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So your favorite (or at least I hope so) Top Chef recapper is back from my brief two-week hiatus. I just recently caught up on the last two episodes of Top Chef and I’m still reeling a little bit. I’m disappointed in the dismissals of both Arnold and Lynn, both of whom I had picked to make it into the top half of their season. I’m starting to really love Tiffany (tell it like it is, girlfriend!)...

...but most of all, I’m super stunned about the revelation that Hot Angelo is straight? Excuse me? He’s straight and apparently crushing on Tamesha? That’s really weird because I could have sworn that he was gay. I mean, he looks and acts so...gay. Granted, I don’t have the best gaydar on the planet, but I didn’t think that he could be interested in Tamesha because, you must understand, she doesn’t have a penis.

Anyhow, this DC season is certainly turning out to be an open race. So far, we’ve had six different winners (Quickfire and Elimination) over the past five episodes. It’s a pretty stark contrast to last season when three cheftestants hogged all but one of the Elimination Challenge wins (with the other win going to my beloved Jen).

For today’s Quickfire, the cheftestants walk into the kitchen and see Michelle Bernstein. I love her. She’s got such a radiant smile and you can just tell that she loves food. My fondest memory of her is from the Season 3 finale when she struggled to try and find something nice to say about Kacie’s pork belly dish. Poor Michelle. She had to work so hard.

Anyhow, the tension immediately ratchets up a few notches with Andrea because she apparently has some sort of pseudo-rivalry with this James Beard Award winning chef. They both have restaurants in Miami and were both rising up through the culinary world at about the same time - except that Andrea took some time off to become a mom and Michelle Bernstein started winning James Beard Awards in the meantime. I mean, total rivalry...in the mind of one of them, I suppose.

The challenge for the cheftestants will be to make delicious dishes out of strange and exotic proteins. Crocodile, duck tongue, emu eggs, you get the idea. The chefs draw knives to determine the order in which they get to select their ingredient. Hot-But-Apparently-Straight Angelo goes in the middle of the pack and selects duck white kidneys. He walks back to his station with his lips pursed in thought.

“Do you know what those actually are?” Padma interrupts.

He looks down at his duck white kidneys, his face now creased with wariness.

“They’re duck testicles,” Michelle Bernstein tells him.

The entire kitchen erupts in laughter. I wonder idly to myself whether or not this is the first time he’s handled testicles that are not his own.

The cheftestants quickly get down to business of cooking their disgusting proteins. Amanda saws into her emu egg, Alex gleefully starts prepping his foie gras, Angelo decides to make a marshmallow out of his duck testicles (okay, okay, so maybe he doesn’t know how to handle testicles).

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