Jersey Housewife Axed in Farmhouse Slaughter
My name is Joshua David Stein. I write a hugely influential weekly column for Gawker.com about the television show Top Chef.
The bilious stank still in my mouth from last week's introduction of new judge worst person Toby Young, the porridgey Voldemort of butchered bon mots, I was unsure if Top Chef had been spoiled forever. Happily, as a species we have a short memory and little taste for disaster. (Recession, what recession? Spend! Spend! Spend!) I was back on the juice this week.
The Quickfire challenge was the usual undignified fifteen minute fuck fest. Chefs were asked to create a meal using shitty canned ingredients, something they've been asked to do many times before. The only difference was this week there was apparently no sponsor so the only lingering shots were closeups of the Monogram logo on the stove and of Leah gazing adoringly at the bulge in Hosea's pants. The only good that came out of these fifteen minutes of sadness was we got to see Hung, the winner of Season 3, who, like Mickey Rourke in the Wrestler, reminded us of how good it was back when we didn't know what was to follow.
The elimination challenge was a trip to Blue Hill Stone Barns, the Rockefeller estate built like a Normandy farmhouse that now houses Dan Barber's really fucking good restaurant Blue Hill. (Sadly, booked for V-day.) Teams were divided into protein groups: lamb, chicken and pork. They were given dead but rather unbroken down corpses of their proteins: Whole chickens with pimply skin, Googly eye red lamb face, Pig snout sad eye dead gone. No blink. Stare stare. Sorry state. The chefs fed the farmers.
But let's cut the bullshit and get to the chase: Aryan, the idiot savant, our Little Man Tate, whose horrendous visage alternated between Jackie O (weirdly hot sometimes!) and a cancerous growth, tried to butcher lamb. Chef's call this breaking down. You can learn how to do it at Marlow & Daughters or through flickr. Aryan, beast of the feckless few, had no idea how to do this. So she ruined her team's dish by tenderizing and generally bashing the living fuck out this dead baby lamb so freshly wrung from the ranks of the living. Fun fact: She was yelling "Abortion is Murder" in her head as she did it. In so many challenges in the recent past, Aryan was saved by the charity in some cases and ineptitude in others of her fellow competitors. It is nice to see her variable for suck finally isolated, identified and sent home.
In other news, Hosea and Leah! Fucking cut it out, you two! Hosea, you have a girlfriend (although I strongly think you probably don't any longer) and you are on television and she is probably watching you! Leah, do you really want to be the other woman? Uncool. Alas what is done is done. We are experiencing your midsummer's night folly in the white out midst of the blizzard present. But we can still see you and your ex can too! There's film in them thar cameras, for chrissakes!
[Thanks to Gawker's own video guru Michael H. Byhoff for the video.]