Welcome to the first installment of the Slashfood Top Chef recapped, a regular post that I'll be writing following each episode this season (barring any Tivo emergencies). I love Top Chef and tend to get really into it, so the posts will likely feature my own completely biased but hopefully interesting commentary, and I'd really like for them to serve as a jumping point for everyone to discuss favorites, who's hot (Padma), who's lame, etc. So let's begin with the first episode.

First things first: lesbian couple on the show! I'm totally rooting for them, and consequently rooting against Spike, who seemed most uncomfortable with the idea. It's unclear whether more gay contestants will be revealed later, but I wouldn't be surprised. One member of the couple, Jennifer sports the same hairstyle as Richard, and both clearly knock-off last season's Dale. Richard noticed = major drama (I wish). Seriously though, there is some major girl power this season and I love it.

On to the food. The deep-dish pizza Quickfire Challenge was an obvious but fitting choice, given the Chicago setting. That said, I wasn't too impressed with the pizzas that the contestants conjured. Dale, who is already establishing himself as the confident, out-to-get-you Hung of this season, put it only slightly too harshly when he said that everyone else's dishes looked horrible. The only one I would have been really interested to taste was Richard's with peaches and syrup.

The end of the season for a show like Bravo's Top Chef is always bittersweet. Like a good chocolate, you want to finish it off, but you also sort of wish that it could go on. Come to think of it, this season might be more like the "finishing off" chocolate, since there has been so much drama that it will almost be a relief to see it end. Almost.

Last night was the first part of the show's season finale and it started off by giving viewers a sneak peek into what the chefs have been doing for the past few months during the break between the main taping and the filming of the finale. Marcel and Sam spent the time practicing their technique, with Marcel trying to learn as much as possible about new ingredients and presentations and Sam learning about pastry, which he felt was a weak spot in his training. Elia and Ilan each spent time learning about Hawaiian food, but neither actively tried to learn as much new information as their competitors.

After the high level of drama last week on Bravo's Top Chef, it was a relief to see the chefs acting a bit less aggressively, though the tension was clearly still present. Marcel is a bit of an outcast from the men's apartment because the other guys, with the possible exception of Michael who is so laid back that he is probably just going with the crowd because it is the easiest thing to do, dislike him so much. He spent a bit of time on the roof of the building at the beginning of the episode composing a little rap/poem to try and clear his mind and enable himself to focus. He wasn't the only one trying to buckle down at this point. Elia is the only woman still cooking in this competition and she clearly wants to win it.

The competition kicked off with the quickfire challenge. This week, the chefs had to come up with a Kraft Gourmet Snack, a snack/small plate that used either mayonnaise, Italian dressing or BBQ sauce in some way. There was a bit of grumbling, primarily about the prospect of using mayo in a dish, but the chefs put out some impressive combinations in just 30 minutes.

New year, new episode of Bravo's Top Chef. The season picked up again this week with only seven of the original fifteen competitors still in the competition. At this point, the chefs have been living together for several weeks and, as in many situations where you have a group of type-A personalities, things are getting a little tense. Everyone in the group seems to oscillate back and forth between feeling compelled to act as a team trying to screw over everyone else so that they, as individuals, can get ahead. It makes things more interesting from a dramatic standpoint, but the chefs really need to get a grip on their tempers if they want to end up as Top Chef.

As the episode started out, one of the first things that we got to see was that Michael had a wisdom tooth pulled. He made it sound like he went to a less-than-reputable individual for the procedure, but seemed to be getting along fine aside from the pain and swelling. Medicated, Michael was much less feisty than usual. He noted that he hoped the challenges weren't too long and the rest of the tired-looking competitors agreed.

Finally! Bravo's Top Chef was back on schedule with a new episode this week and now that the show had only nine chefs, there was more individual coverage of each one and we got to see everyone's dishes, which was sometimes a bit of a problem early in the season, especially with the quickfire challenges.

The theme of this week's episode was Raw and Cooked and the underlying theme seemed to be about technology and what chefs could do when there wasn't a lot of it around. For the quickfire challenge, the chefs were taken down to the Redondo Beach Farmer's Market and told that they had to create a mouthwatering, filling dish using entirely raw ingredients. They had a budget of $20 to spend at the marked and were then given 30 minutes in the kitchen to "cook" their food. They were also introduced to the guest judge, Raphael Lunetta, the chef at Jiraffe.

