When I took this job, I was at a point in my life as a home cook that allowed me to watch "Top Chef," "Hell's Kitchen" and "Iron Chef" with a certain smug and informed confidence. It was, for me, like watching a sport that I could actually play.

"He's going to go for a sous vide!" I would announce to my spectacularly uninterested family.

"Those scallops are overcooked -- I can tell from here!"

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"Top Chef" (Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on Bravo) is one notable exception. Despite recent discussions over whether or not the show has lost its edge, the seventh season of "Top Chef" has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt just how resilient and dynamic the popular cooking competition is. Thanks to a combination of smart casting and daring new challenges, the show started at a slow simmer and has rapidly heated to a rolling boil in the past two episodes.

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Why, then, am I literally drooling with anticipation? Because of the way I'll eat afterward. Let me explain.

I will be the first to admit that "Top Chef" is a fundamentally flawed enterprise. Say what you will about "American Idol," but the audience at home can hear Crystal Bowersox caterwauling just as well as Simon Cowell. On "Top Chef," you get to watch frantic knife work, precise plating and maybe a little bickering around the walk-in, but you've got to rely on Judge Tom Colicchio and friends to tell you how the food on those elegant plates tasted. Indeed, the producers at Magical Elves edit the episodes with an eye toward maximum suspense rather than ultimate clarity. Midway through last season Laurine Wickett's pork rillette was likened to cat food by one cranky judge, but she wasn't canned that week, and another contestant was ordered to "pack up your knives and go" (PUYKAG, to faithful viewers). Which is why Colicchio and the other judges devote a substantial portion of their Bravo.com blogs to explaining/defending the outcomes.

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Luckily, my judging panel doesn't mind a sloppy presentation or overbearing acidic notes as long as the dish in question is covered in melted cheese and/or it just feels right when you rub it into your scalp. (That's my smallest judge's way of communicating that classic Gail Simmons style of high praise, aka "I could bathe in this" or "I want to stick my entire head into a vat of this" or "I could eat this until I quite literally explode.")

In contrast, the celebrity chefs on the "Top Chef Masters" finale Wednesday night were held to such a ridiculously high standard that it was almost too much to bear. Super chefs Rick Moonen, Marcus Samuelson and Susur Lee all prepared dishes that made the judges and guest judges gasp and gush and sigh deeply over their marvelous textures and flavors.

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Either way, it's the sort of burger Spike Mendelsohn says is needed to fuel the people behind the world's largest news organization, and what he set out to create when asked to develop a hamburger inspired by The Associated Press.

Because, er. nothing says great burger like wall-to-wall coverage of war, politics and upset celebrities, right?

Despite the (lack of?) inspiration he was handed, true to his burger master cred -- his Washington burger joint, Good Stuff Eatery, has become a hotspot for the likes of first lady Michelle Obama -- Mendelsohn came up with a winner.

"For the people that never stop," Mendelsohn said of his 24/7 burger, the first in AP's weekly series -- 20 Burgers of Summer, a celebration of the delicious diversity of the great American hamburger.

"Whether you're embedded with troops in Iraq, photographing the animals of Africa or live from the White House, here's the burger that will keep you going any time of day," said Mendelsohn, whose ode to burgers, "The Good Stuff Cookbook," is out later this month.

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Colicchio, whose numerous restaurants include Craft, Craftsteak and the recently opened Colicchio & Sons in New York, was named outstanding chef during an awards ceremony that is considered the Oscars of the food world. It's an honor for which he'd been a finalist seven other times since 2002, the same year the organization named Craft the nation's best new restaurant.

Though Colicchio drew many accolades early in his career, he rose to prominence in 1994 when he and partner Danny Meyer opened Gramercy Tavern, which earned Colicchio three stars from The New York Times and several Beard awards, including best chef in New York City in 2000 and outstanding restaurant service in 2001.

Colicchio's cookbook, "Think Like a Chef," earned him a Beard cookbook award in 2001. More recently, he's become known for his role as the lead judge on the Bravo television series, "Top Chef."

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Americans' cable options are about to get a lot foodier. Last week, Scripps Networks, owners of the Food Network, announced that they'll be launching a second channel for food lovers called the Cooking Channel, on Memorial Day of this year. It will feature similar content to that of the Food Network, including shows by Rachael Ray and Bobby Flay.

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• In the past few days, the folks at Digg were all over this clip from "Buy Me That" -- a children's consumer awareness-program -- in which a food stylist explains how she sells hamburgers on TV using undercooked meat, branding, strategic cutting, and toothpicks. There's something about the tinted early-nineties glow of the footage that makes her explanation seem extra-perturbing.

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That was the moral of the sixth season of the show, in which the irascible Voltaggio brothers whipped up a delicate sous vide here, an exquisite coulis there, each act of gourmet showmanship just an elaborate culinary noogie for the other brother's tender skull.

It was clear from the start that the siblings, who had skills that put most of the other cheftestants to shame, would make it to the finale. But which brother would win?

Some favored older brother Bryan Voltaggio, 33, with his wide eyes and quiet, restrained way of summarizing aggression between the two as simple sibling rivalry. He called his younger brother "a bit of a control freak" and only once whined that he was tired of Michael's "unprofessional behavior being rewarded."

