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I thought the $10 food challenge could have been judged better. Ten bucks is hard to stretch at WF. I don't think the people who created multiple dishes for their family were given enough credit. Cooking for a family is just as much about nutrition but it is also about keeping the family interested and happy and not bored. You could serve your family wheat pasta or you could serve them spaghetti and soup and something sweet. Do the judges cook at home for their kids?

Yeah, this episode kind of shook everything up a little bit but I think next week will settle things back down again.

It was an interesting challenge and I thought most of the contestants did very well with the $10 constraints.

I STILL would like to see them assign a vegetarian or vegan challenge. I realize that many "foodies" and gourmets are not vegetarians, but I do think that the chefs rely far too much on meat as the center of every dish. I would love to see what they could come up with for a meat-free meal.

I don't know I can't imagine peanut butter and tomato being a flavour combination that would be good even in a restaurant. Plus Stephanie also had technical flaws with the food. I think her failure was trying to be too complicated. Challenges like this remind me of some of the cooks on Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, where he challenges the clueless French Head Chefs to make a soup, and their 25 ingredient concoctions wind up not tasting as good as his soup made out of one vegetable and water. If you really are a top chef, you should be able to make something simple and entirely unpretentious that's extremely good as you have to learn the basics before you can do complicated food.

I do wish that they threw in more chances for the Chefs to shine or fall on their own food styles during the competition.

Peanut butter and tomato? Horrors. I wouldn't eat it if it was served to me at a five star restaurant. She deserved the the ding she got. Top Chef bugs me to no end but sometimes they get it right. Chicken and vegetables is almost always a winner. Whole wheat pasta sounds good and sometimes looks good, but in my house, my son won't eat it. It's tough to find tasty whole wheat pasta that my whole family will eat and I doubt we're out of the norm in that regard.

Yeah, I think there are too many silly commercial product driven challenges and quirky competitions. I guess producers think that's what makes something like professional cooking more interesting to the average viewer.

I thought of one of my mentors during the 10 buck competition though. Not for the sake of stretching money (this was at a very expensive fine dining restaurant). But she told me, "do you really want to be a good chef?" Of course I said, yes. She said, "then you must cook at home." I really think there are certain things you learn on your own, especially through trial and error, on your own time that can help you greatly in your professional life. In any career.

Aren't there Thai curries that feature peanut and tomato? It wasn't that much of a stretch for me ... I could imagine it being good.

Peanut and tomato is not a bizarre combination.

Of course when they say "peanut butter" and tomato they make it sound like some sort of an abomination.

In reality, most people use peanut butter to make peanut sauce. But peanut sauce is tricky to get right. It can be light and just right or it can be gloppy, thick and paste like.

That peanut sauce combined with completely over cooked couscous made for a disastrous dish unfortunately.

Here's something to think about if you have kids--what are the chances of a child being highly allergic to peanuts? Pretty high these days. As a chef I wouldn't have considered using peanuts.

To be fair, I feel like they were given more than $10 - they made at least six plates (four for the kids, one for the judges, one for Tom) and in one shot I thought I counted eight. Since the challenge was to cook a meal for four, my boyfriend and I thought they must have been given $20, and told to make 8 plates. $20 at Whole Foods is a whole different ballgame. Otherwise, how could they have gotten things like a whole chicken AND produce? Fennel's close to $4 a pound at my local Whole Foods!

I second the above comment about a vegetarian challenge. I don't think a single one of these people would have a clue as to how to make a satisfying vegetarian meal (although Dale and Richard came kind of close last week with that beef fat-flavored tofu...if it weren't beef-flavored, it would have been a great dish, albeit not perplexed!)

raspberry eggplant

i agree that last night's epi was not very "Top Cheffy", but it was nice to see the chefs interact with kids. I suppose it brought out their "human" side, even if for the sake of viewership.

I make a yummy sauce with peanut butter and tomato paste (and coconut milk) but I wouldn't EVER serve it over couscous.

But I do think that a good chef can cook anything well, not just fancy "restaurant" food. Food should taste good and nourish you. A simple dish can be transcendent without being fancy.

as a vegetarian, I agree with the vegetarian comments. it still annoys me that the group in the second episode made a non vegetarian gorilla meal. vegetarian food can be delicious and "gourmet." it could be an interesting episode, especially in a city like chicago that is renowned for its meat (although I lived there for a while and never had a problem finding great vegetarian food).

I think Mark deserved to go. It was an ill conceived and ill executed dish. Stephanie's looked bad, but at least she had a variety of ingredients, even if they ended up badly.

She could have done a very good peanut sauce with broccoli and chicken over rice--similar, but a much better combination, I think.

Interesting that all the winners seemed to have experience in single parent households, though I can't remember Andrew's details other than that he got healthy at some point.