I'm a week behind on most of my tv watching after spending five days in New York, but the episode of TNFNS with the "be an expert" and the Iron Chef-type challenges seemed especially unfair. You can't convince me that any Food Network personality on the air today could have, at the beginning of their contract, had a random food thrown at them and be expected to deal with it "expertly" in 60 seconds. If the point is to test general food knowledge, why didn't they do that in the screening process? If the point is to test how well you can lie on camera, then the challenge makes me question any Food Network personality's expertise.

The second challenge was just gross and mean. On Iron Chef the contestants are not assigned all the ingredients, just the main one. They get to pick everything else, and they even get a list of possible main ingredients ahead of time so they can plan their dishes. Throwing a bunch of hyper-sweet processed crap at this crew and expecting something good enough to serve at Red Lobster of all places is pretty cruddy.

That said, I do think the right person went home. Even though Food Network needs to get beyond its middle-America white bread image, Nipa's limited experience outside Indian cooking probably couldn't sustain a show for very long.