Honestly, I was just surprised she HAD two Barbie dolls, y'know? Who goes on a reality TV show and brings BARBIES??

Whole Foods sent me an email about their At-Home Top Chef Challenge:

Attention Whole Foods Market shoppers AND Top Chef fans! Your At-Home Quickfire Challenge is to create a burger inspired by the word "audacious" with only 30 minutes from prep to serve.

What's the point of that if you don't win anything? (Other than, I assume, your recipe on the Top Chef website.)

What Alton Brown is giving us next summer:

Feasting on Waves, premiering summer 2008, will feature Alton Brown trading the road for the waves to explore the people, cultures and food of the Caribbean. He will uncover the real mom and pop restaurants and food stands, cook on the boat, dive, fish, whatever it takes to find interesting edibles outside of the resorts. From the deck of a boat, it's a modern day pirate's tale searching out history, cuisines and stories.

TC: Harold is on Martha Stewart's show today.

Yahoo has the first 3 minutes of the first episode of TC4.

How to make your KitchenAid look like Alton's

Oh, hell yeah!

MMaSM: Yeah, I am over Ben. I think he's totally leading Ronnie on and what's more, I think he knows it. To me, his big snow hatespeech outburst sounded a lot like somebody dealing with repressed homosexuality and struggling to establish his identity.

I was over him after the bashing, but I'm even more over him now.

And how did we not know about the Amanda/Adnan scandal before the show aired? We have the whole internets, surely somebody on it reads the tabloids!

I wasn't really sure what to make of her side of the phone conversation, other than I guess I have to respect not wanting to display your whole eroding relationship on the air, close to realtime. But it definitely sounded to me like she'd be breaking up with him as soon as he got home.

Okay, enough of the meta. I like Casey's look, but I can't figure out why the judges are always "You're so beautiful" about him. They're just smitten by him and not by Ronnie, and that's something I don't really get. Ronnie can do a classic look, but he's way more than that, and I don't really get why they're so hung up on him. I just like him, and I think he wants it, and I think he's probably going to have a moderately successful modeling career whether or not he's the winner. I don't really see him as catalog. My catalogs don't have Ronnies in them. They have more like George Clooneys. Although that may just be a demographic thing.

Holly is gorgeous, and if she can get her emotions in check and develop Shannon's professionalism, she could go a long way. She's just got that thing where the camera loves her, and she's learning to work it. She has the core stuff, and the other stuff I think she can learn.

Shannon sometimes looks gorgeous to me and sometimes looks awkward, and I can't tell when it's going to be one way or the other.

The season finale of No Reservations was a LOT of fun. Tony went back to be line cook at Les Halles for a double shift. He also talked Eric Ripert into being the dinner's grill man. They were kind of adorable in a profanity-spewing way. I think there were more bleeps in this one episode than I've seen the entire season.

The squeamish amongst you would best avoid the No Reservations Quebec episode. The quease-inducing gastranomical overload of the foie gras meal and the seven different kinds of poutine meal were nothing compared to the dinner with the Inuit family Tony flew up for (white-fonted for the gross-out factor): raw seal, ripped apart right on the kitchen floor. Tony was given an eyeball as an honored guest. Watching this smiling, happy family digging into the seal carcass was like watching a George Romero movie gone askew. That said, I think the poutine may have been grosser in food overload kinda way.