Chopped: Slow cooker.

Host Ted Allen: Welcome to a special edition of Chopped. In this slow cooker challenge, four chefs will vie for $10,000 by making the best appetizer, entree, and dessert in slow cookers. In each round the contestants will have to use mandatory mystery ingredients from the baskets at their stations. The chef in each round who pleases our judges least with their crock comestibles will be chopped. 

Chef Tats McEargauge: I didn't come here to lose. So I guess I came here to win.

Chef Egon Greez: I've used slow cookers in all my restaurants. Every one. Every single failed bankrupt rotten lousy one. I'm gonna take home that prize. I want my daughters and their mothers to be proud of me.

Ted: And in the first round your dishes will have to use... lamb shanks... fiddlehead ferns... ramen noodles... and chocolate syrup. You have eight hours to prepare your dishes. Time starts now.

[Chefs seen starting to examine products, moseying over to pantry to find other things]

Chef Belle Buster: These guys try to intimidate women in the kitchen, well, nuts to that. I'm here to show that a woman can cook as well or better than the big boys, just like the five thousand or so women who have been on this show before me.

Chef Gerard Ling Rajagukguk du Wangenstein: [very thick accent; subtitled] I am happy to be here and I hope to won. The pen of my aunt is on the bureau.

Ted: [to judges] This is our first slow cooker challenge on Chopped. A little different!

Aaron Sanchez: Foods cooked in slow cookers can get dried out if you don't time it right.

Scott Conant: Yeah, sometimes you need split-hour timing.

Alex Guarnaschelli: Usually chefs get 20 minutes for the appetizer round. How long do they have?

Ted: Eight hours.

Alex: Well, damn it, I'd have had lunch if I'd known that.

Chef Fred.

You all know Fred loves to cook. I can microwave a burrito like nobody's business, pilgrim.

So it's no surprise that I enjoy watching Food Network's show Chopped, the show in which chefs have to cook their way through three elimination rounds, using hamper baskets full of horrible mismatched ingredients. Host Ted Allen will introduce each round like:

Ted: This is the appetizer round, chefs, and you will have to combine the following ingredients in your baskets: Calf's liver... Hostess Fruit Pies... fiddleheads... and absinthe. You have twenty minutes... time starts now!

Like everyone who's watched the show, I have idly wondered how I would do as one of the chefs. I love to cook; I have moments of intense creativity in combining weird ingredients (frozen burrito and Sriracha!), and like all writers, I secretly want to crush my competitors.

Have at thee!

One problem: I suck under pressure.

No, really. My interviews are a mess. When I've done public speaking, my 30-minute talks would be 10 minutes long if you excised the uhhhs, y'knows, and ummmms. And the times I chuckle at my own jokes that no one else laughs at. So I expect I would have some problems.

Here's me in front of the judges, Alex Guarnaschelli, Marcus Samuelsson, and Aarón Sánchez (minus my uuhs and umms):

Ted: Chef Fred! What have you prepared for us?

Me: I have... a meatloaf-marmalade ice cream with a flaming pickled mangosteen sauce and a shredded swizzle stick garnish.

Alex: I like how you've repurposed the swizzle stick.

Me: Thanks.

Alex: But it wasn't a basket ingredient.

Me: No.

Alex: It isn't even food.

Me: No.

Marcus: I'm curious as to your decision to use the ice cream machine.

Me: I thought meatloaf ice cream would make a memorable and unique dessert.

Marcus: You can say that again.

Me: Thanks.

Marcus: But this is the appetizer round.

Me: I panicked.

Ted: And you broke the ice cream maker.

Me: Sorry.

Marcus: It's about the least edible thing I have ever seen in my life.

Me: It was a tough basket.

Ted: The basket contained lobster, spanakopita, Macoun apples, and lime gelatin.

Me: Oopsie.

Aarón: Chef Fred, didn't you pick on one of my products on your blog?

Me: No, I didn't.

Aarón: Yes you did!

Me: Hey. don't link on my blog.

Aarón: You break machines, use terrible ingredients that weren't even in the basket, you don't use a single ingredient that was in the basket, you serve us something that looks and smells like elephant vomit, and you picked on my pork! This is the worst thing I've ever seen on this show!

Me: Uh... I cut myself and bled into the ice cream, too.

Marcus: WHAT?

Me: I'll try to do better in the next round.

Ted: ...Thank you, Chef Fred.

Chopped pork.

Chef Aarón Sanchez is primarily known, at least in this house, as one of the regular guest judges on Food Network's show Chopped. Now he's coming to your refrigerator. 

Found this in the store and had to give it a try. "Authentic Mexican dishes my from kitchen to yours," he writes in his own handwriting on the package. He probably runs through a dozen Sharpies a day.

Would it be too fiery hot for us, though? We're kind of wimpy at the Key ranchito, and we were a little scared. Sanchez co-hosts another TV program called Heat Seekers with Roger Mooking, essentially a show about two jamokes who run around to spicy-food restaurants and torture themselves with horrifically hot foods. Mooking generally can take the pain a lot better than Sanchez, as I recall, but still. Carnitas from A.S. himself are going to be butt-whupping hot, right? The kind of thing you barely get down, then you blast fire into the toilet twelve hours later.

Nothing to do but get a load of cheese and sour cream in, and devil take the hindmost!

So I nuked it up, brought out the tortillas, and served it wearing safety goggles and Ove Gloves. And it was...

Bland as a lump of dirt. Dull as a Nerf home run derby. Fatty as the first guy on line for the cruise ship chocolate buffet.

Maybe that's authentic Carnitas for you. I hear there is some variation in the seasonings used for the dish, but I expected this to have more than salt.

Chef Sanchez, the entree you served is exceptionally fatty and disappointingly flavorless. We were expecting Lupe Vélez; we got Lawrence Welk.

I'm sorry, Chef Sanchez: You have been chopped.