I finished the 3rd episode this season and am the only person a little disappointed with this group? So if you haven’t guessed, I have a lot of grousing to do. First off, I am so sick of Andrew and his smack talk. Can he please be the next one to go?

This week’s quick fire challenge was to make fine dining tacos. Not many of them seemed to really branch out in order to make tacos into fine dining. But Richard seemed to impress Rick Bayless (this week’s guest judge) with a jicama shelled taco. Richard seemed to deserve to win because he seemed to pair traditional flavors with a cool twist.

The chefs got to split themselves into teams for this week’s challenge and I thought that in itself was very interesting. This week’s elimination challenge was to cook for a block party and to get the food from the neighborhood’s own pantries. So the chefs go door to door to get food and some of them thought that the people who be wary about letting in strangers. This was a huge block party and there was TV vans and cameras on the block. I have a feeling that all the neighbors were warned prepared to have their doors knocked on. Then the red team went to a house with a woman with a large well stocked pantry and seemed shocked. Maybe this just strikes close to home but come on, your a chef. You have a well stocked kitchen, don’t you?

Nikki is really get on my nerves also. She wasn’t sure about how she could melt down Velveeta in a sauce and it not dry out. Is she really a chef? Then, for a 2nd week in a row, she is trying to camouflage another bad dish and fails. Luckily for her she was on the (narrowly) winning team. Richard, who had immunity, was called on the carpet for making a dish that wasn’t paella and then calling paella. I think that the only reason the blue team won was that fruit crumble with the sweet wonton that Stephanie came up with. Let me just interject here, a sweet wonton was so impressive? I have been making those and variations upon them for 2 years, yet I digress.

I found the pompous nature of the red team galling. I understand thinking that you were better than the other team but they couldn’t come up with one single reason that they were in the room as the losing team. They already knew that their corn dogs were soggy even if they didn’t realize that their Waldorf salad wasn’t crisp and that their pasta salad left something to be desired. I was applauding (on the inside, I had napping kids) when Tom told them that if they didn’t taste anything wrong with their food that they all had bad pallets. Then Andrew (I believe) said that if he was kicked out that security was going to have to take him out and that this was his house. I was blown away that someone did say something to him much less that they didn’t kick him out.

But, alas our corn dog maker, Erik, got kick to the curb and didn’t seem surprised at all.

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