It’s damned intimidating to step into the shoes of Mike Farley on one of his food-related blog shows, given his long and profound history in writing up the adventures of Gordon Ramsey for Premium Hollywood, but the man has more than earned himself a vacation (as has his wife, for that matter), which is why I’m more than willing to blog both this series and “Hell’s Kitchen” for him in his absence.
First, however, an admission: not only did I miss the premiere episode of this, the fourth season of “The Next Food Network Star,” but I’d also missed every episode of the preceding three seasons. Or, to be more precise, I didn’t even know there was such a show as “The Next Food Network Star.” Fortunately, however, my wife and I are easily suckered into these things if we just sit down and give them a chance, so it was easy to convince her to join me on this viewing experience.
This week’s challenge found Robert Irvine (“Dinner Impossible”) waking the contestants up at 3 AM and sending them on a quest for ingredients at various specialty food shops while testing their culinary knowledge. The guys and gals were divided into three teams of three…
Blue Team: Lisa, Nipa, and Shane
Green Team: Jeffrey, Kelsey, and Kevin
Gray Team: Aaron, Adam, and Jennifer
…and instructed to go on a quest for their ingredients. At each stop – one for bread, one for meat, one for cheese – they would be asked a question, and if they got the question right, they’d be able to pick their ingredient and head off to their next stop. If they got it wrong, however, a member of the team had to earn their ingredient by doing some sort of food prep. So, okay, the delay is is painful, but at least it’s educational, right? Plus, this is a really important challenge because the winner gets to appear in a piece in USA Today’s Weekend Edition.
The first clue that the Blue Team is going to have a problem comes when Nipa takes for-freaking-ever to get ready, with the other two teams long gone before she ever emerges from the bedroom, but the Green Team loses momentum themselves when they get their first question wrong and Kevin gets stuck rolling baguettes for his penance. The back-and-forth between the three teams as they answer questions, select ingredients, and perform tasks is done in such a rapid-fire fashion that you can’t take your eyes off the screen, with nice side moments like Shane being incredulous about knowing one of the answers from having watched Food Network, or Adam being shocked that his days as a waiter at a Spanish restaurant have given him the answer to one of the questions. In the end, the Gray Team wins the ingredient hunt, with the Blue Team managing to pull into second place while pointing and laughing at the last-placing Green Team. No-one’s really laughing, however, when Robert Irvine reveals that the teams are required to use the various ingredients they’ve accumulated – all of them – in their respective brunches that they’ll be making aboard a train on the Morristown and Erie Railway!
The Gray Team offer up French toast (Jennifer), sunnyside up eggs with ricotta cheese (Adam), and a “kicked-up” steak with a bit of orange glaze (Aaron), but Adam finds little favor with his undercooked eggs. The Blue Team have selected lamb as their meat, so Nipa steps up and decides to bring her Indian heritage to the forefront by spicing things up a bit, while Lisa works up her own interpretation of French toast using a baguette and Shane gets a bit lazy by simply offering up a salad. Lastly, the Green Team suffer a setback in the kitchen when they have some issues over the number of plates available to them, but they manage to produce a crostini with fresh mozzarella (Kevin), a duck salad (Kelsey), and a bourbon bread pudding (Shane). The opinions of the selection committee are wide and varied throughout the various presentations, but it’s clear that Aaron has impressed most everyone with both his cheery attitude and his fantastic food.
The grand finale features one particularly shocking moment: Nipa’s abrupt departure. It’s a really bizarre move on her part, since it comes as the committee is universally praising the uniqueness that she brings to the group, and all things considered, I personally agreed with the suggestion that, were she already a Food Network star, they wouldn’t have put up with such shenanigans. As such, I was shocked when they opted to give her a pass and kick Kevin to the curb instead. Granted, the guy came off as kind of a tool, and he was talking a game that didn’t make a whole lot of sense (seriously, how does the combination of figs, honey, and fresh mozzarella give the menu a “fresh, sexy twist”?), but I felt like Nipa got rewarded for her diva-like behavior, and that sucked.
Well, there you go: Episode 2 in a nutshell. Dammit, Mike, now you’ve gotten me hooked!
