Gross Football Lunch – Super Bowl LVIII

Recipe of the Week: Shrimp & Grits

Ingredients:

• Raw shrimp
  • Garlic
  • Salt
  • Pepper
  • Smoked paprika
  • Oregano
  • Cayenne or crushed red pepper
  • Olive oil
• Grape tomatoes
• Whole baby portobello mushrooms
• Non-instant Grits
• Cheddar cheese
• Scallions
• Salt
• Pepper
• Unsalted butter
• Olive oil

Method & Analysis:

Before I get into the final recipe of this season, I would like to say two things. Wait, nope, it’s actually three things. First, and most importantly, thank you for you joining me for the first season of Gross Football Lunch! Whether you’re one of the loyal select few who was here each and every week or you’re just some rando who stopped in for a paragraph, I appreciate you! Second, I’m not so naive to believe that you don’t already have your own gustatory plans and/or traditions pursuant to the big game, but I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t send you off into the bleak off-season without one last thing to cook. Consider this a polite suggestion to make some shrimp & grits at some point in the next seven months.

And third, if you have deeply held and thoroughly informed shrimp & grits opinions, please make sure to leave several angry, illegible comments that don’t even bother explaining your actual beef with the recipe. Badly misspelled shitposts with nary a punctuation mark in sight are what make this job worth doing!

Now let’s talk cooking. As one of my loyal readers, you have surely noticed that I don’t specify quantities in my ingredient lists, and I rarely specify quantities in my cooking instructions. While I get how that could be really annoying, I omit this information on purpose. My goal is to provide flexible instructions that can be scaled up or down easily according to your needs, and get you as a home cook comfortable with a certain amount of winging it. However, this recipe requires slightly more precision. You can scale this recipe up or down as you choose, so long as you cook shrimp grits in the right proportion. Cook one cup of dry grits for every pound of shrimp. One cup of grits and one pound of shrimp can feed four adults; two cups of grits and two pounds of shrimp can feed the entire 101st Airborne. Whether you scale up or scale down, stick to this ratio!

The nice thing about shrimp & grits is that not only is it easy to make enough to feed a crowd, it also doesn’t take very much time to cook. You can whip this whole recipe together in about an hour. Therefore, about one hour before serving time, preheat your oven to 400º F. While the oven preheats, it’s time to prepare and season your shrimp. If you live in a place where you’re able to get good, fresh shrimp and can afford to do so, by all means get fresh shrimp. It will taste better, but unfortunately, you will need to peel and devein your shrimps. It’s a pain in the ass to peel and devein shrimps, but it’s going to be ok. I’ll talk you through it.

To peel a shrimp, find the shrimp’s legs on the shell. Slide a paring knife just underneath the shell between the legs and, facing the blade of the knife away from the shrimp meat, carefully pry the knife towards your person. This will bust open a seam that you can use to peel off most of the shell. You probably won’t be able to peel off every shrimp shell in one piece every time, but this method will get you off to a consistently good start. Once you’ve peeled off every part of the shell except the tail, squeeze the tail to extract the last little bit shrimp meat and discard the tail.

Once you get a shrimp out of its shell, it’s time to devein it. The vein of the shrimp is a thin black line that runs lengthwise along the shrimp, just under the surface. It is, strictly speaking, edible, but it’s gross and you’re better off getting rid of it. Once you’ve found the shrimp vein, use your paring knife to poke the vein at either end to cut a little slit along the length of the vein. It’ll come right out. Repeat both steps of this disgusting, horrific process until all your shrimps are prepped. You can save the shells to make seafood stock if you wish, but if you choose to throw them out, take your trash out immediately, unless you want your kitchen to smell like a briny charnel house toilet.

That said, if you can’t get fresh shrimp it’s not the end of the world. When considered holistically as a dish, shrimp & grits is a pile. It may be a pile with the aura of elevated cuisine, but it’s a pile nonetheless. This recipe is going to be flavorful and satisfying no matter what, so if you’re stuck using frozen raw shrimp you’ll be fine. You also shouldn’t have to peel or devein the shrimp; you may have to remove the tails, but that’ll be fine. Just make sure you let the shrimp thaw completely before seasoning.

Regardless of what type of shrimp you use, once they’re thawed, peeled, and deveined, it’s time to season them. Grab a bowl big enough to hold your shrimp and mince some garlic cloves (use 4-5 cloves for each pound of shrimp). Add both the minced garlic and shrimp to the bowl, then add plenty of salt, pepper, smoked paprika, and oregano. Don’t be shy with any of these seasonings; you want all of them well dispersed throughout your shrimp. Also add cayenne pepper to your liking. This dish doesn’t have to be super spicy, but it can be if that’s what you’re into, and it needs at least a little bit of heat. If you don’t have any cayenne, crushed red pepper will do. Your shrimp is now seasoned. Set the bowl aside.

Once your shrimp is dealt with, it is all but certain that your oven will be done preheating. Grab your whole grape tomatoes and place them in a single layer on a baking sheet; use half a pint of tomatoes for every pound of shrimp and cup of grits. Liberally season with salt and pepper – tomatoes are salt sponges, and it’s nigh impossible to over-salt them – and coat with olive oil, then sock them in the oven for 40 minutes, undisturbed.

