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".
  

Yeah I watch The Food Network every now and then. I live on my own, cook my own food from time to time, so an occasional cooking tip sure wouldn't hurt.

Let's talk about one of my favorite personalities on The Food Network: Giada de Laurentiis. For the longest time, I referred to her as "that chick from Food Network who looks a lot like Natalie Portman". I first saw a lot of her on Everyday Italian (which shows in the Philippines on The Lifestyle Network, though I suspect those episodes are already years old even as they show it now).

Giada is a professional chef, food stylist, author and TV personality. Besides Everyday Italian (which had been on The Food Network since 2003), we also get to catch her on Giada's Weekend Getaways. She also hosted the network specials Behind the Bash and had a 2-part special called Giada In Paradise.

Things You Probably Didn't Know About Giada

It was only recently that I was able to know more about her from my online research. Here are a few interesting bits I found about her on Wikipedia:

• I didn't know her last name was "de Laurentiis". Her grandfather is legendary film producer Dino de Laurentiis, who gave us (among a host of other projects) Barbarella (1968), Serpico (1973), the remake of King Kong (1976), Flash Gordon (1980), Dune (1984), Army of Darkness (1992), and most of the Hannibal Lecter movies, including Manhunter (1986), that one with William Petersen.
• Given her family background, she's really grown up Hollywood-style. Her mother is actress Veronica de Laurentiis, and her father is actor-producer Alex de Benedetti, a close colleague of Dino de Laurentiis, Veronica's father. Her siblings are also, for the most part, in the business of entertainment.
  

• Giada originally had no plans to go into the "family business", which was why she pursued her interests in the culinary arts to begin with. It was after styling a piece in Food & Wine Magazine in 2001 that Food Network contacted her. She admitted to being a little uncomfortable in front of the camera at first, but later on got more used to it, and so became more relaxed on air.
  
• According to her entry on Wikipedia, when Everyday Italian first aired, the Food Network received emails accusing the network of hiring a model or actress pretending to cook instead of a real chef. Well, we all know better now, don't we?
• On an episode of Iron Chef America (in November 2006, actually), we see Giada and Bobby Flay cook off against Rachael Ray and Mario Batali. Rachael and Mario won that time. Nevertheless, it was loads of fun.