The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur News and Links for Thursday, August 2

Hello, everyone!

The European season is quickly approaching. I am still not prepared for it.

Ramble of the Day

I tend to watch a lot of reality television, mostly of the cooking or baking competition variety. Such was the case the other night, when I was watching Sugar Rush, a baking show on Netflix, when a competing team had difficulty creating some baked good and decided to tell the judges just how much they messed up in the process. I always wonder why contestants on competition reality shows do that; it doesn’t impress judges, and it almost never makes your creation seem more impressive than it is. I was quickly reminded of Cutthroat Kitchen, where they never do that.

Cutthroat Kitchen, quite frankly, is the best cooking competition show I have ever watched. It is incredibly competitive, remarkably ridiculous, and wonderfully entertaining and unique.

The basic format is this: Four chefs come to the cutthroat kitchen to compete in three rounds of cooking. They are handed $25,000 at the start of the episode, and are assigned a dish for each round. Before the cooking begins, though, each chef has the opportunity to bid on sabotages that would make cooking much more difficult for their competitors. At the end, those with sabotages frequently end up with inferior dishes, though they always sell it as a “deconstructed” something. After all, the rules of the game are that the judges don’t care what the sabotages are because they never find out.

But let’s get back to those sabotages. I can’t embed an entire episode here, obviously, but here is a recap of sorts of an episode, as host Alton Brown breaks down the sabotages and dishes with guest judge Jet Tila, who had no idea what was going on behind the scenes. This episode also had plenty of self-sabotage, which is almost just as good as the organized sabotage.

That video, though, did not include all of the personality of Cutthroat Kitchen contestants. This BuzzFeed listicle does a great job of collecting screenshots, and therefore stories from the show, such as the guy who was too pretentious to make pancakes and the lady who lied to the guest judge about honeymooning in Hawaii to sell a dish. I was laughing out loud reading through those screenshots, but there is one Cutthroat Kitchen contestant that cannot be beat.

No one can match the man that exclaimed, “I won Chopped!” after winning Cutthroat Kitchen. Come back soon, Cutthroat.

tl;dr: Cutthroat Kitchen is the best cooking competition show.

Links of the Day

Samir Nasri’s doping ban has been extended a full year from six months to 18 months by UEFA.

Burnley have asked UEFA permission to register another goalkeeper to the squad for their upcoming Europa League tie against Aberdeen after both Nick Pope and Tom Heaton picked up injuries.

Transfer roundup: Everton have signed Lucas Digne from Barcelona; Crystal Palace have signed Cheikhou Koyaté from West Ham

Today’s longer read: Henry Bushnell on the International Champions Cup and the transformation of preseason preparations for Yahoo