I've had my iPhone 3Gs for a month or so now, and of course I'm loving it. Running the battery down to the dregs, playing with the voice-recognition of the Google app, tossing enemies around in Knights Onrush, and of course posting to Twitter. Sometimes I even call people with it.

But before getting my Apple fix, I'd given serious attention--if not consideration--to Android phones. I like Google. I like competition. And there's a lot of geek chatter in praise of the Android operating system.

I gotta say, I just don't get the hype.

Android, to me, suffers from the same back-patting niche marketing as Linux. I know my way around technology reasonably well, but I don't know a kernel from a piece of popcorn. An open-source operating system isn't that much of an attraction to me, and I have yet to really hear a cogent argument for what else Android can do that iPhone 3.0 can't.

I'm gonna break it to you, Google developers. Most people don't really know how to modify computer settings. Of those people, I'd venture to guess that most don't want to learn how to modify settings in a complex or elegant way. Sure--I do sometimes, but not to the point that I want to void my warranty and jailbreak my iPhone.

I'm not a consumer who's looking for a project. Don't tell me what I could do with an open-source OS if only I knew what the hell I was doing in a computer's (or smartphone's) guts. Tell me what it will look like and what it'll do for me right out of the box. Say what you will about Apple, but they package their product slickly and show you what it'll do as soon as you charge it up. If I can't install third-party apps, boo hoo. There are already more apps than I'd ever need.

Ultimately, Android just doesn't speak to me except that the name sounds cool. If I want the Android name, I'll buy a watch. All I have to do then is set the time and I'm ready to roll.

[Ed.--Thanks again to Jessica Underwood for topping off a long night of TV viewing with a great recap. Be sure to leave a comment here or shoot her an @reply at twitter.com/junderwood to say thanks!]

As you may have noticed, your usual bard is out of commission today. But no worries, Kyle will be back to business as usual just as soon as he unpacks his computer. In the meantime, I've offered to pinch hit and hopefully keep pace with the level of wit and quip that you have become accustomed.

That's not the only change in the Top Chef arena today. No sirree, hold onto your hats - today's episode will offer you the usual cast of characters, along with some hearty surprises.

The first surprise - no one makes a ceviche! No, no, don't be scared. This is still the same Top Chef we know and love. We still have: duos of scallops, foams, and risottos on the menu for this evening. Okay, good. Just keep breathing into the bag.

Before we jump into the Quickfire, there's something else that's missing that must be noted. It looks like the cast ees meesing a Frenchman. Alas, Mattin has been sent off to the other wing of the Top Chef mansion where the kicked-off chefs are tossed to stew about what they did wrong and share stories about "how this isn't the last time that America will hear from them."

But I guess our leetle Frenchman has not yet packed his bags. Mike Isabella takes it upon himself to uncover some goodies. And when I say "goodies," I mean nearly 50 red bandanas – seesh, those things multiply like bunnies, or Mattin had hopes of running away to become a magician while in Sin City. I'm hoping a veil dance was never in the cards.

Isabella does what any self-respecting camera hog would do, he decides to run around the house telling everyone to don a bandana in remembrance of their fallen Frenchie. (No, Kyle, no one wore it Tupac style.)

Robin (our most cougariffic contestant) had to beg Isabella to share. Isabella wasn't ready to play nice with Lady Cougar. Sounds like he, along with the rest of the chefs, believes Robin's cooking on borrowed time.

Ruh-roh.

Generally, when a chef takes that much bashing (or shows that much weakness) within the first 5 minutes of the show, they better have their bags packed (or Isabella will dig though them looking for ways to accessories his chef coat).

And we're off to the QF...

Walking into the Top Chef kitchen, the chefs are greeted by James Beard Award Winner, Chef Michelle Bernstein and Padma (in pants!).

Padma is forced to reuse the Las Vegas "Sin City" cliché. Today's QF will be to create something inspired by your personal battles as a chef to cook while fighting your inner "angel" and "devil." This is not, however, to be confused with “cooking something that represents a personal vice of yours” - no way - that is COMPLETLY different.

The winner gets immunity. And go.

Ash doesn't take long to utter one of my favorite phrases of the episode: "I've decided to make a duo of custards...I could win a Quickfire with two custards!" Ash, as we know has a bit of a history with custard (see the Potato/Peel QF).

Eli tells us he wants to do scallops, two ways. Eli, did you not get the memo? Dees ees Top Chef, not Top Escallop (sorry, past season ref).

Meanwhile, Ash is fighting with his custards. He ends up with "kind of heated eggs" – yum!

Cue the montage of chefs stuffing food into metal rings, beads of sweat dripping precariously close to Padma's food (although I'm pretty sure we all knew that was how Howie flavored all his dishes in season 3), and boom! Utensils down! Hands up! Walk away from the food!

Highlights:

Ginger Santa makes a slamming hunk of bacon.

Ron (surprise!) does Chilean sea bass. And the fish bones nearly kill the guest judge. I guess that’s the devil part?

Ashley makes scallops two ways (drink!).

Jennifer makes scallops two ways (drink!).

Ash serves only one custard but tells Chef Bernstein the coffee custard was DELICIOUS in his head. He’s just adorable – not Ginger Santa adorable – but definitely up there.

Robin again tells us about her battle with cancer.

Laurine makes something forgettable (drink!).

Isabella makes something Greek (drink!).

In the end, Ash, Bryan, and Laurine are on the bottom.

The other Voltaggio brother, Eli, and Robin (SURPRISE!) are on top.

The winner and immune chef is…drum roll…ROBIN! The cougar rises victorious. But wait, now who’s going home?

Eli is noticeably peeved and makes fun of Robin for playing "yhe cancer card" – now that’s bad karma buddy.

Bring on the Magic Act...

Ginger Santa wets himself a bit when he sees Penn and Teller are guest judges. GS tells the camera how awesome they are because they deconstruct magic, all the while, making it better…foreshadowing? Maybe – but first a magic trick...

Okay, back to the cooking show. Padma tells the cheftestants that their task is to deconstruct a classic dish. A quick camera pan to Michael V. shows him straining to keep his man-posure and not smile and jump up and down like a little schoolgirl.

For those new to the cult of Top Chef – deconstructed food refers to the taking apart of the elements of a dish, serving them in a new and inspiring way, but still keeping all the flavor profiles in tack so that the diner still receives the original feel of the dish.

Deconstruction has traditionally been a saving grace and a nail in the coffin for Cheftestants Past. Just last episode Isabella served a deconstructed béarnaise. It’s not uncommon for an uninspired chef to just serve something tired and call it "deconstructed" and hope for gourmet points.

Let’s see who really knows how to deconstruct a classic dish…

Chefs pull knives:

• Jennifer – Meat Lasagna
  
• Michael V. – Caesar Salad
  
• Ash – Shepard’s Pie
  
• Robin – New England Clam Chowder
  
• Eli – Sweet & Sour Pork
  
• Laurine – Fish & Chips
  
• Kevin – Chicken Molé Negro
  
• Bryan – Ruben
  
• Isabella – Eggs Florentine
  
• Ashley – Pot Roast
  
• Ron – Paella
  

With the knives safely out of reach, Padma tells the chefs they will be cooking for Toby Young, the Simon Cowell of food.

Off to Whole Foods, then 2 hours to prep...

There's the usual back and forth between chefs thinking they got this in the bag. That role will be played by Ron today, who screamed "paella" through a gaping smile and with the enthusiasm of a kid who got to ride the big bus for the first time. Ron then tells the butcher that "he’s got this in the bag"... ruh-roh.

Bryan is being his usual self and explains to the camera in monotone wonderment about how he is going to cook tuna like you would cook a Rueben. By the way, did you know he has won 3 Elimination challenges so far? All kidding aside, I do like Bryan. The Voltaggio brothers are the Mario and Luigi to my Top Chef this season.

Jennifer is showing some stress and second thoughts as she wanders the aisles of Whole Foods – which Eli is quick to jump on. But Ginger Santa is in the background of that scene smiling a big Santa grin and before I know it, all is right in the world.

