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‘Rachael vs. Guy Celebrity Cook-Off’ premiere: What did you think?

The Food Network kicked off “Rachael vs. Guy Celebrity Cook-Off” Sunday night (Jan. 1), which was definitely a fun new reality competition, we thought. There are eight celeb chef-testants (you can see all of their cooking profiles here), competing for $ 50,000 for the charity of their choice.

First off, the introduction – we love the giant kitchen space for the competitions. And then for teams, Guy picks Coolio, Cheech, Alyssa and Joey, while Rachael picks Lou, Aaron, Summer and Taylor.

The first challenge is catering a food festival. They each produce one food item for 150 people. Wow. Each person has a token to give to a chef and the team with the most tokens wins the challenge and is safe. The losing team will lose someone.

Team Rachael decides to do a Hot in the City theme and Team Guy goes with a Mexican theme and then the chef-testants all find out they have to entertain the crowd after they prepare their food.

Everyone seems to do well with their recipe, except Aaron Carter. He struggles with making a ranch dressing from scratch, which puts him behind. He later struggles with the macaroni, which – hmmm.

Lou’s ribs go over great, as do Joey’s kabobs, Alyssa’s bananas mexicanas, Coolio’s fish tacos, Summer’s corn on the cob and Cheech’s machada. Taylor’s gazpacho seems to be a bit too spicy for people, but it’s not as bad as Aaron’s macaroni salad, which people do not seem to enjoy. We think they are perhaps the bottom 2 at this point.

For the entertainment portion, Aaron and Taylor sing for Team Rachael. So at least Aaron pulls his weight that way. For Team Guy, they dress up in Mexican garb and have a pinata. Whoever hits the pinata gets to smooch Joey or Alyssa.

Token time. Lou and Cheech seem to get the most votes for their individual dishes. But the team with the most tokens is Team Guy. They won 82-68, which is fairly close.

The cook-off challenge is between the bottom 2, which are Aaron Carter and Taylor Dayne. No surprises there. The challenge is a 10-minute challenge where they have to use a mystery item, which this week is shrimp.

I would make an omelet, if I had ten minutes. Taylor does shrimp scampi, while Aaron does a penne pasta dish that he just kinda throws together. It appears as though Taylor’s will be better, but who knows. Maybe Aaron lucked out with what he threw together.

Rachael and Guy judge without knowing who cooked what and they decide on Taylor’s dish for her to be safe, so Aaron is going home. That seems appropriate, given how the group challenge went.

What did you think, foodies? Fun new show?

Photo/Video credit: Food Network