One of the final four contestants on The Next Iron Chef Season 2, Chef Amanda Freitag became the runner-up on The Next Iron Chef: Redemption after falling to Chef Alex Guarnaschelli in the Kitchen Stadium finale.

Each Redemption rival was given a journal to use during his or her time in the competition, and Chef Freitag filled hers with notes on the challenges, quick renderings of imagined finished plates, detailed to-do lists, inventories of must-have ingredients, plus go-to recipes.

After a particularly brutal white-bread battle, Chef Freitag let off steam with fellow Showdown rivals Chefs Elizabeth Falkner and Duskie Estes in Next Iron Chef's very first food fight.

Cooking a culinary representation of Chef Falkner in the Chairman's Challenge of Simplicity, Chef Freitag prepared this one-bite bowl of pasta with an anchovy sauce that Iron Chef Zakarian called "simply brilliant." It was deemed the best dish of the day and earned Chef Freitag her first win of the competition.