Others liked the cut of younger brother Michael's jib, what with the 30-year-old's propensity for telling his big brother "Fuck you!" and "Don't be a dick!"

Of course, quite a few of us were rooting for Kevin Gillespie, 26, the soft-spoken, sweet, but still salty chef who won the judges over time and again with his far more simple Southern cooking. Compared to the brotherly gastro-metaphysics flashing and banging around nearby, Kevin's dishes were humble acts of love, not arrogant culinary pyrotechnics.

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Smugness and swagger play well on TV. Eye-rolling know-it-alls, snorty laughter, brazen disregard for other people's feelings, bullying, condescension, superiority complexes, afternoon glasses of bourbon, grumbly stoicism, infidelity, overconfident banter: These things are the rainbows and unicorns of the televisual schoolyard.

Whether it's "Sons of Anarchy" or "The Amazing Race," whether it's "The Mentalist" or "Project Runway," the last thing we want, at the end of a long day at work, is to relax by watching insecure people second-guess themselves. The heroes of the small screen are the ones with the biggest egos.

Revolting Voltaggios!

Take the Voltaggio brothers of "Top Chef: Las Vegas" (10 p.m. Wednesdays on Bravo). These two self-assured but growly young men don't take kindly to either flaccid flavor profiles or incendiary comments in the Glad Torture Chamber. It was obvious from the start of the sixth season that these snarling siblings had the chops to make it to the final three. What was less obvious was the extent to which they might let their clashing personalities and lifelong resentments and deeply competitive natures rise to the surface and engulf them in a stormy sea of unspoken contempt, sullen silences and occasional spitty outbursts.

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Carla, arguably the frontrunner going into Wednesday night's "Top Chef" finale, has always flirted with disaster during elimination challenges, but somehow she's managed to pull herself out of several tailspins to win big in the end. Even so, when her sous vide steak ended up tough and her blue cheese soufflé proved un-plate-able, her fate was clearly sealed. Despite having gained momentum and impressed the judges several weeks in a row, Carla ended up in tears at Judges' Table, as she explained how her cooking partner, former "Top Chef" finalist Casey Thompson, convinced her that her two worst dishes were good choices.

"It seems that you let your sous chef talk you out of cooking the food that got you to the finale, and I'm not quite sure that I understand that," Tom Colicchio told a devastated Carla.

"I've proven that when I cook my food, it's really delicious," said Carla as tears dripped down her face. "Do I think that my food is good? Yes. When I make it? Yes."

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Because, let's face it, we're not nearly as cool as we were 40 years ago. Our hairstyles are ugly, our taste in food and music sucks, we don't read, we take ourselves way too seriously but have nothing original to say, we drive like assholes and these pants make our ass look fat.

Wouldn't we all have better taste if there were less crappy products around for us to choose from? Of course we should stimulate the economy and bail out companies teetering on the brink of collapse, but let's make sure we prop up the right companies while letting the lame ones die quickly. Do we really need to offer assistance to Applebee's or TGIFriday's, ensuring the survival of BBQ Pork Ravioli Bites and Fried Mac and Cheese indefinitely? Let's find a way to bring on the demise of an always-thriving Wal-Mart, while pumping tax dollars into great indie record companies, independent booksellers, excellent mom and pop delis, and, of course, Dunkin' Donuts, home of the widely celebrated Bavarian Kreme Doughnut!

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We know every one of these reality archetypes all too well by now. Or rather, we know how they talk to a camera about themselves, and how they react to losing the flower-arranging challenge, and what they think about men who refuse to flirt with them or antisocial girls who make the same dress over and over again.

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And who sits back, arms folded, with a self-satisfied, almost bored look on his face? You can bet that smug bastard is going to be in the top five contestants when we pull into the final stretch.

In an attempt to reveal both early nerves and early swagger, Chef Tom Colicchio kicks off the fifth season of Bravo's "Top Chef" (premieres 9 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 12) with a particularly brutal Quickfire Challenge (that will also result in one cheftestant being eliminated): Peel 15 apples using a paring knife! (Good luck not cutting your fingers off, kids.) The first group to finish without hacking up the apples is safe, and the bottom group must move on to a second, even more harrowing challenge.

Launching the whole season with an apple-peeling challenge feels a little uncreative and arbitrary. Do the judges really care about knife skills so much that they'd eliminate someone based on them in the first few minutes of the show? On the other hand, don't knife skills reflect, in part, how well a chef will handle the pressures of a chaotic kitchen?

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But how will you react to weeks of high stakes and the occasional negative feedback, when everyone has always told you that your cooking is brilliant? Will you lose your confidence and get emotional, like Richard Blais, whose whimsical touches and mastery of molecular gastronomy have impressed the judges from the start, but who seemed to lose his footing as the season progressed? Will you second-guess yourself and panic like Stephanie Izard, whose fine cooking earned her repeated praise, but who had a tendency to either remain utterly calm or crumble completely under pressure, depending on the circumstances? Or will you blow up at everyone within a 10-foot radius, then fold your arms across your chest and glare until smoke pours out of your ears like Lisa Fernandes, whose excellent palate and nimble hand with Asian flavors got her to the final three despite repeated appearances in the bottom two after the elimination challenges?

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