-food","tag-coffee","tag-cooking","tag-food","tag-food-network","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293","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=293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}