Image Credit: Keith Bernstein/HBO
If you aren’t serving dragon wings at your Game of Thrones viewing party, you’re probably doing it wrong.
HBO’s incredibly violent, incredibly intricate swords-sorcery-and-salaciousness drama is premiering its third season on Sunday, March 31. It has potential. But more importantly: it has potential to inspire great parties.
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If you haven’t watched the season finale of Top Chef, stop reading now! Spoilers ahead!
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So, there’s this little party in Hollywood tonight with your close pals Jennifer Lawrence, Daniel Day-Lewis, Anne Hathaway, and company. People are getting really dressed up, and it’s on TV, and we hear Hugh Jackman is going to sing, so maybe you should tune in. But other than the Oscars, there’s tons to tune into this week — Twilight’s out on DVD, Top Chef crowns a new winner, and more! What should you be paying attention to this week? Let’s see, shall we? READ FULL STORY »
A cocktail certainly would have mellowed us out during the anxiety-inducing Zero Dark Thirty. And who didn’t get a hankering for French cuisine after the revolutionary songs of Les Miserables? If themed dishes for Oscar night are on your party agenda, check out these recipes created by Top Chef‘s season 10 cheftestants, inspired by the Best Picture nominees. But you may have to wait until next year’s show for Josh’s “Afghan Sun”, inspired by Zero Dark Thirty – it takes three weeks to cure the oranges needed!
Click through each page, or go directly to the movie of your choice with the links below. Bon appetit!
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The showdown to who will be the next Top Chef begins tonight – the penultimate episode of season 10 has the two finalists, Brooke and Sheldon, facing off against the latest Last Chance Kitchen winner. But will it be Kristen or fan-favorite Lizzie? Last week’s Last Chance Kitchen (the sudden-death cookoff on bravotv.com between the most recently kicked-off chef and the previous LCK winner) left off with judge Tom Colicchio still deliberating between Kristen and Lizzie after sending Josh home, so it’s a mystery as to who will show up tonight in Part One of the finale.
That said, Kristen has handily beat every chef she’s come up against so far, including breaking C.J.’s seven-win streak and getting a sweet victory over flirty competitor Stefan. General consensus is that she was kicked off the show as a result of the Restaurant Wars squabble with Josie too early in the season, and Kristen now has legions of fans who are hoping to see her back. But Lizzie’s Last Chance Kitchen dish of black cod with spaetzel looked delicious and seemed to impress Tom. Plus, she won over fans during the challenge in Alaska by talking movingly about her dad who recently passed away. Who do you think will come back into the kitchen? Were you pleased to see Lizzie beat C.J. as the fan favorite?
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Image Credit: (top) Juan Naharro Gimenez/FilmMagic; (bottom) Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
If it feels like everything’s happening earlier than usual this year, you’re not wrong. With Oscar nominations already in the bag and the Golden Globes set for tonight, we’re chugging through awards season and it’s still only mid-January! There will be plenty of red carpet looks to keep you going this week, with the Globes followed by the Sundance Film Festival kicking off in chilly Park City, Utah. In between, stay tuned for an exciting week on Top Chef and the end of a beloved series in Fringe, topped off with Rob Lowe playing the sexiest lawyer around in Prosecuting Casey Anthony. Have a great week!
Since the celebrity chef revolution of the early aughts, food has been more visible in pop culture than ever before. But despite dozens of TV programs that glamorize butchers, bakers, and sous-vide duck breast with truffle jus-makers of both genders, Hasbro still only targets girls with the commercials and packaging for its Easy-Bake Ovens — which come only in shades of purple and pink. (Not like there aren’t any boys who like purple and pink, but still: the feminine slant is clear.)
But 13-year-old crusader McKenna Pope is determined to change that. In late November, she launched a petition urging Hasbro to manufacture and promote a gender-neutral Easy-Bake Oven, all for the sake of her cooking-obsessed little brother, Gavyn. “I want my brother to know that it’s not ‘wrong’ for him to want to be a chef, that it’s okay to go against what society believes to be appropriate,” she explains. “Please, sign this petition, help me in creating gender equality, and help the children of today become what they’re destined to be tomorrow.”
She also attached a video that shows off how freakin’ cute little Gavyn is:
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According to reunion master Andy Cohen, 90 percent of all questions about Top Chef: Texas had to do with Beverly and the trio of sweaty, foul-mouthed meanies who bullied her throughout the competition. But honestly, after a whole season in which the food took a backseat to all the undercooked drama in the kitchen, I was glad that most of the reunion focused on other topics — like Ty-lör and his furry bottom (click this borderline-NSFW link at your own risk). Oh my God. Seriously, why were we subjected to that? He’s a good-looking guy, but in that photo he looks like an unholy union between Bluto and the Coppertone girl. That wasn’t the most disturbing moment of the night, though: We also learned that Sarah has “teary orgasms.” Thanks, Bravo. I can’t un-know that. I need a nice sorbet to cleanse that from my brain-palate. READ FULL STORY »
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As told to Nuzhat Naoreen.
It was a great season. It felt different for all of us, partially because of the chefs and the locations and some of the challenges that were so special. It was very memorable for me. I’m excited that we have a winner but I’m also sad it had to end.
[The finale challenge is different from] restaurant wars because one chef is in charge, as opposed to a team that’s involved. This has nothing to do with any of the other contestants, this is one chef’s vision, personality, and culinary style. It really gets to showcase who they are as chefs. We [had a similar finale challenge] for season 8 All-Stars as well. We realized that it’s just a much more realistic challenge for chefs of this caliber. It used to be that they’d have to cook for 10 or 15 of us [in the finale, and] serve everyone at once banquet style. But that’s not what a chef does in a restaurant every day. They have to serve many, many people and every batch of food, every plate that goes out has to be the same and has to be consistent. This really mimicked a restaurant experience much more. As the chefs get better every season we really change the finale. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Scott McDermott/Bravo As told to Nuzhat Naoreen.
I was hoping the contestants would think a little bit outside of the box and really dive into the [fire and ice] idea. We didn’t ask them to be super literal. Fire can mean many things, and so can ice. [Fire] can mean color, it can mean heat as in temperature, or heat as in spice, [and] ice can mean how something looks [or] the method with which you make it. Our chefs did well, the food was good but I was hoping they would all take a little more liberty with the interpretation than they actually did.
It’s funny, when we give [the chefs] too much direction and instruction they get mad because they just want to cook their own food and when we give them not enough and just let them have fun, sometimes they’re so used to the instruction that they get stuck in their own heads. In the end, we were all happy with the results. They all did very different things [and] they did some really creative things — we [had] just hoped they would go all out for the second-to-last episode of the season. READ FULL STORY »
