House of Dioxin

Cooking time for cookers. The food challenge is to whip up a buffet station, which will be served to assorted Vegas entertainers plus the judges plus a bunch of chefs from Wynn. Six hours, $1K budget and use of Wynn kitchens so this is as close to working w/ no constraints as they've gotten so far. The returning chef assistants angle, which they made such a big deal out of in the promos, was totally thrown away. Shane, Kelsey and Jen were hardly on camera. I'm pretty sure Jen had no lines. And other than Smokey Joe, none of the final three said anything about the impact of their assistant on what they ended up cooking. They even drew to see who'd get first pick instead of making it a prize for winning the TV promo challenge. LisagarzaLisagarza won and picked Kelsey. Why she didn't pick Shane I don't know. My twinlined theories are that she doesn't think Shane knows anything more about food/cooking than she does and that she thought she could boss Kelsey around. Other than the overcooked pork roast, the only other drama was Lisagarza dropping half of her fish off the shopping cart at WFM (side note: that's the 2nd WFM they've been to this season that we've also shopped at).
Smokey Joe picked next and chose Shane. He said early on that having an assistant as talented as Shane allowed him to work more ambitiously than in an previous challenge, He whipped up a smoker rig using a couple of woks, some cooling racks and a lot of aluminum foil.
TAFKABA ended up with Jen to help him. Since he'd planned his menu and shopped before he got her as an assistant, it's not fair to hold her responsible for the buffet o' boring he ended up with. Still, it just figures that if boring is around, Jen's not far away. Like I said, for all the attention paid to their roles, the elminated three might as well not have been there. But I'm curious that TAFKABA, who has been cooking some of the best food gets the weakest assistant and turns in a fairly drab performance. Meanwhile, Smokey Joe, who has seemed incapable of cooking at all some weeks, gets Young Shane and is suddenly knocking the socks off everyone.
No discussion of this from either the judges or the contestants. Probably they do not want to go there.
So we end up right where we started and all three go on to the final episode. And I finally get a prediction right.
Guests at the buffet challenge included cast members of Spamalot some of whom entered knocking two coconuts together. Also, drag queens (first time ever on FN?).
High point of the week: when Fogelson said that she couldn't see Smokey Joe as the host of a cooking show while she was sitting at the same table with the Wrong Guy. As in Mr. Overpronounced who was quickly bounced from his godawful cooking show to his current role as traveling eater and reality show host. I mean, sweet jeebus, woman. Do you think we don't watch your frikkin' network? That was even stupider than her line last week about how it bugged her that Smokey Joe was "learning on our dime."