Except on the topics of how to become a child star and how to fuck up your career! IJS.

true, true. He's the poster child for what NOT to do.

I thought that was the Different Strokes kids.

or Leif Garrett even.

I don't know -- none of them would be the worst person in the world to give advice on how to become a child star. They were pretty good at that. For advice on what to do once a child star grows up, yeah, any one of our cats could do better.

That's the Waldorf Salad I know, not one with chicken in it! If you put chicken in Waldorf Salad, then it is chicken salad with fruit and nuts.

I don't see a problem with modifying classics for a challenge like this - just do it well. Colicchio was laughing at them for thinking their great innovation was not putting mayo in it so it would keep (urban legend alert) but the problem wasn't that, it was that their modifications didn't result in something good.

I was pretty disgusted all the way through this ep. And Jesus - I felt embarrassed for Rick Bayless when they saw those Quickfire things (and thought how fucking lucky they all were that it was Bayless judging and not Bourdain - if you'd treated a challenge of his with such disrespect you'd still be waking up in the middle of the night screaming from flashbacks.)

It was a badly designed challenge, I think, coming right after another catering type event. But their attitudes were appalling, and the general level of crap they put out there.

(Aside - did they not have grills at the party? I'll bet you could have put those corn dogs on the grill for a few minutes and come up with something worth eating. Idiots. But if they didn't have grills, why not? Has there ever been a block party without one?)

(Aside - did they not have grills at the party? I'll bet you could have put those corn dogs on the grill for a few minutes and come up with something worth eating. Idiots. But if they didn't have grills, why not? Has there ever been a block party without one?)

They showed some of the neighborhood folk working some grills. But I guess they didn't tell the chefs that would be an option for cooking onsite?

Or maybe the chefs weren't allowed to have grills.

I don't see a problem with modifying classics for a challenge like this - just do it well.

At a certain point, though, you're not making a Waldorf salad any more, and you should stop calling it that. It's like when a movie studio buys a book property they don't know what to do with and winds up releasing something totally unrelated to the original source material with the same title - why bother keeping the title if you've completely rewritten the story? All it does is annoy the fans of the original, no matter how good the thing you actually made was.

Or people on epicurious.com who feel the need to review recipes by saying "Well, I used shrimp instead of pork loin and Old Bay instead of chili powder, and I left out the jalapenos, and grilled everything instead of poaching it. I wouldn't make this again."

At a certain point, though, you're not making a Waldorf salad any more, and you should stop calling it that.

This. What you choose to call something leads to a certain expectation. It's like Casey's coq au vin last season. (It was Casey, right?) The judges seemed to think the chicken was good but it wasn't coq au vin. When you do something radical, you run the risk of appearing to not know what you're talking about.

Though sometimes it really is because you don't know what you're talking about. The worst offender ever of clueless chefness (even this TC season's "piccata" is a distant second) was the "cassoulet" on Hell's Kitchen. It was mac and cheese, which isn't even remotely close to cassoulet except for the occasional letters those words have in common.