Super Bowl Food 2011

When in prior years we researched St. Louis and Indianapolis food, we didn’t get much useful. Having been to both places repeatedly, and eaten Italian or upscale steak house stuff that could have been in Chicago, New York, or Atlanta, there wasn’t much to choose from. We cooked New Orleans style and let it go.

When I was a kid, I was a huge Green Bay Packer fan. This wasn’t quite the idle success chasing it might seem. I loved Ray Nitschke’s busted schnoz, read Jerry Kramer’s book repeatedly, and Vince Lombardi, of course, was from a couple towns over in north Jersey. I memorized the depth charts, and I can still diagram the Green Bay sweep, weak side and strong. When Tom Brown intercepted that pass in the end zone in 1966, and Starr carried it over behind Kramer in 1967, I was glued to the black and white television.

When I got to spend a lot of time in Green Bay for project work in the 2000s, it was just awesome. One frigid night I briefed a big meeting of an angler’s club in a big bar right at the stadium. For meetings in Green Bay or Milwaukee, the law-firm pastry selection always included an odd semi-Danish ring-shaped thing called a “kringle”. It was always way sweet, but seemed to be a real regional specialty. Along with breaded and fried walleye and yellow perch, you had the makings of a good meal anywhere along the lake shore.

For unclear reasons, Molly recently began working on baking kringle. Her recipe is not at all too sweet, in fact it’s a delicious Danish breakfast pastry. For Super Bowl Sunday, we made one not sweet and added a cream-cheese based crab dip as a topping. This was simply frickin’ awesome!

Molly’s crab dip kringle. A truly

delicious appetizer before the

big game with Green Bay on the field.

Now, with a long afternoon of working on

lesson content, and the hugely massive

Premier League game between Chelsea

and Liverpool (with Fernando Torres and

Didier Drogba together terrifying me but not

Liverpool who came up 1 – nil) for warmups,

we siphoned off some of the crab dip, baked up

little tiny Bisquick biscuits to heap it on, and

chowed down with a preliminary glass of wine.

OK, kringle and seafood covers Green Bay. What about Pittsburgh? Well, it turns out that Pittsburgh was and still is the manufacturing home of Klondike Bars. Can you believe it? Dessert doesn’t get easier. And you can divert the kringle to antipasto!

Pittsburgh-based dessert.

Main course? Cover both towns.

Good fresh sauerkraut cooked with

chardonnay, chicken broth, a couple

bay leaves, with a topping of nicely

browned onions and apples, and heaps

of sliced kolbase and something called

 “hardwood smoked chicken sausage”.

Oh. And sautéed potato and cheese pirogies, right out of the freezer case at the local grocery market.

In conclusion? About the best—and easiest—Super Bowl Sunday food ever. We’ll be looking for you to be here next year. Even if it’s St. Louis and Indianapolis. We’ll come up with something. Trust us. 

PS. If you got a little time to kill, boogie on over to the awesome companion blogs:

http://docviper.livejournal.com/

http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/

http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/

thanks for stoppin' by!