Isabella and Ash have a mildly creepy exchange over the burners in the TC kitchen. The word "Sunshine" used as a term of endearment is thrown around a bit too generously. However, we do learn that Isabella is flying blind in this challenge. I guess he fell asleep in class on the day in cooking school that they learned what eggs Florentine are exactly. But no biggy! He's Isabella. He'll be fine. Eggs Florentine...it's Greek, right?

Cue Michael V. wielding a butcher knife. This kid has got some intense breakdown skills - as witnessed last episode by Jennifer. I agree with Kyle, they are a steaming ball of sex waiting to explode. And what? He’s baking his own bread?! If Jennifer wasn’t so busy flipping out, she would probably be on him in the back coolers by this point.

Ginger Santa feels like he has been given a second chance. Apparently, he thinks his mole from last week was a disaster. I don’t know which dude ranch he was on, but just because you didn’t win does not mean you’re horrible. Cheer up, Santa! The judges thought your dish was pretty last week, remember? Either way, GS is ready to hit it out of the park this week with mole, take two.

Jennifer pulls the "I'm a classically trained chef, I can't do deconstructed" nonsense in the confessional. Come on girl, pull it together! Where’s the fire we saw when you were running that military kitchen in our GO AMERICA! themed episode? Do you need to go watch Michael Voltaggio breakdown a whole chicken with his bare hands to get you back in the game? Whatever you got to do, get on it, girl. You can't go home yet!

Cut to Ron talking some utter nonsense. Half is bleeped out and half is nonsensical. All I heard was, "I teenk I gonna win." Eli is quick to point out in his confessional that Ron has no idea what he's doing.

When did Eli become the villain? Wait, since when did Eli get screentime? And wait! Where the hell is Lady Ben Folds? Black is white, good is bad, Top Chef is going crazy. Ginger Santa, save us all!

And now for your slapstick portion of the episode…

Eli is apparently emotionally attached to his own pressure cooker (and he thinks Ron is crazy). So he opts to use the most beat-up piece of kitchen gadgetry I've ever seen, instead (as Ash points out) of one of the many sparkly, new pressure cookers in the back. Eli's cooker is held together by duct tape for crying out loud!

Oh my gosh, it's Ashley (drink!). She has come out of the B-roll footage to tell us something about deconstructing pot roast and how she grew up poor...or that she's gay...or something. I couldn't hear her over Ron screaming "PAELLA!" and Eli's pressure cooker finally exploding all over the set.

Robin the Cougar decides to run wild with her immunity. She drew clam chowder, yet somehow arrives at the idea that fennel flan would be a solid dish. She has also decided that she needs to give her own play-by-play out loud while she cooks – which pisses off nearby Laurine to no end.

Laurine is about to explode all over Lady Cougar like Eli's ghetto pressure cooker, but she stops long enough to tell us about her frustrations regarding fish and chips. Forgettable.

Back at the Mansion...

There's an exchange between Ron and Eli that I swear, I lost brain cells having to listen to.

Look! There's Ashley (drink!).

During the break, we are treated to a vignette; it's basically Isabella making his usual crazy eyes and creepy smile at people, using the same tired joke, and still trying to figure out what the hell eggs Florentine are.

Food Service

The chefs serve in pairs, but will be judged individually. The table is set. Toby is ready to scowl. I'm wondering how Teller can critique food.

Michael V. & Isabella
Voltaggio makes an inspired Caesar salad, complete with salad dressing encapsulated in a bubble designed to burst and then mix in with your food. Penn Gillette apparently wanted an explosion. But his dish is elegant and well received, nonetheless.

Isabella, on the other hand, serves after Voltaggio and mumbles some nonsense about a dish he obviously knows nothing about. Not to mention there is a soft-cooked egg yolk wobbling smack in the middle of his hot mess of a plate.

Bryan and Laurine
Laurine's fish and chips prove to us that the Top Chef curse of trying to fry anything on-site still lives. She ends up with 14 usable chips. The judges knock her for it. Plus, her fish is undercooked.

Bryan is worried about serving such a tiny plate of food to Penn. What he should have been worried about was his idea to sub in tuna for the a typical Rueben's corned beef.

Ash and Jennifer
Ash has a fumble with the potato puree. His shepherd's pie was left potatoless and thus well within reach for the criticism of Englishman Toby Young. Also, Hector was apparently reaching out from beyond the chopping block. Ash's lamb came out overdone on some plates and undercooked on others.

Jennifer ended up with a good-looking plate of lasagna. Padma can't help but smile when she eats it. Jennifer still thinks she's going home.

Eli and Ron
This is a complete shitshow. Ron channels Top Chefs past in the confessional and tells us "it is what it is." Teller looks bored with Ron's paella. Ron seems to have interpreted "deconstructed" to mean serve on a plate, instead of a bowl. The paella comes out missing the usual crunchy goodness. All around, a poor cooking job.

Eli's sweet & sour pork reminds the judges of bull testicles. Jokes abound. There are some impossibly cute shots of an embarrassed Chef Tom Colicchio. And Penn decides the dish is "unhealthy and unpleasant" – and that’s exactly why he likes it.

Ashley (drink!) and Kevin
Ashley serves a wonderfully done piece of meat with carrot foam. Marcel and Wylie Dufresne would be proud. The judges think she nailed it.

Kevin’s mole is reinvented with Mexican coffee, chicken thigh meat, pumpkin seeds...after that I zoned out for a bit as I thought about how magical that dish must have been. It was so good Teller almost spoke.

Robin
This was purely for comedic relief. Her "fennel flan" came out more like "soup that had been left out over night," said Toby. The judges asked Teller to make it disappear.

Judges Table

Ashley, Michael V., Kevin, and Jennifer make the top.

Chef Tom tells Michael V., "Dishes like that make you excited about food." Well done. And your brother is noticeably absent from the top group.

But the winner – Ginger Santa! He wins a brand new set of Calphalon cookware. GS tells the camera that he has learned to just "cook what he believes in." Simultaneously, he has made me believe in Santa all over again!

Time for the bottom 3 – Laurine, Ron, Ash. No surprises here, Ron is sent packing. I think he is still confused about what deconstructed means.

Next week, the cheftestants try to whip up a Top Chef quality meal in their Top Chef bachelor pad of a kitchen. Hilarity undoubtedly ensues.

In mere hours, Kristine and I will officially be homeowners. Keys and everything. It's pretty friggin' rad. So it should go without saying that it's very possible we'll be too all-over-the-place to sit and watch Top Chef tonight. And even if we do, it's just as possible that I won't feel like taking notes.

I'm happy, then, to announce that this week's Top Chef recap will be penned by blog reader, Top Chef watcher, and all around cool chick Jessica Underwood. She might even be live-tweeting the affair, as she is wont to do--and do well.

It's the first guest blogger experience on Reading This Will Not Make You Popular, and I'm pretty jazzed about it. It's like we've got a real website here!

Well shee-ewt, it's another episode of Top Chef: Wild West, and this rough-n-tumble outing kicks of with a honest-to-goodness verbal gunfight, as the chefs...talk about their feelings and identities? This isn't very cowboy.

No, it's just our regular bunch of tattooed, shiny-haired and/or doughy contestants. Eli wonders about making changes solely for the judges. Bryan's feeling confident, while Mattin feels ze shame. Ashley is missing home, because her twin brother just had a baby, and--ASHLEY PUT DOWN THAT PHONE IF YOU WANT TO MAKE IT TO RESTAURANT WARS. Alas, she makes the dreaded Call Home­­™, thereby ensuring not only her prompt dismissal but some kind of fiery Toyota cataclysm on the way to the airport.

Padma is having a little Love-time when the chefs arrive at the kitchen--Tim Love, that is. The cowboy chef with the late-night DJ name (not to mention Top Chef: Masters competitor) is there to serve as guest judge as well as bridge to the elimination challenge. But first, the Quickfire. Remember back to the Season 5 finale, when the Bravo phone poll was a question of which ingredient would you like to assign the chefs to use for a Quickfire? Well, with 57% of a highly questionable vote, the cactus is coming home to roost, y'all.

