food

I haven't watched this season of Hell's Kitchen since the second episode. But I have them all recorded just in case I wanted to get back into it and maybe I'll take one of these weekend days and do a marathon. Of course, since I'm writing this post I already know who won, but it won't ruin the season for me. It's all about the journey (and a chef yelling at people).

So were you surprised by who won?

[Watch episodes and clips of Hell's Kitchen and other shows at SlashControl.]

Amid the real housewives and matchmakers, millionaire real estate brokers and house flippers, there is one unscripted series that has been top shelf on Bravo. With Project Runway not on Lifetime, the best of Bravo's reality is Top Chef. In the five seasons past and the current season playing out, Top Chef has been a winner for the cable net, so it's not a big surprise that today Bravo renewed Top Chef for a seventh season.

If I were a drinker, I'd drink to that. Top Chef is in the midst of season six, which is shaping up to be one of the best yet. The location, Las Vegas, has opened up a lot of options for challenges, including a French food episode that might have been one of the most intense ever on the series.

Recently, I was channel surfing and I stopped on a show called Just Cook This! With Sam the Cooking Guy. The fact that it was on FitTV nearly made me move on (to me a healthy cooking show is oxymoronic!), but this guy Sam, the cooking guy, kept me tuned in. Well, I can now say without equivocation, Just Cook This! is my new favorite food show and I'm in love with Sam.

Sam is actually not a formally trained chef or a caterer turned cook or a restaurateur or any of the other types that have made their way to TV. I looked him up and Sam Zein was a regular Joe, working for a pharmaceutical company, who dumped it all to make a TV show about travel, which turned into a food program instead. FitTV, which is part of Discovery, probably bought the show because they liked Sam. And that's the beauty of the show.

This isn't a blog where we talk about food and drink (that's what Slashfood is for), but something happened on the most recent episode of Mad Men that I wanted to talk about. It was a shocking moment, something that a lot of people were talking about the next day.

Gene put salt on his ice cream!

(S06E04) If the names Joël Robuchon, Daniel Boulud, Hubert Keller, Laurent Tourondel and Jean Joho don't strike fear in your heart, you are probably not a Top Chef contestant. Even Tom Colicchio seemed über-impressed by these French chefs. This season the producers have really turned up the heat on Top Chef, pushing the chefs to truly earn the title of Top Chef as never before. This challenge -- cooking for the aforementioned master chefs -- was the most difficult in the series yet.

(S06E01) The producers of Top Chef must have listened to the criticism from the last edition of the show, the one set in New York with the contestants housed in Brooklyn. Despite being in perhaps the most exciting culinary city in the world, TC-NY was pedestrian. Well, Top Chef season six, is in Las Vegas and judging by the premiere, the stakes -- as they said a few times -- have been set very high. The round-up of players was filled with James Beard awardees, Michelin star cooks, people who have restaurants already... and a couple of others who have something to prove.

Last night's episode of Top Chef Masters upped the "reality show" factor on the show, as former Top Chef contestants came back and controversy was injected. This was most evident in the confrontation Dale had with Michael Chiarello (KEY-a-rello). More controversy isn't necessarily a good thing when it comes to a cooking show (it's been good to see civility), but it certainly spiced things up.

I thought this was the finale, but it's not. The finale is actually going to be aired next Wednesday at 10:15 PM, after the premiere of Top Chef: Las Vegas. That's confusing.

The idea of a guy traveling around America and making a glutton of himself in a different city every week doesn't sound, at first blush, very appealing to me. No one needs another over-eating American stereotype gorging themselves for our amusement every week. Did we learn nothing from Morgan Spurlock?

That said, I love Man v. Food, which begins its second season tonight at 10PM on the Travel Channel. I love the show mainly because I like the host, Adam Richman. Richman is amiable and a bit shlubby, and I identify with that. And as unpleasant as that stereotype of the gluttonous American might be, I love comfort food, and that's what Man v. Food is all about.

The new season of Man vs. Food starts tomorrow on Travel Channel. If you've never seen it, host Adam Richman goes around to various eating establishments across the country and eats stuff. Not just anything on a menu, we're talking about giant hamburgers, a 13-pound pizza, 12 egg omelets, stuff like that. In tomorrow's episode he eats a burger so hot he has to wear gloves.

I thought we already had a Lard Channel, only it's called Food Network.

This clip is from Jimmy Kimmel Live. It's the Lard Channel, where all of the programming is based around fat people, who seem to be all the rage these days. Before he is crucified for dumping on people who are overweight, please note that ending of the clip.

Jacob at FoodNetworkAddict.com has come up with five good reasons why he thinks Melissa Darabian will win The Next Food Network Star when the competition wraps next Sunday. His points are well thought out, especially the one that suggests that Melissa's journey on the show has been dramatically edited to make her seem like an underdog who has now emerged as a dynamic player. However, I'm banking on Jeffrey Saad to win. Here's my five reasons:

1. The likability factor
Since the opening episode, there hasn't been a more attractive and likable competitor on The Next Food Network Star. Jeffrey makes viewers feel comfortable, like a Tom Selleck or James Garner, and when you're talking about TV personalities, that's the most important asset. Jeffrey would be welcomed on TVs in living rooms -- and kitchens -- around the country.

Every single season - hell, every single episode - the dramatic announcer of Hell's Kitchen tells us that "this will be the most explosive episode of Hell's Kitchen ever!" or "for the first time on Hell's Kitchen..." But this season, all of those proclamations might actually be true.

Of course, that's not necessarily a good thing, because it could easily turn into The Real World or Big Brother and be more about the confrontations and the personality conflicts than the actual cooking and choosing of a chef. I mean, in the first two episodes alone there are more confrontations and yelling and accusations and fisticuffs - yes, fisticuffs - than in whole seasons of other cooking reality shows.

No, the next Food Network star isn't going to be Rachael Ray. She already has several shows on the network. "Rachael Ray" was the title of last night's episode, as the remaining contestants had to go on her show and do a team cooking presentation.

Does someone know if this episode is going to air or will it air when new episodes of the show start up again? It would be weird for the episode to air after the winner of NFNS is crowned.

Later this afternoon I'll have my What's On Tonight picks posted, but I did want to give Top Chef Masters fans a heads up about tonight's episode: there isn't one.

For some reason, Bravo is replacing this week's episode of the cooking competition show with a special episode of The Fashion Show. And this isn't one of those deals where one show is put in place of another show but that other show is rescheduled to another night during the week, maybe in the slot of the first show. No, Top Chef Masters won't be seen at all this week (except for reruns of previous episodes, of course).

Fans will have to wait until next week for the next new episode. (And if you're wondering what's on tomorrow night at 10 in the regular time slot for The Fashion Show, it's a repeat of tonight's episode.)

Oh well. I'm not watching The Fashion Show so I guess I'll catch The Philanthropist.

I was deciding whether or not to include exclamation points in that headline, so it read Yes! Chopping Block returns to NBC tonight! But I realized that this is one show that doesn't really deserve them.

Does anyone really remember this show? And if you do remember it but didn't watch it, are you interested in checking it out? And if you did watch it, were you breathlessly awaiting its return or did you simply forget about it because it wasn't very good and/or you didn't think it would be coming back so you didn't want to get to invested in it? I watched and reviewed the first episode, and I found it rather underwhelming. This might be the ultimate example of a network burning off a canceled show during the summer.

NBC is using an exclamation point on the show's web site, so maybe the return of The Chopping Block is more important than we think.