When you were in school and didn't get along with someone, parents and teaches probably told you that in the "real world" you have to try to get along with people you don't like because you often have to work with them no matter what your personal feelings are. Reality TV might not exactly be the "real" world, but it is becoming more clear that not all of the contestants had this lesson when they were growing up. On this week's episode of Bravo's Top Chef, the camera spent a lot of time on the personal interactions of the cooks, as well as filming the cooking itself.

This was a Thanksgiving themed episode, so it was particularly appropriate for this week despite the fact that it was probably filmed earlier this summer. For the quickfire challenge, chef Tom Colicchio served as the judge and the contestants were given only 15 minutes to create a "tasty" dish using three different canned ingredients. There was no time for anyone to utter more than one or two words of complaint as everyone got down to cooking.

If you recall from last week's episode of Bravo's Top Chef, there was no elimination and the chefs were told that they were going to be on probation. Some of the contestants may have been bending the rules about what ingredients they could use in the kitchen, not to mention the lapses in judgment made by chefs in earlier episodes, and others were suspicious enough to create a very tense situation that even the judges couldn't resolve quickly. As such, the chefs in this episode were all on parole, which meant that Tom Colicchio stayed in the kitchen to supervise. The result was that we got to see his reactions to the dishes much more clearly, though the chefs did not seem to be too affected by his presence.

This punishment, of sorts, was leftover from the previous week and coincidentally, the theme of this episode was also leftovers. Don't get too excited, though. The odds are that nothing they made would work out with the leftovers from Thanksgiving next week.

This week's episode of Bravo's Top Chef introduced a couple of elements that we saw a lot of last season: junk food and kids. The two did not really tie in together, but it was interesting to see how this season's competitors responded to these challenges, as compared with the last group of potential Top Chefs.

Junk food came in to play during the quickfire challenge, where the chefs were allowed to pick a total of four items from two vending machines as the ingredients to prepare an amuse bouche. The guest judge for this episode was Susanna Goin, the head chef of Lucques and AOC in Los Angeles. She is known for simple, yet innovative, dishes, so she was a good choice as a judge to evaluate what the chefs could do with relatively common "ingredients."

Judging from the promos that we aired in the week leading up to this week's episode of Bravo's Top Chef, the show promised to be a good one. Then again, what reality show doesn't heavily advertise the conflicts that cast members have? At least we are starting to get to know all the competitors better and can pick out some of the chefs that seem to be leading the pack.

The chefs had a hard time with this week's quickfire challenge. Padma started out by saying that only 38% of Americans eat in fine dining restaurants at that it is important for a top chef to be well rounded and able to cater to different audiences. Their challenge was to create an original ice cream flavor to be served to beach-goers in Los Angeles. With the exception of the pastry chef, Marissa, no one seemed to have ever made ice cream before, but after seeing some of the flavor combinations, you would have thought that they had never eaten ice cream before, either.

Only one week into season two of Bravo's Top Chef and things are already getting a lot more interesting, primarily because we are getting to know the players a little bit better. The honeymoon seemed to wear off quickly, as at the start of the show everyone agreed that they really felt like they were in a competition now that someone had been asked to pack their knives and go.

This week, things started off as usual with a quickfire challenge, though this one required a 4:30 am wakeup call. All the chefs headed off to the Los Angeles fish market where they were given $100 to pick out fish for sushi. Once they returned to the kitchen, they were given 30 minutes to prepare a dish for the guest judge, Chef Hiroshi Shima, an expert in the field.

I know I'm not alone when I say that I was a big fan of the first season of Bravo's Top Chef, the culinary competition that had drama, laughs and - most importantly - food. It was such a success that the network decided to film a second season. Next week, on October 18th, Top Chef Season 2 will premier with a new host, Padma Lakshmi, and a whole new cast.

The competitors in the first round were good, and a few were even great, but as with most reality shows that require some degree of skill or talent, the participants tend to get a little bit better in each round. Of course, along with the talent comes the drama, as producers get better at finding people who will create some conflict, though it will be hard to top the Tiffani/Dave drama from last season.

Is anyone else looking forward to the show? Don't forget that if you miss an episode, I'll be doing a recap right here on the following day!