Rather than rattlesnake or kangaroo, the chefs will have to harvest some cacti (from the countertop, not the arid plains unfortunately) and make any sort of dish they want. They'll have 45 minutes, and a $15,000 chip is on the line--but no immunity.

Isabella seems to know his way around the succulents (more like SUCKulents, AMIRITE), and sets about de-gooping them. Mattin keeps on saying "catcu-ees," so I'm not sure he'll be cooking the right ingredient because I don't know what a cactuees is. Laurine, intent on being true to herself rather than comparing herself to other chefs, will be making a pork chop stuffed with cactus and Ambien. Ash is trying to channel Hector, which is a pretty funny mental picture. Ron seems to think (and I'm happy to see that other bloggers picked up on this) that Haitian cacti are poisonous, which he uses as an excuse to make something totally unrelated to cactus and then just whipping up a cactus sauce.

But poor Eli. For yet another week, he--along with Robin, this time--is shorted on camera time when it comes to seeing his output. I guess it wasn't that impressive, but do we really need a supersized episode to see all the chefs' work? Come on. That's lame.

There's a lot of pickling and ceviche-ing for this Quickfire, so the particulars are kind of a wash. Tim's bottom three are Ash's very un-cactusy cactus grilled cheese, Michael's incongruous avocado roll with cactus coconut ceviche, and Ron's overcooked fish, rancid-tasting crab, and inconsequential cactus. His top three are Laurine's flavorful achiote-glazed pork chop with cactus salsa (sans Ambien), Isabella's technically successful tuna and cactus ceviche/sashimi, and Mattin's tequila-pickled cactus with halibut.

Aside: if you bred Tim Love and his usual cowboy hat with Mattin and his neckerchief, know what you'd have?



Anyway, Isabella's successfully unslimy cactus takes the win and the $15k chip. Bryan's a little catty about the win, saying he'd rather be able to make a flavorful and interesting dish than know how to take the slime out of a cactus. Mee-OW, Bryan.

What would a cactus Quickfire and a cowboy chef guest judge be without a Western-themed Elimination challenge? Love and Padma tell the chefs that they'll be serving an outdoor lunch to two dozen cowboys. They can make whatever they want, but it has to be "high-end," which means what, exactly? No beans-on-toast? I'm sure that would have been everyone's first pick.

The chefs all cotton to the likelihood that kitchen basics like stoves and electricity might very well be at a premium, and they adjust their plans accordingly in advance. (They're learning!) They arrive at the lunch site after a gallop through Whole Foods to find...teepees. Fire rings. And an outhouse. Michael seems to think this looks like the set of a horror movie; I'm not entirely sure where he's getting that, but I think he's got some kind of irrational hatred of the outdoors. Ashley, on the other hand, apparently equates her poor single mother upbringing with a familiarity with outhouses.

Aside: what was up with all the pan-and-scan during this episode? I've almost gotten used to the crappy ADR on Magical Elves productions, but now we've got to deal with mid-90's era VHS editing? Has this episode of Top Chef been formatted to fit my television? Blech. Maybe all that lurching visual frame is why Tom and Chef Love get so ill--but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The chefs get to spend the night in the teepees, so they pair off and bunk up. Ron starts doing something he apparently calls voodoo to repel snakes, but that looks like piling up sticks at the door of the teepee. Eli--who is turning out to be a major dork--is just pissed and finds camping an abomination. Kevin is just jazzed about the horseshoe pit, and as seen in the mid-break vignette is a total shark at 'em. Around the campfire, Isabella makes a leering joke about leaving food out to attract cougars...as Robin the fortysomething sits next to him. She doesn't find this stuff amusing.

Ten-bells, and the chefs start cooking. Mattin plans a ceviche because even though he proclaims a love for camping, he doesn't want anything to do with the fire pits. Ron, the same. Michael isn't giving two shits about the demographics of the diners; he's doing his food and if they don't like it, they don't like it (yes!). This means black cod dashi. Laurine is happy with her Southwestern food literacy, while Bryan just shows his comfort level with a complex but totally authentic menu. The ranchers arrive, and as Bryan barely gets his food plated, the triangle rings for chow time.

Isabella: pork gyro with an apple-fennel tzatziki. Good, but not blowing up anyone's chaps. Plus, again with the fennel. And he pronounces it with a soft G, which drives me nuts.

Eli: tuna sandwich with sun-dried tomato mayo. A little bland, and the accompanying radish salad is boring. Ranchers find the bread too hard.

Laurine: sauteed arctic char with tomatillo and corn salsas and a fire-baked potato. Anyone who actually goes camping knows that cooking potatoes in the fire isn't all that revolutionary. But in the context of this competition, Gail Simmons finds it ballsy as hell. Everyone likes her flavors, and the use of the grill in general.

Ash: grilled chicken paillard with bourbon and a corn succotash. Pretty good succotash, but maybe too much bacon in it. The chicken is unimpresive.

Mattin: ceviches of salmon with apple, spicy tuna, and cod with corn. Tim can barely spit out his analysis of the cod as extremely fishy before Tom actually spits it out. Very raw, very bad. Tom uses the word "gross."

Robin: grilled romaine salad with "drunken" prawns and spicy chicken sausage. Tim tastes chlorine on the "terrible" shrimp. Nasty.

Bryan: roasted pork loin with polenta and braised dandelion, glazed rutabaga, oyster mushrooms. I love this dish on principle, because it goes in all the right directions. It's nicely cooked, everyone's quite happy, and Gail goes so far as to say that she'd feel comfortable camping with Bryan. Well then, Ms. Gail. Whatever would your husband say?

Jen: snapper with cold duck confit and a daikon-carrot slaw. They're loving the slaw, and the duck (which I'm sure has nothing to do with the crappy non-alcoholic beverage) is perfectly cooked by Tom's standards. Tim's not exactly wowed, but everything tastes good so there's that.

Ashley: Seared halibut, bacon, braised romaine, and avocado mousse. This is Ashley's take on a club sandwich--what's with all the faux sandwiches this season? Anyway, the judges like the avocado and note that it's far and away her best dish of the season. The flavors are very reminiscent of a club sandwich, which I guess is a good thing and high-end enough. (?)

Ron: coconut, lime and mango tuna ceviche with a Haitian coconut mojito. Definitely the best of the ceviches (damning with faint praise), if too sweet. But the cocktail is described as both terrible and disgusting.

Kevin: roasted duck breast with a faux mole and a tequila-marinated watermelon salad. The duck is cooked right, the "mole" is a good touch, and Gail's digging the presentation.

Michael: Dashi with miso and mirin-marinated black cod, and watermelon. Gail likes the flavors, while Tim is surprised by the unexpected and tasty combinations.

As the chefs discuss the suspected presence of some sort of spoiled ingredient in the coolers, Padma arrives to call out Laurine, Ashley, Michael, and Bryan. I'm quite surprised that Ashley got in over Kevin, which makes me wonder if they were throwing her a bone for finally making something good.

Judges' Table is very brief indeed. Obviously, these are the top four. Tom praises Ashley's technique on a seafood protein, given the conditions. Gail thought Bryan's dish was well-focused and was definitely restaurant-quality. Laurine's use of the grill made Tim happy, and the simplicity of the dish was what allowed its quality to shine. Michael's dish was unique and very well-prepared. The winner? My personal favoite, Bryan Voltaggio--his third Elimination win. He takes a little shot at his brother in the confessional, pointing out that the only Elimination win Michael has came when Bryan wasn't in the final group.

Robin, Ron, and Mattin are called out for the back end of Judges' Table. As soon as she's given the podium, Robin starts rambling about how steak and barbecue were her inspirations for...prawns and chicken sausage. Tim calls her on it, and they all agree that there was a good dish in those ingredients somewhere, but Robin lacked the chops to bring it out. As such, she was clearly trying to cover for her inadequacies by loading up the bacon; it was unsuccessful. Bacon is clearly the retreat of the incapable chef this season.

