Gross Football Lunch – Week 18, 2024 NFL Season

Recipe of the Week: Rob’s Tomato Sauce

Before I get started, it will help to establish some expectations. The following recipe produces a red tomato sauce that is precisely of the sort one might expect to find accompanying a large plate of pasta noodles, or perhaps a meatball or two. I am hesitant to describe it more specifically than that; while it may be reasonable to quit being so damn vague and call it a damn marinara sauce, I am afraid to do so. Isn’t that a pretty specific thing? Perhaps it is, perhaps it is not. I refuse to use that term, because if I do, I might make the nerds mad, and making the nerds mad will bring me far more attention than I can responsibly manage. Regardless of what you choose to call it, please also note that this sauce takes two to two-and-a-half hours to cook. You won’t be working the entire time by any means, but that’s a significant chunk of time for anyone, so plan accordingly.

Grab a large yellow onion and dice it up as finely as you can manage, then place the diced onion bits in either a Dutch oven or large saucepan. Drizzle the diced onion with just enough olive oil to coat most of it, then sprinkle it with a pinch of salt, and give everything a nice stir or three as you put your future sauce vessel over medium-low heat. If you want to rush things a tiny bit, you can turn the heat up to medium, but onions reward patience and so does my tomato sauce. Using medium heat will also necessitate more frequent stirring, lest the onions brown too aggressively.

Continue stirring the onions every so often, and use the time you are not stirring to get a few other things ready. Peel and mince an entire head of fresh garlic. This will take a while, so you may need to step away from the garlic to stir for a bit. You may also find that your head of garlic contains a certain amount of tiny, bullshit cloves that are mostly made of paper. Feel free to discard these, your sauce will have enough garlic in it, I promise. Open a can of whole peeled tomatoes, as well as a can of tomato paste (or, preferably, a tube of the fancy double-concentrated tomato paste). Open your bottle of red wine and let it breathe a bit. Haul out your trusty jar of dried oregano, and be sure to bring its best friend, your equally trusty jar of crushed red pepper.

That’s plenty of working ahead for now; by this time, your onions should be starting to gently sizzle and turn translucent around the edges. You can move forward to the next phase if you wish, but you don’t have to. The nice thing about onions is that, when they’re being cooked on such a low heat, they can keep cooking as long as you please. I wouldn’t let them cook for so long that they start to caramelize – the tomatoes are the star of the show here – but I would encourage you to let them continue to hang out and slowly but surely develop their flavors for quite a while.

So, at some point after the onions have started to turn translucent but before they have caramelized fully, it will be time to move on to the next phase. Dump your minced garlic into the pot and stir it in until it becomes fragrant. Next, add several shakes of dried oregano and at least a few shakes of crushed red pepper. If you want a spicy tomato sauce, feel free to add as much crushed red pepper as you like, but if you don’t want an even sort of spicy tomato sauce, you must add at least a little bit of crushed red pepper anyway! It will only make the finished product better, I promise.

When the oregano and red pepper flakes start smelling good, it is time to add the tomato paste. But first, a brief tangent is in order. This recipe scales up quite easily, but if you choose to scale it up, the ratio of tomato sauce to whole peeled tomatoes is load-bearing. The basic ratio of paste to tomato is one six-ounce can of tomato paste (or one whole tube of double concentrated tomato paste) per 28-ounce can of whole peeled tomatoes. If you use more than one can of tomatoes, make sure to use the same amount of cans of tomato paste. Also, use an additional onion and head of garlic for each extra tomato can.

Once your tomato paste can(s) or tube(s) is(are) prepped, empty their entire contents into the pot, sprinkle the paste with some salt, and bump the heat up to medium. Stir everything together; the tomato paste will stick to everything it comes into contact with, including the bottom of your pot. Keep everything moving, but leave the stuff that’s stuck to the pot stuck to the pot! Stuck tomato paste is flavor country. After a few minutes, the tomato paste will start to turn a brighter shade of red, indicating that it is time to pour in a few glugs of red into the pot. Add just enough wine to coat the bottom; it will start to bubble up and cook off immediately. Use this time to scrape the bottom of the pot as aggressively as you can; this will loosen the tomato paste that got stuck at the bottom, thus incorporating that delicious gunky goop into your finished sauce.

The wine will mostly cook off in less than a minute. That’s not much time, so feel free to add another glug or two if you’re not finished scraping off the bottom of the pot. As soon as all the wine has evaporated and all the sticky bits have been scraped, it’s time to add the tomatoes. Dump in the entire contents of your tomato can(s), including any and all liquid, using a spatula to shepherd straggling puddles of tomato liquid into the pot. Put enough salt and pepper on the tomatoes to cover each individual whole tomato with a respectable dusting, then break the tomatoes up a tiny bit with a spoon. You do not need to break them up into tiny chunks; just crush them up enough so that they burst open.