Next, find the stovetop cooking instructions package of grits; for now, all you need to do is follow the instructions as written. Measure out your dry grits and the appropriate amount of water specified for the amount of grits you’re using. Place the water in a pot on the stove to boil and add a generous pinch of salt. Make sure to use a bigger pot than you think you need, as grits expand a great deal during the cooking process. While you wait for your water to boil, cook the mushrooms. Remove them from their packaging and given them a rinse, then snap the stems off and out. Once that’s done, cut the remaining caps into quarters. You can thinly slice them if you want, but quartering will yield bigger, meatier, and more satisfying mushroom bits.

Grab a frying pan, put it on medium heat, and add coat the pan with olive oil. Once the oil is hot, and your mushrooms, along with some salt and pepper. Stir them together until the mushrooms brown and shrink visibly. Do not crowd the mushrooms! Crowding the mushrooms will result in insufficiently browned mushrooms, and if you don’t get some nice browning on these mushrooms, you may as well not have bothered with them in the first place. If you find yourself packing mushrooms into your pan, stop doing that and remove mushrooms until each one has at least a bit of personal space. Cook in batches if you must, adding more oil to the pan for each batch.

Once your water is boiling, add your grits and lower the heat and simmer them for however long the package instructions said to; this should be at least 15 minutes (because, as we all know, no self-respecting southerner uses instant grits). At the risk of condemning Ralph Macchio and his buddy to die by the hand of the State of Alabama, you don’t actually need to stir the grits constantly. All you need to do is stir them periodically, searching for and breaking up any clumps that may have formed between stirs. When you’re not stirring, shred 6 ounces of cheddar cheese per cup of dry grits, and rinse and chop up your scallions, trimming both the root end and the woodiest green parts on the other end beforehand.

Once your grits are done according to the package’s printed instructions, remove them from the heat. Give the grits a quick taste for seasoning, and add more salt if needed. Once the grits are salted to your liking, stir in at least one entire tablespoon of unsalted butter per cup of dry grits, a metric ton of cracked black pepper, and your shredded cheese. Keep stirring until the cheese and butter melt and dissolve completely, which will turn your grits a beautiful yellow color. Cover the pot to keep the grits warm and set it aside.

Now let’s saute your shrimp. Coat the bottom your frying pan with more olive oil (yes, the shrimps have already received an oil coat, but this part is super important for reasons that will become clear soon enough) and put the pan back on medium heat. Once the oil is hot, add your shrimp. As the shrimp cook, they will shrink and change color, from the dull gray of their raw state into the white with red-orange color you think of when you think of shrimp. Once you see the color change on the bottom, flip them and cook on the other side until both sides have changed colors. This takes about four minutes, tops.

At last, it’s time to serve. Whether you’re serving into individual bowls or one large bowl, first scoop in a big heaping pile of grits, then top with a generous amount of shrimp, some tomatoes, and some mushrooms. Garnish with the chopped scallions. Finally, add the piece de resistance: you remember that extra oil you added when you cooked the shrimp? While the shrimp cooked, it turned a delicious, beautiful dark red as it became infused with the paprika and garlic. Drizzle this oil in a thin swirl over the top of your bowl. Because if there’s one thing this dish is missing, it’s spicy, unctuous fattiness. You can always use more of that. Also, an additional garnish of hot sauce will not go amiss here. Add some splashes, with my blessing. Dig in!

Super Bowl LVIII Pick

Before I get to my actual pick for the game, let’s take a look at the results from the conference championships:

I cannot rightly say that championship Sunday went as well as it possibly could have – I picked the Ravens to win it all, and they’re obviously not going to be doing that – and yet, I feel like I won the damn lottery all the same. It took a late, borderline garbage time Lions touchdown for my picks to work out this way, but I had a perfect weekend against the spread! Even with only two games to pick, that feels impossible; even more unthinkable is my total playoff record against the spread, which has ballooned to a ludicrous 0.750!

And yes, my playoff pool did suffer from the Ravens loss, but both my 13-point and 12-point picks hit, which means the 14-point loss was as cushioned as it could have been. Furthermore, it sure looked like the Lions were going to pull out the victory for a while there, and had they done so my differential for the weekend would’ve swung from a tolerable +5 to a disastrous -9. That possibility hung over my head for long enough that, once the 9ers secured victory, my relief was incalculable. My playoff pool survived what could have been a ruinous weekend, my spread picks are performing beyond my wildest imaginings, and the last game can only screw both of those up so much. It’s a good feeling. Time to pick the big one.

Line pulled from ESPN at 8:59 AM Eastern Time on Thursday, February 8th, 2024. My pick for the game, and the relevant spread, is listed first. The designated home team is displayed in bold.