While Robin was expecting to be at the bottom, Mattin expressed shock and dismay at his presence there. The judges tell him that his dish was poorly composed, but also ask if he tasted his ceviches. He says of course, and Tim tells him flat out that the raw cod has made him physically ill. Mattin is clueless, and the judges ding him on his obliviousness and his choice to do three half-assed things instead of one good thing (to his credit, he makes the same comment back in the stew room before the verdict is handed out).

There's no doubt that Ron's safe, but they still give him the business for his hideous cocktail. Tim was also bewildered by the sauce and the overall presentation. Ron explains his bad beverage by saying he doesn't drink but didn't want the coconut to go to waste. Too late! Tom tells him that without that cocktail, Ron wouldn't even be at Judges' Table. Gail hails Ron's dish as "the most edible" of the three. I take it back--that's damning with faint praise.

So if Ron's safe, it's down to known error versus oblivious error. Considering the strength of Robin's concept if not her execution, I felt that Mattin had to go. And when the judges lay down the law, it is indeed Mattin who is sent off into the sunset. Two comments to the confessional show that Mattin was oblivious to the end. "Maybe ceviche wasn't the best for cowboys," and "I mean, I'm sure they gonna miss me."

Next week, Penn and Teller! Eli's pressure cooker explodes! And--aww, FUCK. It's Toby Young again!

You may have heard that I got married back in July. It was pretty cool, if maybe a little predictable. I mean, we'd been dating for over 11 years at that point.

So anyway, for our honeymoon, we didn't want to do something with a big production value. Rome, Tahiti, Hawaii, New York...these were all out of the picture because a lot of the wedding had been DIY (well, more like DIH: Do-It-Herself) and we didn't want to have to plan a big trip. Nor did we want to feel compelled to do stuff once there. Thus, Montreal.

Montreal offered a good combination of a vibrant food scene (me, duh), and the ability to just laze around town, stop at cafés, and windowshop (Kristine, not that the two couldn't be switched to a certain degree). Plus, it's another station of the Anthony Bourdain cross.

I don't really apologize for being a bit of a Bourdain-chaser--any chance I can get to go to a place he's featured on No Reservations, I take. I don't see anything wrong or dorky or fanboyish about taking the lead of someone who's been everywhere and eaten everything. (Okay, maybe a little fanboyish, but it's not like I'm shopping at the place he buys his slightly-inadvisable horizontal striped thermals.)

The centerpiece of the Montreal episode of No Reservations was Tony's trip to Au Pied de Cochon, and his time spent with chef Martin Picard. Please to enjoy the video clip below.



Now, a smart food guy would see that he'd be in a city with a great restaurant like this, and maybe take the initiative to make a reservation a few weeks in advance. I would not be that guy.

We arrived in Montreal on Monday afternoon. On Tuesday night, I figured it would probably be a good idea to actually call and see if we could get a table. (To be fair, Kristine didn't think to make an advance reservation either.) APDC is somewhat notorious as a hard table to get, and a tough call to make; they don't spend a lot of energy on customer coddling or pretense. Or answering the phone during business hours.

So there I am, Tuesday around dinner hour, listening to an outgoing voicemail messag for perhaps the best restaurant in Montreal...and it's entirely in French. I don't speak French. Kristine couldn't forget her high school French fast enough. We're kinda boned.

I know, however, that they have an email address for reservations, and that their website offers a bilingual toggle. Fingers crossed, I send off an email that starts "Je suis désolé," and then tell them that I wasn't sure if leaving reservation requests on the voicemail was de rigeur, and we don't get cell phone service in Canada, and this is our room number at our hotel, and we're on our honeymoon, and could we possibly get a table any time between Wednesday and Friday night? I hit send, and I waited.

It was to our great relief, then, that about 24 hours later, we received a call from a lovely lady at APDC. Turned out, it was extremely fortunate that she called back as soon as she did; there was a misunderstanding that resulted in her thinking that we wanted a reservation after that coming Saturday, rather than before. But wouldn't you know, there was an available seating at 9:30 on Thursday. We're Eurotrash, we regularly eat dinner late--this was perfect! Yes please, merci, hang up, done.

We took the metro (this trip was both of our first subway rides, incidentally), walked a bit, and hovered outside the restaurant until closer to our reservation. Restaurants in Montreal all generally have wide-open facades, so that in good weather the dining space is totally open to the sidewalk. It's pretty cool, and creates a palpable atmosphere that washes out into the street.

Our table turned out to be directly behind the chair at which Tony Bourdain sat during his visit; Fanboy would have made a point of touching it or sitting in it for a picture, and I did no such thing.

Service was a little slow after our first beverage order, but we received multiple apologies from someone who carried himself with an air of authority, and actually got a couple beers on the house. The beers, by the way, were okay. St. Ambroise Pale Ale and a cream ale. Craft beer in Montreal appears to be a weak point.

Kristine and I were torn between going balls-out and ordering everything that looked good--and in turn feeling like sweet hell by the end of the night--or sparing our wallets and waistlines by picking winners and staying reasonably sensible. In the end, improbably, sensibility won.

Our order: tomato tartlet, fried zucchini blossoms, and the cochonnailles platter to start. The tartlet, about the circumference of your average melon, was buttery, hot and wonderful. The zucchini blossoms were lightly fried, like tempura, and crunchy. The star, however, was the cochonnailles platter, basically a cold-cut charcuterie plate of patês, boudin sausage, boudin noir, terrines, a zingy tomato chutney, and pigs' blood gelée. Kristine, taking a big step for her Fringe Foods-writing hubby, took an affirmative position on trying it given the esteemed surroundings.

Neither of us liked it.

Shocker, I know. Surprisingly, though, it wasn't because of any metallic taste, but rather the extreme saltiness. Moisture started seeping out of my brain to compensate.

Picking from all the main dishes is like Sophie's Choice, but only if Sophie had about twelve conjoined siblings. The namesake dish--a huge, stuffed pork hock--looks great, the sausage looks great, the pork chop looks great, even the house signature salad looks great (and from what I've heard, it is).

It's a good thing Kristine and I scoped out the menu in advance, because otherwise we'd have been those obnoxious tourist newlyweds who just volley "what are you having?" off of each other for an hour. Kristine chose the plogue à Champlain, a shameless example of vertical excess comprised of a buckwheat pancake, potatoes, cheese, bacon, foie gras, and a maple syrup and duck jus reduction. It's not a huge dish in terms of proportion, but try finishing it without being consciously gluttonous. I shudder to consider the calorie count.

There are many must-haves on the APDC menu, but the one that stuck out to me was the Duck in a Can. A duck breast, a thick slice of foie gras, veggies, herbs, and balsamic all get canned in the usual manner. It's about the size of a Chunky soup can. Your plate arrives dressed with a simple disc of buttered crouton topped with the house mashed potatoes impregnated with cheese curds--basically mashed poutine. The can arrives intact. The waiter opens your can, which has been pressure-cooked, and plops the contents onto your awaiting mashed potatoes. Fat and jus and veggies spill out across the plate, like a pyroclastic flow of decadence. Almost embarrassingly erect stand the duck breast and foie gras, perched jauntily in the potatoes. You're forced to gasp, but that's all right because the very air is thick with flavor.

Yeah, the duck is maybe a little tough. The foie gras, I'm kind of happy to say, isn't really my thing. But the overall flavor is immense, and the experience is a surreal combination of tacky and regal. Worth doing once, and any number of times over. At least, it would be if there weren't so many other dishes that merit ordering.

To say nothing of dessert, which sadly we just couldn't fit into our torsoes. But the real kicker is the bill. After tip, we ended up paying about $160 Canadian. Considering the source, the reputation, the portion, and the quality, you could expect to pay twice that amount for a similar meal in the States. An unbelievable bargain, even with two free beers.

I've since said that eating at a place like Au Pied de Cochon seems not unlike climing a mountain. It's not an easy place to experience, but from the top it's simple to see why it was so rewarding. We both loved it.

All my pictures are on Facebook, but I'll see about getting them onto Flickr to share with all y'all. You can always send me a friend request on FB, though--just attach a note to tell me you're a blog reader. In the meantime, you can take a look at our broader adventures in Montreal on my annotated travel map.

