Gross Football Lunch – Week 8, 2024 NFL Season

Recipe of the Week: Autumn Squash Salad

Method & Analysis:

Gross Football Lunch does not make any secret of its institutional pro-salad bias. Salads get a bad rap for no particularly good reason. Americans attitudes toward food almost always assume that healthy and tasty are mutually exclusive, binary categories; a foodstuff that is one of those things cannot be the other. This framework is boring, incurious, and tiresome, and it is imperative that you reject it. Food can taste good even when its consumption will not be considered a contributing cause of death on your autopsy report. I do not claim that this salad is healthy in the strictest sense – there’s plenty of fat and salt involved – but most of its constituent elements are broadly considered not terrible for your insides, and it’s more satisfying than a lot of “fun” meals, many of which are little more than dog kibble for humans.

None of the steps involved in preparing this salad are terribly taxing, however, I do need to discuss the matter of squash. You could use the celebrated butternut squash instead, but cooking a butternut squash requires peeling the outer layer, which is a huge pain in the butt, and not a skill I am practiced enough in to offer counsel. Some grocery stores may offer pre-peeled and cubed butternut squash at this time of year, but I’m not going to promise your grocery store does. Also, the last time I tried to use the pre-cubed squash – in order to make this very salad – each and every cube in the shrink-wrapped package sprouted mold a full two days prior to the printed Use By date.

This recipe calls for using delicata squash because it has an edible outer rind, making it much easier to work with than butternut. Henceforth, I am proceeding with the assumption that you are using delicata squash as prescribed, and will not be held responsible for the consequences you bring upon yourself for any squash-based deviations. Preheat your oven to 400° F. Take your delicata squash and use a big-ass chef’s knife to cut it half lengthwise. The insides of your squash contain a whole bunch of stringy, seedy bits; grab a spoon, scoop the stringy bits and seeds out, and discard them. Once these are removed, slice the remaining squash halfs into half-inch to one-inch width half moons, then slice those half moon slices in half again, so that they become bite-sized quarters. Place these quarters into a large bowl and toss them with extra virgin olive oil, a few generous pinches of salt, and some black pepper, then arrange your seasoned squash quarters in a single layer on a baking sheet. Once the oven is preheated, place your baking sheet on the middle oven rack and set a timer for 40 minutes.

While your squash roasts, start working on your lentils. This absolutely foolproof method of cooking lentils comes from outstanding food writer and late 2010s Bon Appetit YouTube survivor Carla Lalli Music; I wish I could take credit for cleverness of this caliber, but I cannot. Measure out and rinse a cup of dry French green lentils, then dump them directly in the cooking pot. Fill the pot with water until the lentils are covered by an inch of water or two, then set the pot over high heat and add a generous amount of salt. Once the water starts boiling, reduce the heat to a medium-low simmer and set another timer for 20 minutes, stirring every so often. When your timer goes off, spoon out a few lentils and taste them for doneness. You want your lentils to be firm and toothsome but not crunchy. Simmer your lentils for longer if they are crunchy; it should take a maximum of 10 additional minutes. Once your lentils are done, drain the pot and set the cooked lentils aside to cool.

After the squash timer goes off, haul the sheet out of the oven and check it out. Your squash quarters should be attractively browning on the outside and, more importantly, offer no resistance whatsoever when poked with a paring knife. If the knife gets stuck during poking, put the sheet back in the oven and set another timer for 10 minutes. Your squash will not burn in this time, I assure you, but it will most certainly be done after this time. Once your squash is all the way done, set it aside to cool as well.

Now it’s time to make the salad dressing, which does require some semblance of cooking technique but is also incredibly easy once you get the hang of it. Grab a large bowl for salad serving and splash in a generous glug of apple cider vinegar. Next, grab either a tiny whisk or a fork in your dominant hand, grab a vessel of extra virgin olive oil in your non-dominant hand, and tilt the bowl towards your person. Begin vigorously beating the vinegar with your whisk/fork, then begin gently and slowly drizzling olive oil into the vinegar. Keep beating as you drizzle and eventually, the oil and vinegar will start to look like a single, homogeneous, yellow-ish liquid. This is your salad dressing, congratulations! If you cannot for the life of you get the oil and vinegar to come together this way, no matter how hard you beat it, add a dollop of Dijon mustard; this will make it much easier. You’ll get better at making salad dressing with practice, and in the meantime, it’s ok to cheat a little. Once your dressing is done, add a pinch of salt and pepper.

Now it’s time for salad assembly. Toss several fistfuls of arugula into the bowl with your dressing, then add in all of the squash and a proportional amount of cooked lentils. Neither the squash nor the lentils need to be fully cooled, but in the unlikely event that they’re still actively hot to the touch, let them cool until that’s no longer the case. (You will almost certainly have leftover lentils, which is deeply unfortunate, as cooked lentils have no known culinary uses.) Next, add a couple fistfuls of chopped walnuts. If your container of walnuts refers to its contents as ‘Chopped Walnuts’, you can dump them right in; if the container reads ‘Walnut Halves and Pieces’, give them an additional rough chop before adding to the bowl. Last, add your goat cheese; take your tube of the stuff and cut it into thin slices; it will then crumble into appropriately sized crumbles on its own. Dump these crumbles into the bowl and toss everything together, until everything is well-distributed throughout.

Congratulations, your salad is done! This salad is substantial enough to serve as a main but also makes a damn good side salad if you prefer; in either case, it will prove, vibrant, satisfying, and tasty without also making your stomach feel as though it has been filled with a pile of discarded rebar. Dig in!

