Brightest Young Things

After a week-long hiatus (during which we found out that Padma was pregnant and that Toby Young was actually a hobbit), TOP CHEF was back last week.
It kicked off with everyone looking tired and slightly more low energy than usual, Jen suffering from some morning sickness type ailment, Ash contemplating his lack of training and Michael Voltaggio revealing that he actually does not live in some underground bunker masterminding highly conceptualized meals, but, in fact, has two little girls that he misses and whatnot.
Don't you just hate it when they all turn out to be human?

Anyway-onto the M Resort and the quickfire challenge.
There, Padma awaited, exhibiting zero morning sickness signs (is Padma's baby actually Jen's baby? Is there some sort of a "Glee" tie in which I am not aware of? Can I please stop conspiracy theorizing this early in the morning? Yes, I can) along with Tyler Florence who, I hear, has some TV shows and cookbooks or something (no one seemed too impressed by his presence there).
It was a Cookstr.com challenge (today's author of the day-Padma!!! Wonder how that happened?-ed), meaning that everyone was going to have to make a meal on the basis of 3 words explaining the dish's: mood, texture and geographic provenance.
So they played the slot machines to get the words and the slot machine seemed to be stuck on "umami" and "asian" more so than anywhere else and then they set off to make something in 30 minutes.

Now, there's 10 people left and 3 words each and the whole quickfire segment lasts 5 minutes so there was no way for anyone to actually realize what was truly going on but in the end Jen was in the bottom three for the first time ever, and Kevin won, even though he never cooks Asian food, because he is Kevin and Kevin is a genius, and he decided to take the money, instead of the immunity (Kevin does not need immunity, because he is Kevin) and then they sent them all home.

And when they got home they realized that their challenge was going to be to make a family style dinner for the Macy's culinary council which consisted, aside from Tyler Florence, of a number of other well-known chefs no one seemed to care about too much (I guess whipping out Joel Robuchon as a guest judge in episode 3 was eventually going to backfire): Tom Douglas, Nancy Silverton, Govind Armstrong, and Takashi Yagihashi.

Anyhoo-they all drew knives and worked in pairs, each pair getting a bag of products to use from a member of the culinary council.

The pairings looked like this:

• Kevin and Jen (so good it could almost be cheating to have them do anything together)
• Bryan and Lauryne (quiet, competent, silent killers)
• Ash and Michael V. (just a complete temperamental clash)
• Eli and Ashley (which you could just smell would not go too well, because Eli is Toby Young's evil twin or something, and Ashley is just too meek to step up to the hobgoblin)
• Mike Isabella and Robin (disaster U.S.A)

And there weren't enough stoves or enough counter space or enough room anywhere for Mike Isabella's ego to fit in so people cooked in tight corners and on glass tables and with wok's plugged into living room walls etc.

Ash was basically just sitting there being (not so) secretly in love with Michael V.
Jen and Kevin were kicking ass.
Mike Isabella was insisting on saying "I" every 2 seconds when describing his plan of attach even though he never cooked Asian and Robin (silently suffering) did
No one heard a word from Bryan or Lauryne all episode
and
Ashley was getting more and more stressed and Eli was getting more and more cocky.

In the end, Michael V. had electricity issues and overcooked his fish, Eli destroyed Ashley's gnocchi by oversalting them and then refused to cook the prawns leaving her to freak over it last minute, and all the non-impressive famous chefs sat around, at their food and said non-remarkable things. It was like this episode had its personality be surgically removed.
Only Tom dared speak and I found myself missing Gail because Gail loves food and every time she speaks you know it.

Then-at the judges table: Kevin/Jen and Bryan/Lauryne were in the top 2 pairs with Jen winning for her tomato chutney sauce and getting a 10 000 dollar gift card from MACY's (making the Kevin/Jen fiscal gross for this episode 25 000 bucks) and Ashley/Eli and Ash/Bryan were in the bottom 2 pairs with Ash just blubbering about his Bryan crush ("How do you feel playing second fiddle to Bryan in this challenge?" "It was like washing brushes for Picasso. I loved it") and Ashley got sent home.

I really, really, really thought Eli or Ash were going to be packing it, but I guess, I was WRONG.
What did you think?
Next week's predictions: a lot of screaming, Robin or Eli go home, and someone kills Mike Isabella in his sleep. Fingers crossed.