Gross Football Lunch – Week 3, 2024 NFL Season

“Recipe” of the Week: Chile Relleno with Christmas Chile Sauce

Greetings from sunny Albuquerque! I spent most of the past week on the road, so there’s no recipe this week. Instead, I’m going to show off the best thing I had while I was away. Behold, chile relleno from Los Cuates! For the uninitiated, a chile relleno is a pepper filled with cheese, then dipped in an egg batter and fried. They are always delicious but these transcended the game. The batter was so perfectly crisp and salty, yet light and fluffy underneath the crust. And, whereas I am used to my chile rellenos being made out of poblano peppers, these were made out of hatch green chilies, because that’s how they roll in New Mexico. This plate will haunt me for the rest of my days.

And now, a word about chile sauce. New Mexico is celebrated for it’s chilies and chile sauces, and they come in two varieties: red and green. Both are good, and both clearly have their uses, but in my limited stay I was unable to develop any understanding of how to pair sauces and dishes. I was only visiting for a few days, so perhaps gaining such an understanding was unrealistic, but every restaurant I went to was willing to top my dish with red and green chile sauce (a.k.a. Christmas chile), provided that I asked nicely. While this was delicious in the short term, in the long term it has left me feeling adrift in a sea of my own fecklessness. I choose nothing because I believe in nothing; I am unknown to myself and those I love. I have lived as a coward, and I will die a coward’s death.

Week 3 NFL Confidence Pool

My Week 2 pool sucked; I whiffed on far too many high assignments, and I don’t think my season points percentage will ever recover. Most of these assignments were made out of an abundance of caution; I was so worried about overreacting to the Week 1 results that I made cowardly picks and assignments. Since I have no interest in letting my season pool die a coward’s death, I’ve decided to go whole hog on overreactions. I’ve picked against the teams that betrayed me whenever possible and when that was impossible, I’ve assigned those Judases as few points as possible.

No individual game write-ups this week; next week’s column will return to more or less full size. To the picks!

Enjoy the games, everybody!