Kansas City Chiefs (+1.5) vs. San Francisco 49ers

My elation with my postseason performance is the result of insecurity. I’ve made no secret of my imposter syndrome when it comes to slinging football takes; look anywhere else on the internet, and you’ll find any number of people with takes all their own, all of which are better researched and more considered than my own. I’m just a bored Couch Dad Plus in search of both a hobby and an outlet for my own half-baked opinions that isn’t a call-in radio show, a comments section, or a smarter person’s Twitter replies. I spend most of every season feeling like I have no idea what I’m talking about, and that just about every thought I express in this column must require some kind of citation. If it’s a thought about football, and it seems logical and coherent, surely I must have stolen it from somewhere else.

This is why this year’s playoffs have served too calm my endless sense of inadequacy. I’ve done well and it’s felt easy to understand what’s going on just by knowing each team’s basic deal, watching the games, and synthesizing ideas accordingly. Football is a complicated sport, but that doesn’t mean the results of games are always difficult to parse. For example, you need only have watched their playoff games to notice that the 49ers’ defense isn’t quite what it used to be; therefore, picking their opponents to cover 7-point lines twice was an easy choice that was rewarded twice.

And, of course, the Chiefs’ offensive woes during the regular season have resulted in disrespectful lines ever since the Divisional Round, and I have reaped the benefits. You can point out as many deficiencies with Kansas City’s receiving corps and offensive line as you wish; this is still an offense led by Patrick Mahomes and designed by Andy Reid, and those two facts alone should instill the fear of the football gods in everyone. What’s more, the Chiefs’ defense is visibly and obviously the best it’s been in the Mahomes era, and has been so for the entire season. If I am to be stuck in my milieu as a Couch Dad Plus, barely fit to synthesize my own findings and express them publicly, why not use that to my advantage? I’m picking the Chiefs because any line that favors their opponent obviously is too high. If the Chiefs are the underdogs, I’m picking them, period. No further analysis is required.

But, because I’m the sort of person that likes to pretend I do everything for a reason, even when that’s demonstrably false, I’m going to provide further analysis, anyway. As I said above, the eye test is enough to demonstrate that the 49ers’ defense isn’t what it used to be. They struggle against the run and the pass rush isn’t as white-hot as it once was. If the Chiefs choose to grind out long drives with running and short passing, they will probably be able to do so. Of course, the problem with grinding out long drives is it reduces the margin for error. Longer possessions necessarily have a greater chance of stalling out – at this level of the sport, defenses can get stops even when they’re not supposed to – and quick passes and runs are always less efficient to begin with.

However, even if they can stop these kinds of drives, San Francisco is in trouble. Let’s assume that KC’s offense comes out and does exactly as I suggest. They run a lot and they primarily use short and intermediate throws. From this starting point, there are two possibilities: this plan either works, or it doesn’t. (Sophisticated analysis this ain’t, but like I said, just because the game is complex doesn’t mean the reason everything happens is complicated.) In either event, the 49ers are in deep shit. If the Chiefs can’t move the ball slowly, they will be forced to move the ball quickly, and even with their question marks at receiver and tackle, you cannot possibly want the Chiefs to have to move the ball quickly!

A plan that assumes that Mahomes and friends will not be able to make plays downfield is no plan whatsoever. If the 49ers decide to limit explosive plays, they will still have their hands full when it comes to actually doing so. If they decide they must load the box to stop the run (or otherwise prioritize stopping steady gains), they will leave themselves open to explosive plays, and I cannot possibly imagine choosing to do this after all Mahomes and Reid have shown us, both in this postseason and in the last six years. It’s not just irrational, it’s disrespectful. Consider rule #12 of the Evil Overlord List, which states that “[o]ne of my advisors will be an average five-year old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.” I can think of no more obviously flawed plan than choosing to leave explosive plays open to Patrick Mahomes. I’m pretty sure my oldest could tell you that much, and he’s only two.

The 49ers are also in trouble offensively. While I think it’s foolish to think that the Chiefs can neutralize the 9ers entirely, I do think that the Chiefs’ can make their lives incredibly difficult. Kyle Shanahan’s calling card, both as a playcaller and an offensive designer, is his ability to manipulate defenses and thus make his quarterback’s job as easy as possible, but nothing is easy when the quarterback is under constant siege. I expect the Chiefs to send lots of blitzes with lots of man coverage behind it, in order to force Brock Purdy to be accurate. I think Brock Purdy is Actually Good, but I cannot deny there’s been a lot of Spraying and Praying to his game during the playoffs. He will have his hands more than full if he is forced to avoid the rush and make pinpoint throws.

Of course, the 9ers also have Christian McCaffrey, who I’m told is pretty good, but can only help so much if the 9ers do fall behind. This time I mean it: the 49ers must keep things close in order keep their offensive options open, or they will be screwed. Yes, the 9ers made big comebacks against both the Packers and Lions, but the Chiefs defense is a great deal better than either of those two units. I doubt Purdy can orchestrate another big comeback when he’s getting blitzed again and again and again. It’s wrong to say that the 49ers have no chance, but they have their work cut out for them, and I cannot consider picking them in good conscience.

Also, for what it’s worth, the Chiefs have a much better kicker. Use or discard this information as you will.

Enjoy the game, everyone!