Week 8 NFL Confidence Pool

Am I righting the ship, finally? Last week, I hypothesized that it’s now deep enough into the season that it’s possible to determine actual mismatches with actual accuracy, and I constructed my Week 7 pool specifically in order to test this hypothesis. My hypothesis bore out, in that my Week 7 pool brought in way more points than my number of successful picks merit, as I earned 72.5% of possible points on a mere 60% pick hit rate. My only mistake in the upper echelon was putting 11 points on the Falcons, who stunk up the joint against the Seahawks. How soon I have forgotten that it is in the nature of Kirk Cousins to revert to chaotic bozo ball immediately after convincing the rubes he is capable of consistency. Once, I knew this all too well, and after five and half seasons of the guy I can hardly be blamed for blocking all of these memories out at the first opportunity.

This week, I am once again banking on my ability to pick out and go big on the true mismatches. For all of my recent success in the most important part of the pool, I find myself wracked with uncertainty further down the assignment list. It’s not that I assign distrust any of the middling teams I am forced to pick further down the line; distrust implies past betrayal, and I never trusted any of these middling schmucks. It’s that I have no idea what to do with these teams! Just what version of the Eagles am I to expect in any given week? Or the aforementioned Seahawks? Or the Chargers? Or the Broncos? Or the Buccaneers? These are just some of the teams that I’ve found myself picking this week for reasons that are often unclear, even to myself.

That said, I do remain actually confident in most of my double-digit picks this week. The good teams have emerged, and so have a lot of bad ones. It’s always a good feeling to pick a team, assign that team a bunch of points, and not think twice about either decision. To the picks!

Six mismatches you can feel about is a king’s ransom this season, and I urge you to take this slate for all it’s worth. Up top, we have the Lions(!), having recently solidified their claim as the undisputed best team in the NFC(!!) and led by bonafide MVP candidate Jared Goff(!!!), going against the putrid, lifeless Titans (no exclamation points needed). This is the ideal form of the mismatch, and if you put less than 15 on it, you’re fucking up big time. The Ravens have put their slow start long behind them and the Browns deserve every indignity they will endure for the rest of this extended swirlie of a season. Divisional chaos is a non-factor.

Stranger things have happened than a 2-5 team with a theoretically talented quarterback pulling their act together in the middle and late stages of a campaign, and last week only validated concerns about Jordan Love’s inconsistency, but neither of those alone or in combination are reason enough to even think about picking the Jags. I’m going to spare everyone my extended Vikings thoughts this week; suffice to say I am not concerned about last week’s loss to the Lions. They should handle business against the depleted Rams, as they have the advantage at almost every position on paper. That said, the Rams hold the advantage at quarterback and have stayed in most of their games. Give the Vikings double digits, but I’m not going any higher than 13 and you shouldn’t either.

Finally, we have a couple of games that, while they are mismatches, are subject to the division rivalry chaos the Ravens are insulated from. The Texans are only a disappointment if you expected them to emerge as capital-C Contenders, and while the Colts have some wins under their belt they haven’t shown me any reason them to take them seriously. They almost stole a win from the Texans in Week 1, but that was at Indy; there’s no reason to pick the Colts here, or even entertain the possibility. The Chiefs have burned me against the Raiders multiple times – in the Mahomes era, no less – but I’m done picking the Raiders for any reason, so all I can do is hedge the assignment.

Here are two assignments that serve more as repudiations of the opposition than positive affirmations of the teams being picked. Marcus Mariota always sucked, and if you let him carve you up as the Panthers did last week, you are beyond hope. The Giants are another frustrating team to assess. They’re trash but also, I get the impression they’re slightly better than the league’s true bottom feeders. Still, I could never pick them outright and I refuse to assign double digits to the Steelers, so 9 it is.

The Bucs got rolled on Monday night and looked like crap in the process, but don’t overreact. Just like last year, the Ravens are gonna smoke some good teams, and the Bucs look close enough to good that the loss doesn’t change my opinion of them. The Falcons barely squeaked past at home in the first matchup, and I don’t like their chances of repeating the feat in the second. What’s that you say? Chris Godwin is out for the year!?!? Eastern time is a disease, if I was in Central I’d have stayed awake long enough to know this already. Falcons by 20 billion, then. Has trading for Amari Cooper given the Bills offense the lubrication it needs to unfuck itself? Maybe! Am I scared of picking the Seahawks outright ever since they lost to the Giants? Definitely!

Degrade the opponents they’ve faced all you want, but I’m telling ya, the Bears are starting to look legitimately good (and consider this a reminder that good teams whale on bad ones). Their defense is scary and the offense is putting some things together. The Commanders might not be starting Jayden Daniels and face a tough matchup even if they do. Finally, we have the weekend’s marquee matchup, an exhilarating race to the pit of despair between two of the league’s most prominent frauds. Who ya got, Mike McCarthy thinking about all the fishing he’s gonna have time for soon or Kyle Shanahan drifting through an injury-plagued disassociative episode? I’m taking the 9ers only because the Cowboys still can’t stop the run, but I’m gonna give them points like they’re a 3-4 team without any receivers.

Very well Eagles, you have regained a fraction of a percentage of my attention in annihilating the Giants. Can you do it against a real team? Do the Bengals even count as a real team this year? These are questions I cannot answer, nor are they questions I can be bothered to research or investigate. That’s the Gross Football Lunch commitment to professionalism in action, baby! Surely the Jets can’t fuck this one up, right? Right? The Saints are done and the Dolphins are bad no matter who is playing quarterback; it’s also foolish to assume Tua will be able to finish a game. I fear for that man’s safety, but not as much as I fear for that man’s judgment.

Enjoy the games, everybody!