[Blarg]

Glad you got the book and hoping you like it, Katy. It's a fun and revealing read.

This show had very obnoxious product placement that I could have done without. Not only did they essentially make Bertolli frozen food the center of the primary challenge in the show, guest chef Rocco was shamelessly shilling it while describing the challenge. Yuck.

Hung got another well-deserved dressing-down, and I can't say I'm not glad of it. Having so much ego and inability to listen to people while still so young suggests he could become a true a-hole and failure in many aspects of life coming up in very short order. That said, I did feel bad for him anyway. He should have stood up to his partner, Joey, but he just collapsed and went quietly to his doom. He looked absolutely stricken during the judging, and the same spiked with anger during the service.

Howie, too, was terrible at working with his partner. Sara may not be a particularly good contestant, but a guy like Howie makes it very hard to contribute, much less do so without getting into a fight. He just started blocking out Sara from the very beginning of the challenge, and he was hardly graceful about it either.

I think many challenges on these shows are being discounted because working together as a team is being talked of as something that should take a very distant back seat to expressing one's culinary genius. The problem with that is that these chefs are not aspiring to cook at home, but in a business. Someone with an inability to work with and motivate others can sabotage the relevance of any level of his own talent. In a business, one simply does not work alone.

This makes Howie someone who seems like he needs to either work by himself or expect in his working life to be in big trouble if he can't find people who are absolutely perfect matches with him and stay with him forever -- which will entail putting up with his tunnel vision and tendency to angrily tune people out. An autistic savant is not what a kitchen needs. Maybe I should start calling Howie "Rainman."

I was glad to see CJ do well. He has said he never won anything before, but he has gotten plenty of compliments on doing good food, and from what I recall has not spent significant time at the bottom. His "tuna casserole" was ruinous in a previous show, but at least it showed him thinking. He seems to have potential, and I liked that for once, everything seemed to go well for him.