She's incredibly beautiful, totally accomplished, and brings an extra kind of hotness every week on Bravo's "Top Chef". Have you met Padma Lakshmi?

Alright, I admit, she's one of the main reasons why I watch "Top Chef". All shows should have hosts this gorgeous. But she's not just there for eye-candy. Not only is she a chef, but she's also a supermodel, actress (both in Hollywood AND Bollywood), Food Network personality, fashion icon, award-winning author and UN ambassador.

She already has two cookbooks to her credit: Easy Exotic- which covered her experiments on delicious low-fat recipes, and Tangy, Tart, Hot and Sweet- a collection of international recipes that are easy to prepare, yet elegant and memorable.

Other Interesting Things You Might Want To Know About Padma

• That scar on her right arm? She got it from an accident when she was 14. According to Wikipedia:
  

  The accident happened on a Sunday afternoon on her way back with her parents from a Hindu temple in Malibu. She remembers a loud bang, looking out the windshield and realized the family's red Mecury Sedan was airborne. Padma describes the event in the Vogue-April 2001 edition as "Flying in a car felt like an exhilarating hallucination, an unbelievable ride that oddly remains one of the most beautiful images in my memory." The car flew 40 feet down an embankment directly into a tree. The tree trunk fell directly on top of the car. She remained conscious, covered in glass, for the 40 minutes it took for the paramedics and firefighters to get through the traffic. They used the "jaws of life" to extract the family from the crumpled car. A helicopter landed in the middle of the highway to air lift her parents away while an ambulance carried Padma to the hospital. Fortunately, everyone survived. Her injuries included a fractured right hip and a shattered upper right arm which resulted in her famous 7" scar.

• Padma is of Indian-American descent. She was born in India (on 01 September 1970), but spent most of her teenage life in the United States.
• Padma Lakshmi was once married to Salman Rushdie. They divorced on July 2007, just a little after three years of marriage.
• She was named number 66 on AskMen.com's "The Top Most Desirable Women of 2008" list. Personally, I think she really could've ranked higher.
• "Top Chef" isn't her first TV show. She also hosted The Food Network's "Melting Pot: Padma's Passport", and the Discovery Channel's "Planet Food".
  

Popular media has, for the most part, managed to portray supermodels as anorexic drama queens and dim-witted divas, and for some reason we've lapped that up that image completely.

While it is true that there might be those in the fashion industry that might be a little in the way of attention-hungry, unreasonable or just in need of a good cheeseburger, such isn't the case at all for my girl, Heidi Klum.

In fact, she's the ultimate supermodel if you ask me: she's beautiful, and has a body that's still as marketable as ever. But more importantly, Heidi's been able to make good use of her popularity and success to pursue other interests both inside and out of her immediate comfort zone.

Plus, she's sharp, has a fun personality, and an all-around media darling. Seriously, can you really say anything bad about Heidi Klum?

Heidi Klum, Supermodel.

In 1991, an eighteen-year-old Heidi Klum entered a modeling contest after some prodding by her friend. She did win the contest, voted the winner out of 25,000 other hopefuls, and bagging a contract worth about US$300,000.

Since then, Heidi's been on the cover of just about every fashion magazine- but it was her work for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and for Victoria Secret that catapulted her into fame.

Heidi's also been a spokesmodel for several well-known brands, like Liz Claiborne, H&M, Braun, Volkswagen, Jordache and McDonalds, and even made appearances in TV shows and movies- "Sex and the City", "How I Met Your Mother", The Devil Wears Prada, Ella Enchanted and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.

Project Runway

In December 2004, Heidi Klum signed up as host, judge and executive producer of the reality show "Project Runway". The show came out on the Bravo cable TV channel. That's her with the Season 1 contestants in the picture to the left.

In "Project Runway", fashion designers compete for the chance to show their work at New York Fashion Week and receive money to launch their own fashion line, among other prizes.

Heidi has received an Emmy nomination for the show for each of the first three seasons. In 2008, Project Runway and Heidi Klum received a Peabody Award, the first time a reality show had won the award, according to Heidi's entry on Wikipedia.

Heidi Klum Now

As we know, Heidi's happily married to musician Seal, with two boys Henry Günther Ademola Dashtu Samuel (who's turning 3 in September) and Johan Riley Fyodor Taiwo Samuel (who's having his second birthday on November). Heidi also has Helene "Leni" Klum, who's turning 4 this May.

Heidi's still rather active in the fashion industry, designing her own clothing lines (and her own line of jewelry, even) as well as designing for others (Birkenstock, Mouawad, Victoria Secret). She also produced two fragrances, "Heidi Klum" and "Me".

Besides "Project Runway", she's also working on "Germany's Next Top Model", and is trying out her hand at voicing for video games, sculpture and paintings, even dabbling into pop music.

For more of Heidi, you can check out her official website, HeidiKlum.com. You can also read more about her on her IMDb profile here, or her Wikipedia entry here.

As long as TV keeps coming up with delicious eye-candy, this blog's feature on "Favorite TV Chicks" will be on hand to get to know more about our fine female performers who make our TV shows a little bit more interesting. Only on "Too Much TV: Renzie on TV!"

Cheers, everyone!