Well Fed Network

Posted by Patsy Kreitman on Edible TV.

This week, the finalists were challenged by the media.  First by Esquire, then by Good Housekeeping. Two very different publications with different demographics. 

In the first challenge, they met Ryan D’Agostino, the Editor of Esquire Magazine.  They were each given two ingredients that could be found in an Esquire man’s kitchen.  The challenge was to come up with something that one of their readers would want to make.  Once their dishes were completed, they were thrown an extra challenge of doing a 1 minute on-camera presentation of their dish.  This was to be their first impression of how they would do on-camera.  For some it went well, but Jamika lost her train of thought and never got it back.  It was also painful watching Michael trying to stretch his for an extra 20 seconds.  Eddy seemed to have redeemed himself from last week and came across much better and ended up winning this challenge.

For their elimination challenge, they were taken to the gorgeous Hearst building.  They were greeted by Giada de Laurentiis and Rosemarie Ellis, Editor in Chief of Good Housekeeping magazine.  This challenge was testing their creativity by requiring each to put together a holiday tray and one dish that would appeal to the readers of Good Housekeeping.  Eddy had the privilege of pulling the holidays out of a stocking and assigning them to each of the finalists.  He seemed to be matching everyone up pretty nicely. 

This week, there seemed to be some genuine attempt to help Melissa out with her plating by both Brett and Teddy.  Keeping in mind that we only see the edited portions, it seemed as though Melissa prepared her dish on her own and was falling behind when it came to plating.  Brett and Teddy brought quite a lot of chaos to her kitchen, but they managed to assist in getting her dish plated. 

There were some great presentations and some that really were boring or just plain uninteresting.  The worst ones were Katie’s for Earth Day and Eddy’s for Valentine’s Day.  Jamika really hit it out of the park with her New Year’s Eve dishes and presentation; she showed personality and made the food come alive according to Bob.  Melissa shared her ideal Mother’s Day breakfast in bed and just needs to keep her energy in check a bit as she can be a bit hyper.  Michael was his usual over-the-top self with Halloween and as Rosemarie stated - he knows who he is and is very comfortable with himself. 

The evaluation got interesting when Melissa was receiving compliments on her eggs because Teddy and Brett both seemed angry.  Brett said that they didn’t think she got the food out on her own and she had to defend herself to the judges.  She prepared the dish, they helped plate.  While they did deserve recognition for their help, they shouldn’t try to throw her “under the bus” for it.  They didn’t have to help, and the way it appeared was that they made things crazier by assisting.

In the end, the top three favorite presentations and dishes were Melissa, Debbie and Jamika.  Jamika took the win and will have a recipe featured in the July 2009 issue of Good Housekeeping in their Healthy in a Hurry section.  Be sure to check it out!

The bad news is that Brett just couldn’t figure out how to present himself and that caused him to go home. 

Note: Last week’s post incorrectly referred to Eddie going home, it was actually Jen. 

Photo courtesy of Food Network.