Obviously, conventional wisdom--and the information we've been given so far--tells us that Locke became a vessel for The Nemesis when Ajira 316 landed on the Island. It's a perfectly reasonable assumption, but we need to remember that, so far as I know, it's still just an assumption.

I've told you many times over about Doc Jensen's mirror theory of LOST, which has pretty well become a fact by now. After Season 3, things start folding back on themselves, chronologically. At the beginning of Season 2, we discover a man at the bottom of a shaft. At the end of Season 5--the direct antipodes--we lose a woman at the bottom of a shaft.

So what would be more likely? That a wholly game-changing event would take place in the middle of the fifth (of six) season? Or at the end of the third?

At the end of the third season, Locke is at the bottom of a mass grave, clearly left for dead. Then, out of nowhere and without rational explanation, a man literally in black appears to Locke and imbues him with life and a quest. He begins acting with a clarity of purpose that puts him at odds with many of the 815 survivors. He does not want more people to arrive on the Island, and is willing to kill to ensure that those people do not arrive.

A couple episodes in, Locke initiates a division in the crowd of survivors: those who follow him, and those who follow his opponent, Jack. "Jack" is based on a diminutive form of the Latin "Jacobus."

During the split, Bernard tells Rose that if she still has intent to never leave the Island, he'll be right there with her if she wants to follow Locke to the Barracks. Her response? "I'm not going anywhere with that man." Rose, one of those characters like Ron Weasley in Harry Potter, who is almost always right, specifically fails to call Locke "Locke."

Even later, after Ben fires two shots into Charlotte's torso, Locke is on the verge of killing Ben in retaliation. Ben promises information, whatever Locke wants to know. Locke's question, at this very momentous occasion? "What is the monster?" The Smoke Monster, sort of like the Agents in The Matrix, a self-protective entity that exists outside of the standard good/bad dichotomy. If anything were to pose a threat to the Nemesis, it's a system that appears to be invulnerable--except for the sonic barrier. The sonic barrier that surrounds the place Locke is hurrying to get to.

Lastly, the end of Season 5. Jacob and the Nemesis argue about the nature of humanity, and the "game" they appear to be playing. Jacob seems to want the people on the ship off on the horizon to find the Island. The Nemesis definitively does not. He says, "They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same." The same things Locke seems intent on preventing with the freighter.

If the chronoglogy of LOST is doubling back on itself, then this fundamental reversal of Locke's identity should happen at the exact halfway point of the series. The end of Season 3. The near-fatal gunshot. Maybe the actually-fatal gunshot, and we've been watching the Nemesis manipulate the survivors for two full seasons.

~

For more of my thoughts on LOST, which are occasionally well-elucidated, click here.

No, this is not some esoteric riff on metaphysics or overwrought romantic sci-fi concepts. I mean literally, I got a call back from TIME--as in, the magazine.

Specifically, I came back from my honeymoon to find a voicemail from the Caitlin Flanagan of my recent post on how marriage is doing, and how much it matters to the state of our nation. Ms. Flanagan is the author of the piece titled, "Why Marriage Matters."

Now, I need to say something right off the bat. Two somethings, actually. The first is a basic assumption that the woman who left the voicemail actually is Caitlin Flanagan. The second is that, agree/disagree/miss the point entirely, Flanagan deserves credit and respect for making a call to a fairly insignificant voice in the blogosphere and responding both subtantively and convivially. She could have gotten a wild hair up her ass like my anonymous commenter did on the first post, but she didn't. And I respect her for having the integrity to interact with me on a higher road.

However, she misses my point entirely.

"You're exactly right that marriage is really in excellent health," she says. I agree that the institution of marriage is not teetering on the brink, but my point was not so much that marriage is alive and well but that it's not the culture-crushing causation of "hardship and human misery" that Flanagan thinks it is.

She pins the bleakness of her statistics on "repeat divorcers" skewing the curve. Okay. That might be true. You know what can't hurt, then? Standing up and saying that every American couple should have the right to establish a legally-recognized union. But Flanagan didn't mention the affect gay marriage would have on her assessment of the State of Our Unions, and she didn't mention it in her message to me.

To bemoan this perceived "ambivalence" toward marriage and not discuss the scores of gay couples in the United States wishing they could have a recognized relationship is like wishing more people visited your house while you have a barbed wire fence around the perimeter of your yard.

And I'd be fine, by the way, in legally divorcing the term "marriage" from whatever federal name someone wants to apply to the legal act of coupledom. Marriage is for the churches to handle, and if they want to have a No Coloreds/No Jews/No Queers policy, then go right ahead.

I can't recall where I read this recently, but there's a bon mot from Napoleon that goes, "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." If the churches want to be bigoted and closed-minded, let them make that bed and lie in it. Meanwhile, churches like the United Church of Christ can stand up and announce that all are welcome, and look very intelligent and compassionate for doing so.

I'm happy to see, by the way, that TIME's readers got the same itchy feeling I did when they read Flanagan's article. While the unfortunately-named Mandi Mangler "applaud[s] TIME and Caitlin Flanagan for highlighting the strong case for marriage" (another one who doesn't get it), five the other seven letters express different facets of the same argument I made.

George Kalmar, Pacific Palisades, CA: "Flanagan grossly understates the complexity of the causes of infidelity and divorce in the U.S." Irene Burkhard in Becket, MA, and Shannon Sawicki of San Francisco were insulted that Flanagan would be so dismissive of childless marriages. Clifton Snider from Long Beach and Karen Baker from Cottage Grove, WI (yeah, home state!) brought up the glaring omission of gay marriage. Clifton says it pretty succinctly: "Once again, I notice a major story that reads as if I, a gay man, do not exist. Today such an omission is inexcusable."

So thanks, Caitlin, for the call, the politeness, and the well-wishes for the future health of my new marriage. But please read my posts again, and understand that pinning the health of marriage in America on just us staights stickin' it out and makin' babies is becoming more and more antiquated every day.

...

ADDED: And hey, look at that. Today, news has reached The Advocate that Jerry Nadler (D-NY8), Jared Polis (D-CO2), and our gal Tammy Baldwin (D-WI2) will be introducing a bill aimed at repealing the "Defense of Marriage" Act. One of the more disappointing aspects of the Clinton presidency, DOMA looks to be opposed by 50 or more congresspeople when it is officially circulated for co-sponsorship.

Seems like on Thursdays after these super-sized episodes of Top Chef, I'm waking up tired ... tired of COMMERCIALS WHO'S WITH ME. UP TOP. Ugh. Enough. Sure, it's nice that I have enough time to run downstairs to see if my iPhone's done installing OS 3.1, but come on. The veneer of "added content" is pretty thin, Bravo.

This week, we begin facing the prospect of Isabella going out in a blaze of douchey glory for the insult that was his inclusion in the losers' bracket last week. Also possible: Robin de-evolving into a junior high-schooler before our eyes--she thinks women rock and the boys shouldn't start thinking they're the bomb. As if!

With all that extra room to lounge around in, this episode's Quickfire blazes by. Ironic, given the details. Daniel Boulud, slightly marble-mouthed chef of renown, joins Tom in announcing the challenge: make a dish featuring snails, a dish that hasn't KEPT PACE (GET IT) with the rising popularity of French cuisine in America. You have 45 minutes.

Oh, and one more thing (hat-tip to the return of Steve Jobs to the stage yesterday)--this is a High Stakes Quickfire. Before anyone beyond Ashley can start seeing dollar signs, Tom announces that it's more a loser-based challenge: while the winner will have immunity, the loser of the Quickfire's gotta go. Cue the Crunchy Bravo Synth-Guitars of Doom!

Challenged to make an escargot dish that even Daniel Boulud has never seen before, the chefs immediately start softening the ground in the confessional--chef after chef professes total lack of experience with snails, or being mystified by why people would eat snails, or in the case of poor Hector, a total bewilderment at the existence of something called a "France."

