Freshly Made

Hey, the Editor's Food Blog on Epicurious is pretty great - it's full of interesting news tidbits, cookbook-related amuse-bouches and crusty opinions. Seems to be pretty down to earth, which is a nice change from the zillions of flogs (food/foodie-blogs) out there gasping over the miracle of fava beans or recounting every last thing they put in their mouth over the course of the day. For sure, I loved the heads-up on Pimp My Snack, a website devoted to making humungoid doppelgangers of Oreos and reasonable facimiles of Big Macs. Oh baby, I love it! Seems like there's a whole heck of a lot of people out there who like nothing more than spending a day scraping out forty packs of Reese Peanut Butter Cups, melting down the chocolate and creating, like a phoenix rising out of the ashes, a Guinness Book of World Records'-like spectacle. The only thing is I am totally unfamiliar with are English junk foods, a realization that causes me a significant amount of sadness and rising determination to taste these items. Rainbow Drops? Twiglets? Faerie Cakes? I think my fellow Canadians should rise to the challenge and begin creating gigantic Wagon Wheels and Coffee Crisps (yes, I know these are English sweets too, but I miss 'em). But I gotta say that the first pimped snack I saw was a gigantic gummy bear created by a guy called Matt. This killer snack was comprised of layers 'n layers of melted gummy bears poured into an empty animal cracker tub. Way to go Matt!

You know, I was enjoying Top Chef for brief moments here and there, despite so many flaws in the show. You know what I'm talking about - Tom Colicchio looks like a serial killer - a serial killer with no personality, which, I guess, is a given in most criminal cases. Why didn't they just get Tim Gunne to walk around the kitchen? I can just see Tim standing in front of Candice's crazy erotic cookie underwear going, "Hmmm, Candice, nobody wears thigh-high bikinis anymore. And what is going on with that frosting?!? It appears to be...DRIPPING". Gail Simmons' pretend tough remarks come off as incredibly nitpicky and never seem to get to the heart of the matter. And Katie Joel...eek! I feel that she is Carson Daly's younger sister but she appears to believe that she is Carson Daly's mother. They could have saved a lot of cash by balancing a two by four on a pair of Jimmy Choos. The producers of this show have orchestrated this show in such a nakedly obvious and clumsy way that it has just left me with a bad taste in my mouth and a hole in my TV with the remote sticking out of it. For starters, Dave got shafted last night. I mean, people liked the flavors in his dishes! They liked the egg rolls, they liked the shrimp, they liked the steak. When Tom told him he could have won the Cirque du Soleil challenge if only he had produced one more dish, you could see, nay, feel in your very guts the sheer glee in Tom's voice when he realized that he could finally tell this guy where he could stick his eggrolls. There was so much bad spirit and ill will, so much goading in an attempt to draw shame from the chefs who were cut that last night I was positively disgusted by it all. To me, flavor is paramount. All over the world, people eat stuff that's brown, grey, stewed for hours, limp and covered in sauce, but it TASTES BLOODY GOOD. That's why people eat! To be a top chef do you need to be completely snobby and obsessed with image? Well, Emeril may be looked down upon by a lot of haute cuisine type chefs but I'm sure he makes a whole hell of a lot of people happy instead of intimidating the crap out of them. Stupid Top Chef.