(Herein lies the source of my anxieties that I am a marinara sauce poser. Yes, this sauce takes a couple of hours to come together, but that’s not actually enough time for whole peeled tomatoes to completely break down without human intervention. Perhaps someday I will discover the secret to slow-cooking tomato sauce, but for now, I can assure you that the finished product of this recipe will suffice in almost any scenario that calls for red sauce.)

Next, take your empty tomato can(s) and fill them up with tap water, then dump this water into the pot and bump the heat all the way up to high. Use one can’s worth of water for each can of tomatoes. Add a goodly portion of additional salt and pepper, and keep an eye on your pot. Once the sauce starts boiling, reduce the heat so that the sauce starts to simmer instead of boil. Start by reducing the heat to medium; if the sauce is still bubbling a bit too much, keep reducing the heat until the sauce reaches a bare simmer.

Now that your sauce is simmering, it’s time to toss in a couple more ingredients. Rinse or peel one large carrot, chop it in half, and drop it in. If you have a rind of Parmesan cheese you were told to hang on to, for reasons that time has forgotten entirely, throw that in as well. Next, open up your oversized bullshit clamshell of unsustainable climate death supermarket basil. Remove about half of the basil from the clamshell, cut a length of kitchen twin sufficient to tie this basil together – leaves and stems alike – then tie this basil together and drop it in the pot. Strip the leaves off of the remain basil stems, chop them up into ribbons, and set them aside.

That was a lot of work, but the good news is that the active cooking is almost entirely complete. For the next hour or two, you only have two tasks to see to. You must keep an eye on how much your sauce is bubbling, and manage the heat accordingly. If it’s bubbling too quickly, turn the heat down, and if it’s barely or not at all bubbling, turn the heat up just enough so that it starts bubbling again. You must also stir the sauce occasionally, just to keep things moving. Feel free to break up the tomatoes further with your stirring implement, if you wish.

After an hour or two, your tomatoes, aromatics, and water will have reduced and thickened into a sauce-like consistency. Once this happens, it’s time to perform some sauce finishing maneuvers. Taste a bit of the sauce for seasoning, and add more salt if necessary. Turn the heat off, then use a pair of tongs to remove the carrot pieces and the basil bouquet, as well as any Parmesan rinds. Some of the basil leaves will have wilted and fallen off of the stems, and that’s ok! Leave them in the pot, but do your level best to get each and every stem out of there. Next, add in your chopped up ribbons of basil and a final drizzle of olive oil, and stir everything together.

Congratulations! You have cooked a pot of delicious red sauce. Whatever shall you do with it? Why, whatever you want to do with it, my good friend, but if you need any ideas, keep an eye on this space during the playoffs. This year, the Gross Football Lunch playoff recipes will be laser-focused on providing you, my loyal and beloved readers, with uses for this new-found power. In any event, wait for the sauce to cool completely before moving it to a container. If you intend to use the sauce within a week, put in the fridge. If not, freeze it, and I’ll show you what to do in a couple of weeks. See you then!

Week 18 NFL Confidence Pool

Yes, this week’s slate is duller than dishwater, but let’s face it, the last week of the regular season is a colossal anticlimax more often than not. At some point within the last 15 years, give or take (I was not paying attention when this change occurred), the league decided that every game of the regular season should be a divisional matchup, in what I can only assume was a bid to goose the stakes of a weekend that almost always struggles to sustain interest.

I’m here to tell you today that, if you are struggling to care about this week’s games, you’re hardly alone. Frankly, we could all use a week off. Professional football is many things, but above all other things, it’s show business. For decades upon decades upon decades, the guiding principle of show business was Leave Them Wanting More, and the addition of a 17th game spits in the face of this entrenched wisdom, in exchange for benefits only seen by assorted league and television executives. In other words, ask not why this season’s 18th week must be so boring; ask why it should even exist in the first place. If you love something, ask for less of it.

Therefore, let us join with the rest of the football observing public in declaring this weekend a Senior Skip Day. In preparing, submitting, and publishing this week 18 confidence pool sheet, I have spent every last drop of sweat, every last smear of elbow grease, and every last and shred of mental fortitude available as I possibly can in determining which teams are playing starters, which teams are resting starters, which teams still have playoff seeds at stake, and every other concern relevant to this week’s games. Although, it’s worth keeping in mind that I was out of town until Tuesday night, I’m fighting off a chest cold that just won’t go away, and I’m supposed to watching the kids right now. Perspiration, lubricant, and willpower were in negative abundance, and these picks reflect that.

Next week is the start of the playoffs, which means that next Friday, January 10th will mark the glorious return of the Gross Football Lunch NFL Playoffs MegaColumn! While, in keeping with MegaColumn tradition, there will be no recipe for the week (boo), there will be the Playoff Confidence Pool, plus a bunch of extra bullshit no one asked for (BOOOOOOOO)! Deal with it, ingrates!

Enjoy the games everyone!