Isabella, fresh off his sucky "Greek" shrimp salad, still harbors notions of a Hellenic heritage; he'll be making a Cretan dish. Shocker. (That's--I say, that's a homophone joke, son.) Kevin's perspective on the intricacies of cooking snails seems intelligent, and it looks like it'll serve him well. Mattin is traipsing around the kitchen like he was just handed a shiny new toy.

The chefs line up in threes to present their dishes to Tom and Daniel. Looking at my notes, and thinking back on the episode, I can't recall seeing Eli present his dish. Anyone? Anyway, you can see the wheels a-spinning in most of the chefs' heads. Acid acid acid. Jen uses yuzu, Bryan goes with red wine, Laurine and Isabella each go for lemon. Fava beans show up a couple times, and the chefs who are floundering make it clear they're not jumping up any time soon. Ashley: soup. Hector: generic escargot with "Caribbean flavor."

For this QF the winners are less impactful than the loser, so the top three are given first billing: Isabella, Jen, and Kevin. Turns out Isabella knows something about Greek food after all. Jen's yuzu provides just the right kind of acidic pop. Kevin's fricassee with candied bacon jam blows Tom and Daniel away, and he takes the win.

The bottom three, no surprise, are Ashley, Jesse, and Robin--thus ensuring that another female chef will be leaving this week. The title of this week's recap means "look for the woman" in French. It has a slightly antiquated, Mad Men-esque connotation: when a man does something stupid, look for the woman; she's probably at the heart of it. But for this week, let's have it mean simply that in this season of Top Chef, if there's a sucky dish to be made, the likelihood of a female chef making it is startlingly high.

Before getting the axe, the bottom three chefs are given one last chance. "One bite to save your life," as Tom puts it in his inimitable fashion. Twenty minutes to create an amuse bouche of whatever's available in Daniel's kitchen. Best two are safe, worst one goes home.

Ashley continues her long and glorious tradition of freaking out in the kitchen, while Robin shows that she is even worse than Ariane in terms of failing to understand the "cuisine" in cooking. Jesse, on the other hand, is more confident than her bottom-dwelling ways would seem to indicate. All three bites come out slightly poorly proportioned, but Tom seems generally complimentary of all three. In what can only be considered a crap-shoot, Robin's avocado crab soup with yuzu and green apple and Ashley's foie gras with pineapple, tarragon, and ramps are spared in favor of Jesse's tuna tartare with sorrel, gooseberries and a quail egg. Jesse's fortunes dropped like a stone from Week One and stayed there; her time is up.

The surviving chefs, with the exception of QF winner Kevin, draw knives. Words like poussin, chasseur, bearnaise, and frogs' legs should tell the savvy viewer that this will be a French-themed challenge in more ways than just the nationality of the judges (as teased in last week's closing moments). The knives wear on their steely faces six sauces and six proteins that are near and dear to the heart of the French chef. Our chefs will have to pair off (again?) and create a dish using the ensuing protein/sauce combo.

The judges will be some of the world's greatest French chefs, including Hubert Keller, Jean Joho, Laurent Tourondel, Boulud of course, and the host of the whole event, Joel Robuchon. The sound of bricks being shat must have been cleaned up in post; the contestants are in awe, and none more so than Kevin. As Quickfire winner, he will not only be spared from competition this round, but he'll get to dine on the products of the competition at the table with the Mt. Rushmore of French cuisine. It's hard not to get a little excited seeing his big hairy face light up like it did.

It's also hard to not get a little annoyed with Mattin, who thinks this challenge was a gift specifically for him from the show (as the mid-break vignette shows us, it's his 29th birthday during this challenge). Using the phrase "All eyes on me," I'm forced to picture the wee Gaul wearing his scarf as a doo-rag a la Tupac.

With ten minutes (not to mention classic French chefs to cook for), the chefs organize in fairly obvious fashion. Rabbit/sauce chasseur. Lobster/sauce Américaine. Chateaubriand/sauce au poivre. It would have been entertaining to see them fuck with tradition a little , but given the audience at dinner I can't say I blame them for going with the usual pairings. They did, at least, mix up the standard trout Meunière. Food nerdery over. Back to usual recap.

The 30 minute, $200 shopping trip gives us the following teams. Ashley/Mattin: poussin (chicken) velouté. Robin/Ron: frogs' legs Meunière. Jen/Michael: rabbit Chasseur. Bryan/Isabella: trout Béarnaise. Eli/Laurine: lobster Américaine. Hector/Ash: chateubriand au poivre.

Shopping done, the knives come out. Literally. Michael's butchery skills are on display as he breaks down the bunnies with the quickness. Also figuratively, as Ron shows the viewers at home just what he thinks of Robin's capabilities (see: massive eye roll). Every spazzy idea she blurts out, Ron quietly shoots down or just withholds comment on until Robin just decides it's a bad idea and moves on.

There isn't much time in this challenge, so the chefs are sweating details left and right. Isabella's second-guessing his deconstructed Béarnaise despite Bryan's experience in making such a thing; he's preparing to be a cautionary tale to young chefs everywhere. I think he might already be on his way. Eli and Laurine are worried about their lobster being cooked enough. Hector is futzing with his beef, and Ron's just worried that the French chefs are going to enact a new Code Noir and put his Haitian butt to work.

Kevin seems to have trimmed his beard up a bit, and look at that he's even got a little bald spot in the back! He's just a cuddly little guy, definitely inspirational for all the nicknamers out there ("Ginger Santa" is the new one, thanks to the aforementioned @junderwood--my wife loves that one like I love "Yukon Cornelius.") The rest of the chefs are obviously just as enthusiastic as Kevin; Eli speculates that the demi-godly Robuchon might actually have been a unicorn for all he knew.

With that, the meal.

Ron/Robin: frogs' legs Meunière with lemon confit and a fried caper arugula salad.

-Eli talks trash as it leaves the kitchen, and the reception at the table isn't much better. It's heavy on the flour, and the legs are overcooked.
-There's some originality there, and frogs' legs are challenging, but Robuchon notes that the flavors are all somewhat masked.

Bryan/Isabella: warm-cured trout and a deconstructed Béarnaise, with pickled shallots, a raw egg yolk, and fennel pollen.

-I think fennel pollen is one of Isabella's tricks; seems to me he's gone to this well before. Boulud seems to be lightly mocking the decon work, but at first bite is impressed. "A perfect translation." Joho calls it simple but sophisticated.
-Our boy Kevin nails his analysis, garnering a nod from Keller. Robuchon "likes it a lot," to which Gail can only say, "Wow."

Eli/Laurine: lobster Américaine with cauliflower pureed and raw.

-The lobster, not so much undercooked as, well, overcooked. Joho finds it tough, and the sauce too bitter.
-Robuchon offers the interesting take that the dish generally is a success, but that upon closer inspection falls short in most critical measurements. Basically, a passable mimicry of French cooking from someone who doesn't have the depth to actually do French cooking.

Mattin/Ashley: ravioli of seared poussin with bacon velouté and asparagus.

-Mattin, to whom Ashley ceded almost all authority over this dish, introduces it in French before Ashley does so in English. Robuchon might not have known Mattin was French, or was just being drily funny, but he compliments Mattin's pronunciation nonetheless.
-There are a litany of complaints about this dish. Chicken bland. Velouté unconvincing as such, and way too bacony; Tom notes that this is something not made better with bacon. Joho's analysis is that it's a dish full of half-measures, not quite carrying off any of its characteristics. Keller feels that with a better sauce, it could have been a successful dish.

Jen/Michael: rabbit Chasseur with mustard noodles and shiso.

-I find this dish to be really interesting, even if un-broken-down rabbit rack looks a lot like a centipede, and Jen appears to have a difficulty pronuncing "Chasseur." Definitely daring.
-Boulud loves the rabbit, well-cooked. Robuchon agrees. Tom describes it as "very mature work" from two young chefs. Two young chefs who look like they might have something in common with a couple of rabbits fairly soon...

Ash/Hector: chateaubriand au poivre with confit de pommes and spinach.

