Gross Football Lunch – Week 5, 2024 NFL Season

Recipe of the Week: Black Bean Quesadillas

It is important to note that sandwiches and piles are not exclusive categories, and this week’s recipe was chosen to teach this lesson. I’m going to tell you how to make your own quesadillas – which are a form of sandwich – and then dress those quesadillas with so many toppings that the whole mess becomes one big pile. Longtime readers will note that this recipe consists of many of the ingredients used in last year’s nacho recipe, and this is by design. Not only do I want to teach you all how to reject the falsehoods inherent to most exclusive categorizations, I also want to help you think about how to use familiar ingredients in new ways. That way, when you fall hopelessly behind on writing your weekly cooking and football column because you procrastinated and played a shitload of BattleTech Advanced instead, you aren’t completely screwed.

As with the nachos, I am instructing you to prepare a very basic, rudimentary guacamole. Cut open a couple of avocados and scoop their insides out into a medium-sized bowl, then mince 4-6 cloves of garlic as finely as you can manage and dump them in. Rinse a small bunch of fresh cilantro, pull the leaves off the stems, and give them a rough chop. Throw the cilantro in and season the whole mess with cumin, paprika, plenty of salt, and black pepper. Squeeze in one entire lime’s worth of juice on top, then mash everything together until it turns into guacamole. You don’t need to keep mashing until your guac is fully homogenous – I’d argue some chunkier bits of avocado are desirable – but do make sure all of the seasonings disperse. You can wait until just before serving to whip this together, but I do advise making your guac 30-60 minutes before serving. The flavors will come together more fully, and your guac will be just fine if it sits for this length of time.

With your guacamole done, it’s time to saute peppers and onions to top your quesadillas. You can put these peppers in the quesadillas if you wish, but after years of doing just that, I began placing these veggies on top, as the resulting quesadillas were invariably overstuffed and unweildy, even for me, thinly slice a couple of medium-sized onions, throw them in your trusty frying pan with some olive oil and a sprinkle of salt, then start sauteing the onions over medium heat. While the onions get going, thinly slice a couple of bell peppers and add these slices, as well as another pinch of salt, to the pan.

If you have the time and patience, you can saute the onions and peppers separately; I find the best sauteed onions are cooked slowly over medium-low heat, while the best sauteed peppers are cooked quickly over medium-high heat, so if I often choose to cook them separately when time allows. That said, time often allows no such thing. If you split the difference and saute both over medium heat, the resulting product will be more than adequate to the present task, although I do recommend giving the onions a head start. Once the peppers and onions have browned a bit and softened, transfer them to a serving bowl and set them aside.

Before I continue, I need to discuss the scale of this recipe. It is super easy to scale this recipe up or down according to your needs, but you will need to know the baseline yield I am working with in order to do so effectively. For this recipe, I am assuming you are using one pound of cheese, one 15-ounce can of black beans, and 24 taco-sized soft corn tortillas; this will yield 12 quesadillas, which will serve 4 adults. Shop accordingly!

With this yield and these proportions in mind, gather up your cheese, beans, and tortillas; it’s time to start working on the actual quesadillas. Preheat your oven to 200° F, then shred your cheese. Drain and rinse a can of black beans (if you’ve cooked your own black beans from scratch, feel free to use those), the dump them an easy-to-access container. Open your bag of tortillas and lay down as many single tortillas as will fit on your cutting board, kitchen island, or non-specified work surface. Grab a handful of shredded cheese and sprinkle them over each tortilla, then make sure this cheese is spread out evenly over the entire tortilla surface. Once this is done, sprinkle some black beans over the cheese (don’t fuss about bean-to-cheese ratio, life is too short) and place a second tortilla on top of each bean and cheese pile. You have now assembled an uncooked quesadilla. I like to assemble as many uncooked quesadillas in advance as possible; you will have some time to take your eyes of off the cooking quesadillas to assemble future batches, but not much.

It is finally time to cook. Heat some vegetable oil (or any other neutral oil) in your frying pan over medium heat and let the oil and pan get nice and hot. Once they are hot place no more than two uncooked quesadillas in the pan. You don’t strictly need to wait for the pan to heat up fully, but as with pancakes, if you put your first batch of quesadillas in before the pan is hot, that batch will turn out weird, since they won’t crisp up fully on the outside before the inside cooks. Keep an eye on your quesadillas and wait for the cheese inside to fully melt. Once it does, wait another minute or so before flipping; the outside will crisp nicely and blister attractively, and you’re not gonna hurt the fillings by doing so. This will take about 3-4 minutes. Flip your quesadillas, then cook them on the other side for 2-3 minutes more. Once each batch of quesadillas finishes, place them on a baking sheet and sock them in your preheated oven so that they’ll stay warm and crispy while you continue to fry your remaining quesadillas. Continue frying your quesadillas two at a time and placing them in the oven until all of them are cooked.

Now you’re finally ready to serve and top your quesadillas. Place 2-3 quesadillas on a large plate, and top each one with your sauteed peppers and onions, pickled red onions or jalapenos (you can pile both pickled onions and jalapenos if you insist but, speaking as a guy who liked pickles and pickled things a lot, that might be too much pickle), and a dollop of guacamole, then spoon/dump the salsa opver your choice over the whole mess. This is both indisputably a pile, but the foundation of this pile is a couple of ingredients sandwiched between two tortillas. We have achieved synthesis; melty, salty, acidic synthesis. Dig in!

Week 5 NFL Confidence Pool

This is the first week with teams on bye, which means that the maximum amount 0f points this week is decreased, which means that the margin of error is thinner, and will remain so until the bye weeks end. In a normal year, this isn’t as scary as it sounds. By Week 5, we generally have some idea of which teams are trustworthy, and which teams are not. This year, everything I thought I knew about every team has been wrong each and every single week, and there is not a single team I trust with my top assignments during this critical stretch.

But alas, the dictates of the confidence pool format are such that I must assign all of the week’s relevant point values, whether I find the idea palatable or not. Every team is fraudulent and can lose to any other team, which means that there is no such thing as a mismatch. Seeing as mismatches are the foundation of my entire confidence pool strategy, this means that I am fucked. Whatever, at least I finished above 0.500 last week. That’s like finishing a week above 0.700 in a normal year. To the picks!

Bye: Chargers, Eagles, Lions, Titans

Enjoy the games, everybody!