The Hot Dogs on Top Chef.

Rooting for Ariane on Top Chef is like rooting for your favorite basketball team that is always two points down and then makes a bucket with one second to go to throw the game into overtime. Arianne is not only in overtime she is living on borrowed time but I'm very faithful and I'm sticking with her.

There were a lot of life lessons on Top Chef this week. Sometimes simple is better. One week we can be on the top the next week towards the bottom. Sometimes when we got out of our comfort zone we can lay an egg. Often it isn't so much what you do but how well you defend it. And last but not least men will often think their performance is better than it actually is.

For those of you that don't watch Top Chef each week involves two segments. A Quickfire challenge which is usually a really quickly prepared meal where the regular judges and the guest judges choose the winner. The winner then gets immunity in the next segment, the elimination challenge. The elimination challenge usually involves cooking for a group of people.

The Quickfire challenge this week was hot dogs. Hot dogs are big in New York with over one hundred million hot dogs being sold every year in the Big Apple. This week the guest judge was Ms. Donatella Arpaia of the restaurants David Burke & Donatella, Anthos, Mia Doja, and Kefi. In addition the show brought in the hot dog cooking expert, Angelina DeAngelo, for the fifteen chefs to cook against. The contestants were given forty-five minutes to create a signature hot dog. The bottom two hot dogs:

The double winner from last week, Stefan, fell from grace with an Italian Sausage on French Bread with Wisconsin cheese & Irish tarter sausage.

Jill went with a store bought hot dog rather than to create her own casing. She went down the tube with a summer roll hot dog cooked in chili sauce & rice wine vinegar.

The top three hot dogs:

Hosea with a pork hot dog with roasted pablanos, jalapenos, smoked bacon, & red vinegar.

Fabio with andquille sausage with goat cheese, roast bell peppers, and sun dried tomatoes.

The best and winner of the immunity was Radhika with a kabob style sausage with caramelized onions, cucumber, and tomato.

What did the hot dog expert, Angelina cook? She went with simple, a hot dog, mustard, sauerkraut and relish. Sometimes simple is better.

The cooks then moved on to the elimination challenge where they cooked a three course meal in head judge Tom Colicchio's Craft Restaurant. Their diners? Fifty New York Chefs that tried out for Top Chef and didn't make it. That made it really challenging. I've gone up against firms that have beat me out for assignments and while it is stressful it is huge fun to win against them. The fifteen chefs divided into three groups: Appetizers - Fabio Hosea, Jamie, Melissa, and Leah; Entres - Stefan, Alex, Eugene, Jill, & Jeff; Desert, - Carla, Ariane, Daniel, Richard, & Radhika.

The judges were very disappointed in the quality of the food this week. They thought it took a huge dive from last week. Tom also said their cooking sent American style of cooking back twenty years. In one case Padma spit out Ariane's desert into her napkin. Not a good sign for my gal.

The best three of a bad lot:

Jamie with a simple appetizer - sweet corn soup with chili oil & mint.

Carla's desert, rustic apple tart with ginger peach tea, apple cider reduction, and cheddar cheese.

The top dish was Fabio's beef carpaccio with argula salad, parmesan and spherical olives sliced and diced in a special way.

The bottom three:

Ariane's way to sweet desert the lemon meringue martini with a vanilla cookie crunch & cherry surprise.

Hosea was convinced he won the competition but his can bought grilled crab with citrus vanilla dressing with mango and avocado left the judges less than pleased.

Jill went out of her comfort zone by buying an Ostrich egg and making an Ostrich egg quiche with rice-pecan crust, aspargus, and aged cheese that layed an egg and had one of the diners saying it tasted like dog food.

It came down to Jill or Ariane. Ariane admitted her dish was to sweet. Carla defended her dish that was in the word of one judge "the lamest defense in five years of Top Chef." Whew. Carla went packing.

Hope this weekend really cooks for all of you!