-A nice, classy-fied take on the 50's standard of steak with creamed spinach. Except that Hector totally botches the cooking time (and method), having to cut the meat with less than two minutes to go, leaving it both bloody and ragged. Ash's pepper sauce loses its integrity in the leaking juice, and he can see the train leaving the tracks.
-The apparent absence of sauce is the first thing everyone notices at the table. The meat, Robuchon notes, is absent of juice, sauce, everything. The cooking is uneven, with some parts very overdone. Robuchon notes to the clearly-irritated Gail that she must have gotten the end piece. "I got the end?", she replies. "Well, they picked the wrong lady." You tell 'em, sister!

Gail is very complimentary of this crew of competitors, and Robuchon invites any of them to come to him should they need a job. Pretty cool for all those crazy kids. In the stew room, Kevin returns to his mates to someone shouting, presumably referring to Padma, "There she is!" They needle him for scoop, but he plays it cool. Michael, Jen, Bryan, and Isabella are called out; these are the top teams by a mile.

Bryan and Isabella's dish is up first. The judges note that the sauce was very flavorful, a successful execution of the deconstruction idea. Tom knows the trout was much more complicated than it looked on the plate. The two chefs are basically up front about who did what, and who was responsible for which smart move--but there's no doubt that Isabella wishes he could take more credit considering he didn't really come up with either recipe.

Michael and Jen get credit for a meticulous dish as well. Michael comments on the priority he placed on butchery, and Jen compliments his skill. She notes that he was putting bones out for her sauce faster than she could put 'em into the pot. Seems to me that she wants Michael to put one more bone out for her. Seriously, this is a seething hot ball of sex just waiting to pop. Michael blows platitudes up her skirt, talking about how hard it is to work with a chef this talented, because you don't want to get shown up. It was verbal foreplay, and if this doesn't come to on-screen fruition, I'll be very surprised. Michael's cherchez-ing himself some femme in a big way.

There was, of course, a winner. The chef who will take the victory plus a week-long stage in Joel Robuchon's kitchen in Vegas is one Bryan Voltaggio. Quite a nifty little present, indeed befitting a higher level of talent at this point in a TC season, as Gail noted. Isabella must be wetting himself with relief that he doesn't have to call himself out again. Instead, Mattin, Ashley, Hector, and Ash get the call.

Mattin and Ashley come up first, and right away Mattin takes the hit for too much bacon and not much velouté-ness to his velouté. The asparagus was a false note, the judges comment, and ask Mattin about it. He pins it (rightfully, to be fair) on Ashley. Ashley's response is odd, kind of like she's uninterested in defending this dish that SHE HAD ALMOST NOTHING TO DO WITH. Okay, not so odd. Tom says it would have been better if it had just been an asparagus velouté, which Ashley says was "discussed," and Tom calls it on Mattin: "I bet you shot that down." Mattin, who did in fact shoot it down, says no. No? NON?? Zut alors, that's a whole bunch of bullshit! Mattin is desperate to not get kicked off on French Week, and Ashley-of-no-kitchen-chops is too worn down to put up a fight.

Ash and Hector are the other side of the coin, painfully aware of the mistakes they both made. But mostly, the mistakes Hector made. Ash defends the quality of his pepper sauce, but notes that the late and poor cutting of the meat killed it. (He also doesn't seem to be able to say "chateaubriand," adding an 'S' sound in there earlier in the show.) Hector, up front with his screwups, has to respond to Gail's incisive questioning of his knife: "Was it not sharpened?" Boulud notes that the team seemed to lack a solid game plan, and for the botching of Boulud calls the easiest protein to work with in the challenge, Hector is sent packing.

Ashley thus becomes the first person in history to ever be saved by an axe murderer. Ash tells the rest of the chefs that Judges' Table is "painful because they're right." Ashley looks like hell as she hears that she's safe, and it's obvious to the judges that she didn't have a fight in her. I don't see her making it much farther, even if a dude finally got his walking papers this season.

Next week, it's a wagon trail adventure and Colicchio spits out a bite! Man, you know that's got to be really bad.

Some coming attractions for y'all. I haven't welched on my promise to offer more diverse substance on these pages.

-Of course, a new Top Chef recap tomorrow. Very Francophonic, I assure you.

-The long-awaited follow-up to my post on Caitlin Flanagan's position on marriage (hint: it's missionary). In case you forgot, she personally called me to assuage my concerns. Find out on Friday of this week if it worked.

-On Tuesday of next week, I shall regale you with some thoughts and recollections from my evening with the wife at Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal. Fans of Monsieur Bourdain should pay close attention.

Plus, if we make it to the Annual Pug Hug at Token Creek Park this Sunday, you'll probably see some cute, furry art sometime midweek. (Incidentally, if you have a pug family, or even a Boston terrier family, swing over there around 10AM. The pug people are fun.) Thanks to @junderwood for a little hype over on The Twitter.

This could have been a fairly pedestrian, if not downright sucky, episode of Top Chef. But stick with me, because the Judges' Table segment of last night's blatantly flag-waving challenge was perhaps the best Top Chef has ever put to film.

The standard table-setting open shows Mike I. clamoring for tough challenges to weed out the weaker competitors. We go not-so-subtly to Laurine, whose vacant demeanor is explained by her being a bit awestruck by all these young talented chefs, and how she just needs to focus. She, Preeti, and Jesse are officially the black widows, with the first two eliminations coming out of their residential suite. So I suppose as long as she's better than those two, she'll be fine, right?

Chefs better get their humble on, because they walk into the TC Kitchen to find Padma and Top Chef: Masters competitor Mark Peel waiting for them. They explain the bounty of potatoes on the tables surrounding them by instructing the chefs to create an "out of this world" potato-based dish in 45 minutes. Yes, Bravo used that phrase, and yes, they too put it in quotation marks. No, it wasn't really apropos of anything.

With the PEEL/POTATO diptych in play, the chefs get to work. Ron's doing another fish dish, and explains he's like the Bob Marley of food. I'm guessing he doesn't mean bi-racial and dead, but whatever he means is probably of no greater consequence to the show than that. Like many of the chefs, Ash must have realized that potatoes in 45 minutes is a dicey proposition; he goes with a sweet potato ice cream idea. Smart!

Mike I. (is it all right with you guys if I just call him Isabella?) has a dicey proposition of his own: he's treating the potato like rice, but without a ricer. He's actually brunoising each potato down to rice-sized chunklets. Meanwhile, Jesse thinks she'll make a soup. Yep. That seems out-of-this-world. Maybe she's trying to induce a spirit quest a la Homer and the Guatemalan Insanity Pepper with all the cayenne she's got in there.

A little drama ensues when Preeti, who had planned on using Kevin's blanching water for her asparagus, accidentally dumps them into Ashley's gnocchi-cooking water when Kevin's pot "disappears" (damn you Bravo drama-gremlins!). Ashley throws a hissy, but then everything just kinda goes back to normal. Sound and fury, and all that.

It's not a stellar lot of Quickfire dishes. Lots of stewy, soupy concoctions, with a couple notable deviations. Ash's custard (it didn't set up enough to be ice cream), Eli's take on sweet potatoes and marshmallows, and Laurine's potato "burger" served on fried portabella "buns" come to mind.

Chef Peel is a good judge, taking into account mouthfeel and color among the usual points of evaluation. He dislikes Eli's yams, finding them way too sweet even for Southern cooking. Ron's bland yams were wrapped around an overcooked piece of fish. Jesse's soup, the texture and flavor of which Mark actually liked, had way too much cayenne.

On the other hand, Jennifer struck a good combination of flavor, texture, and color with her steamed mussels and yukon gold, blue, and sweet potatoes. To Ash's extreme surprise, his custard rates highly for flavor and for not overreaching (seems like a failed ice cream is the pinnacle of overreaching, but what do I know?). And Ashley recovers from the water debacle nicely; her gnocchi were good and her hen of the woods mushrooms were handled well. Mark even throws an umami reference in there.

