Top Chef D.C.: Tracey Bloom Packs Her Knives & Goes

You are looking at Tracey Bloom. I don't know if Tracey is any relation to Orlando or Brian Bloom. I do know that on Wednesday's Top Chef D.C. Padma told Tracey to pack her knives and go.

Tracey had trouble making a pie for the Quickfire Challenge. Try one was a disaster. The rushed Try 2, also did not go well. If I remember right, blueberries were involved

Tracey's partner in a previous challenge, Angelo Sosa, made a really bad sounding pie. I think curry may have been involved.

When Tracey was Angelo's partner she gushed about having a crush on him. In the same episode, the one about making a healthy school lunch that kids would eat, Tracey said kids were close to her heart due to helping her girl friend raise hers.

I'm guessing this means Tracey is a girl who likes girls. Which is a fine thing. I only mention it because Tracey was, by far, the most likable girl who likes girls ever to be on Top Chef.

Tracey is funny, good-natured, self-deprecating and I don't think we saw any anger directed at anyone but herself. Very much not the stereotype. And I think Tracey is cute, in a Rosie O'Donnell can be cute type of way.

The Elimination Challenge, that sent Tracey home, involved making a grilled picnic type dish, to be served to D.C. interns, while doing the grilling at George Washington's Mount Vernon.

Was George rolling over in his grave over this? Who knows. But there was a moment of some sort of divine guidance when a bird attacked with a dropped projectile that hit direct on a chef's table while the judges were getting their plates of food from him.

Tracey's grilled picnic had some problems. She couldn't grind meat fast enough to make her intended sausages. So, she turned them into sausage sliders. Which were really big, and in which she'd stuck un-ground fennel, which overpowered a bite or two.

I thought it would be the annoying Stephen Hopcraft who was told, by Padma, to go, due to his disgusting looking fish wrapped with bacon, that apparently was cooked all sorts of wrong. I would have thought, all things being equal, and with both Tracey and Stephen not doing well, send Stephen home and keep Tracey, because she's funny and likeable, while Stephen is sort of a personality-less, annoying toad.

Another annoying toad, Arnold Myint, won the Elimination Challenge with his grilled meatballs.

It's only a couple weeks in, with this being an entertaining season of Top Chef. I'll keep watching. I always do.