Happy Thanksgiving Eve to all fans of food, frivolity and reality TV! Why not ditch the relatives and the feast-prepping chores for an hour or so, and join our Top Chef commenter live blog? You'll be thankful you did!

To get a seat at our little banquet of banter, you won't need to go over the river or through the woods—just over to the TV and onto the couch. On your way there, you may want to swipe a glass and a bottle of Thanksgiving wine from the kitchen. Once the show starts (on Bravo, at 10 pm Eastern), we'll all use the comments section below this post to converse and quip and opine and snark and make merry and spy grandmother's cap and all that good stuff. Hurrah for the fun!

Our last live blog had both fun and funny commentary aplenty. As evidence of this, I've collected a few of my favorite comments. Here are some more highlights:

  • Commenter The_Obvious offered up this theory about the origin of Tom's soul patch: "He used to have a unibrow, but that extra piece of brow migrated south to his chin."
  • After Padma Lakshmi introduced the quickfire challenge with a five-year-old catchphrase from Snakes on a Plane, Formerly-Mymoustache wondered :"When they do a Barbeque episode, will she shout ‘Where's the beef?'"
  • Several commenters who'd eaten rattlesnake meat described the experience. The consensus? It actually tastes like chicken. Who'd have guessed?
  • The elimination challenge produced not just one, but two ugly cakes. Commenter miltonista noted that Heather's cake resembled "Jabba the Hut as a bride," while robina the first described Dakota's cake as "three layers of brightly colored sadness."
  • We were all bummed out when the bearded, burly and beloved Keith—whom we'd fondly nicknamed "Black Santa"—got the boot after several of his teammates accused him of screwing things up. As this went down, Pop Socket lamented: "Black Santa is being thrown under the sleigh!"

Meanwhile, I've watched what went down on the preview clips of tonight's episode. Here's a sampling of what's in store:

  • In the quickfire challenge, the chefs will have to cook with extremely hot chili peppers. Paul Qui will choose a "ghost pepper" that has a spicy-heat rating of 1 million on the Scoville Scale—which equates to a rating of "Hot Hot Hot" on the Buster Poindexter Scale.
  • Padma will ride out in front of the crowd on horseback, prompting a starry-eyed Chris Crary to gush: "Seeing Padma on a horse is like looking at Fabio on the cover of a romance novel, with his hair blowing in the wind." This may be the most bizarre simile in the history of similes.
  • The elimination challenge will be a chili cookoff guest-judged by Tex-Mex chefs Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken, experts on tamales of the too-hot variety.

So it looks like we've got plenty of Mexican-themed fare on tap to get us all in that Thanksgiving mood. ¡Hurra por el pastel de calabaza! And on that note, I'm gonna go swipe some Thanksgiving wine and head down to the comments section. I'll see you there!