The winner, to Isabella's consternation, is Jennifer. She gets immunity; he gets petty. Claims to the confessional that it's "favoritism." I'm not entirely sure where he gets that. To quote Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Some moody, dramatic music shepherds us into the Elimination Challenge. To introduce it, Padma welcomes Colonel Dave Belote of the US Air Force into the kitchen. I cannot tell you how relieved I was that no one felt the need to snap to attention. Col. Belote serves out of Nellis AFB, home of the Thunderbirds air demo squadron. For this Elimination Challenge, the chefs will be cooking for 300 or so airmen and women from Nellis, some of whom are either readying to deploy or just coming back from deployment, dontcha know.

Okay, so there's some topicality in that the Voltaggio brothers (can't help but think of the trial scene from Ghostbusterangs 2 every time I say that) have a younger sister who is in the Air Force. Kevin's male relatives going back decades have all served. But is there any doubt that this note is being struck solely because the anniversary of the September 11th attacks is coming up? Blech.

All the chefs will cook together in one team (USA! USA!), but they won't learn their available ingredients or cooking equipment until the next day. Right there, in Vegas terms, that's a tell. The chefs should have expected military-style surroundings and shelf-stable ingredients. Did they? Probably not. But that's what they'll get just as soon as they figure out how they're gonna arrange 15 people into a cooking unit.

Isabella decides that everyone should pair off, and Jennifer should take the reins as the one with immunity. Everyone's amenable with this, and chefs find their buddies. The Mikes join forces, Ash and Ashley hook up in the only way either ever would, Bryan teams up with Mattin just to make sure he doesn't surrender to anyone while they're at the base, Hector and Robin create Team Old, Preeti and Laurine put their San Francisco connection to work, and that leaves Ron and Jesse. Bottom-dwellers. Team Suck-by-Attrition. Ron's afear'd. He should be.

So would you like to know the first thing to come to Preeti's mind after 9/11? Becoming a chef. You mean that wasn't the first thing you thought of? Pfft. Communist. The fact that it took her two or three years to corral that upwelling of patriotic gastronomy into going to culinary school is really neither here nor there.

The chefs all start to come to grips with their surroundings and supplies. Ron's bright idea is a clam chowder. Sure, it's hot. But troops love chowder! Seriously, he said that. I don't care how many chowder awards you've won, Ron--Jesse's suck is clearly infiltrating your noggin. Ash, who will be doing dessert with Ashley, has to find a way to make peanut butter creme anglaise. "I've never made creme anglaise in a wok," he notes to Eli. "Have you?"

Laurine's got some kind of disorder where everything has to be familiar. Once again she trots out that imperative to make things that people are comfortable with and used to. It's a great idea--if you're making underwear. Elsewhere in the kitchen, Ron calls Mattin "Frenchy" in the "I don't know any better" proper noun sense, Jennifer kicks ass as chief of the deck, and Eli hopes that the military will handle their supplies and foodstuffs with care when they transport it. I'm sure they'll be gentle as a soufflé.

En route to the hangar where dinner will be served, Isabella is first to make an inappropriate analogy to battle--I'm shocked. The chefs set up shop and are alarmingly well-mannered with each other. What is this, Top Chef: Masters? There's a nice, even artistic shot of Bryan walking in front of a massive American flag. Preeti and Laurine express some consternation about how simple their dish is compared to some of the other offerings. They made bowtie pasta salad--YA THINK?

Anyway, the dishes broke down thusly:

Mike/Mike: Braised slab bacon "pork belly" and crunchy peanut taco. Also, a "Greek" shrimp salad with cucumbers and olives.
Preeti/Laurine: Farfalle pasta salad with broccoli and peppers.
Jesse/Ron: Clam chowder with roasted corn.
Hector/Robin: Three-bean chili with roasted chicken and celery leaves.
Eli/Kevin: Georgia-style pork shoulder and potato salad.
Bryan/Mattin: Beef strip loin with cauliflower gratin and mushroom demiglace.
Ash/Ashley: Chocolate "brioche" bread pudding with peanut butter creme anglaise.

The commentary during the meal reveals a lot. The strip loin? Good. The chili? Authentic, and the celery leaves in lieu of herbs is a good touch. BBQ and potato salad? Chef Peel puts the salad on par with his aunt's fabled recipe. Pork belly taco? Socks are getting knocked off all around the hangar. But that shrimp salad? Bad. The pasta salad? Gail falls just short of calling it half-assed, but you and I both know that's what she was thinking. And the chowder? Well, it's good. But it's also 100 degrees outside and that bowl's full of creamy goodness. Ugh.

A very sappy thank-you moment follows the meal, including the announcement that a couple in the crowd just got married and will be deploying shortly, so this was like their last nice meal at home. Awww. Plus, IN YOUR FACE ASHLEY YOU GAY GAYERSON. Although, the colonel does come around to shake hands starting with Ashley. I expect he's already been court-martialed.

We've come to it, then. The Judges' Table. The culmination of almost an hour of mediocre build-up (yes, this was an outsized 75-minute episode). Padma calls out the Mikes, and Team Fat Kid. Eli and Kevin are both Southerners, and Kevin's family does competition barbecue. The judges all dug it. The Mikes' creative treatment of boring old slab bacon actually renders (get it? a pork fat joke!) Tom Colicchio speechless. He's reduced to calling it "cool." But after another inappropriate war analogy, Isabella is asked whether he was happy with his shrimp salad. He says yes...and gets no challenge from the judges. Odd...?

The winner? Mike Voltaggio, author of the innovative and quite tasty bacon taco! I got no beef with that. And I'm still wondering what's going on with Isabella when Padma starts telling the chefs who to send back. This is odd, I think. We never see this. She tells them to send out Laurine and Preeti...and that Isabella's got to come back out with them. Yes!! Hang 'em high!

Isabella's obviously shocked, and the rest of the chefs in the stew room are too. The three naughty chefs head back out, Isabella with hands on hips. Tom notes that while the other two chefs don't look happy, Isabella looks pissed. Isabella cops to it, but says there were no salads at all and they needed one and then all of a sudden he's saying that y'know, he wasn't ever 100% on serving that shrimp dish. Padma, sterner than usual, hammers him with a "then you shouldn't have served it" that made even the camera man swing around wildly to catch it.

Tom turns to Preeti and Laurine. Who was responsible for this dish? It was collaborative, Laurine says. Usual Judges' Table schtick from chefs on the losing end of team challenges. Tom's not buying it. "Let's cut to the chase here--who said 'Let's make pasta salad!'?" Laurine, defensive, says she honestly doesn't remember. Preeti thinks the pasta was better than some of the other dishes out there. Tom nails the creativity aspect, which was lacking in their salad. Preeti asks if a clam chowder in the desert is creative. Tom says no, but that was a better representation of clam chowder than your salad was of pasta salad. And also, STFU.

So Tom goes back to Laurine, asking her why her internal editor didn't wake up at the prospect of serving this kind of tepid dish in a cooking competition. Her response? "I think I forgot about the competition aspect." Followed shortly by "That was a bad answer." I like to think Laurine's inexplicable behavior at Judges' Table was in honor of the military setting. She gets positively Rumsfeldian with the self-answered questions/statements and denials. Tom just doesn't relent, chiding them like a pissed-off dad: "Do you both want to go home?" It was brutal.

The three chefs go back to the stew room. Laurine pompously declares, "They want us to incriminate each other but I won't do it." No, Laurine, you're doing fine incriminating yourself. The judges call them back out, and Tom lays down the facts. Isabella, you made what you yourself seem to think was a throwaway dish. Preeti and (here, Tom hangs up briefly, apparently struggling to remember Laurine's name) Laurine, you guys made an uninspired dish. Preeti, you don't seem to get it at all. Laurine, you do, but we wonder why it's only dawning on you now. I'm at a total loss for prediction, and for the last time, Padma lovingly forms the name on her tongue and tells Preeti she's done.

Love it! Damn near felt like I needed a cigarette afterwards. I hope Isabella's got the fear in him, and that he makes some kind of assholish move next time. French chefs are the judges, so I wouldn't be shocked. Mattin's gonna be all a-quiver. PLUS, there will be a Quickfire elimination. First time since last year's premiere. Good stuff, people. Good stuff.