After weeks of challenges that forced chefs to do things like use microwaves and shop in convenience stores, the cooking got serious in the second half of the Top Chef finale and the two finalists, Harold and Tiffani, were finally asked to show the judges their full range of culinary abilities - sans gimmicks. Working separate kitchens at the MGM Grand, Harold and Tiffani had to create 5-course tasting menus to feed eight prestigious judges.

There was only one twist to the episode. Since both chefs needed help to prepare their meals, Dave, Stephen, LeeAnne and Miguel were brought back in to help out. Instead of assigning them to one of the chefs, they were asked to pick whose team they would prefer to be on. Dave, LeeAnne and Miguel all said they wanted to cook for Harold, while Stephen picked Tiffani. Judging from his comment of "Let's keep things interesting" when he said Tiffani's name, it was clear that he would rather have worked with Harold, but recognized that someone would have to be on Tiff's team. Harold, forced to choose between Dave and Miguel, had them draw knives to see what team they would join and Dave ended up with Stephen and Tiffani.

This was the first challenge in Bravo's Top Chef competition where everyone truly had to work together. The task was certainly the largest to date, though last week's restaurant design challenge was not at all easy. The quickfire and main challenges were combined, for this episode, though the chefs did not know that when they started out. If they had, things would have gone a little differently.

Upon arriving at the quickfire challenge, the chefs were introduced to Scott and Scott, a gay couple that would be having their commitment ceremony very soon. They were asked to create a wedding menu for 100 people with 5 courses, including an hors d'oeuvre that used prawns and a wedding cake, all on a $3,000 budget.  "The Scotts" asked for something with an Asian flair. Everyone had imaginative ideas, though the other chefs criticized Dave's menu for being too simplistic. Dave, on the other hand, was the only one who had substantial catering experience and he had purposely designed his menu to be relatively simple and full of dishes that almost anyone would enjoy. In the end, the Scotts choose LeeAnne's menu (after her joke about being the only actual Asian competitor), which was as follows:

After a trying experience last week with microwaved food, the Top Chef chefs again found themselves preparing food outside of their element - both literally and figuratively. Instead of working in the kitchen, plating and serving, the chefs were sent out to San Francisco's Mission District to peddle their wares as street food. In addition to mingling with the people, the chefs had to focus on ethnic flavors throughout both tasks in the episode and in doing so, found that they were further from their comfort zone than they realized.

The quickfire challenge was designed to test the chefs' ability to recognize ingredients without seeing them. I agree with the comments that Tom Colicchio, one of the judges, made on his blog - namely, that the challenge was not really representational of their ability to recognize ingredients because the ingredients chosen were very exotic. Guest chef and judge Mike Yakura, head chef at Le Colonial, a French-Vietnamese restaurant, choose ingredients to taste that some of the chefs had never before worked with. Expecting that all chefs should know all possible ingredients is unrealistic, if not impossible, and the competitors did not do terribly well. Out of the 20 ingredients - which included longan, tamarind, hibiscus extract, chili paste, nopal, konnyaku, durian and nato - the chefs tasted, Tiffani and Miguel only identified 1, LeeAnne, Harold, Lisa and Stephen identified 3, and Andrea identified 4. Andrea, winning the challenge, received immunity.

The second episode of Top Chef ran Wednesday night on Bravo. The bulk of the episode took place inside a fetish shop in San Francisco, since the main challenge involved making a sexy dessert. It was interesting to see some of the contestants cutting loose among the latex-clad party goers - one of which was RuPaul - while others were clearly out of their comfort zone. But as usual, there were two challenges on which the contestants were judged.

The first, quick challenge for immunity, dealt with presentation and the chefs were asked to make a fruit plate in 30 minutes. Elizabeth Faulkner of San Francisco's Citizen Cake served as the judge for this challenge. Some of the chefs really didn't seem to understand that not only were they making a fruit plate, but that they were competing against other people, so originality was important. Half of the chefs had garnished their plates with pineapple tops, which Ms. Faulkner didn't like, and the majority of the other plates looked very similar. She criticized some plates for looking like they were part of a buffet. The three top plates were Cynthia's, which was minimalist and used papaya seeds as a garnish, Harold's, which showcased his knife skills, and Stephen's, which used fruit and herb combinations served in espresso cups. Stephen won purely on originality; his presentation was gorgeous.