Gross Football Lunch – 2024-25 NFL Divisional Round

As you may recall, in the final week of the regular season I provided my recipe for marinara sauce, and promised that each recipe in each playoff installment of Gross Football Lunch would provide a use for that tomato sauce. After last week’s clerical accountability vacation from recipe-writing, it’s time to get saucy! For the next three playoff columns, I will provide three recipes that use my marinara sauce, in ascending order of labor-intensiveness and overall sexiness. After all, the further we get in the playoffs, the fewer games there are to watch, which means the more time there is to cook and cook in elaborate fashion. So, seeing as this week is chock full of four super important games, the tomato sauce series begins with the easiest recipe I have planned. And that happens to be….

Recipe of the Week: Baked White Beans

First off, make the dang tomato sauce, if you haven’t already. As I said a couple of weeks ago, the sauce takes time to make (my most recent batch took me about 3.5 hours to cook from start to finish), and it also benefits from hanging out for a day or two to come together completely. Remember to freeze it if you make it more than 3-4 days in advance, and to defrost it the morning or night before you intend to use it.

Next, turn your attention to the beans themselves. While you certainly can make this recipe with canned beans, cooking your own dry beans will yield tastier, healthier beans with a more pleasing texture. As much as I hate to generalize the sum total of human tastes and preferences, I suspect that many of the bean-averse among us developed their aversions from exposure to slimy, mushy, and altogether inferior canned beans. Not all canned beans are gross, but some are, and I sympathize. Learning to cook dry beans is also a good skill for any home cook to have in their toolbox, and it couldn’t be easier.

This recipe calls for white beans, the most maligned class of beans. When cooked properly, white beans are mildly earthy and almost buttery, and as such area perfect sub-strait for vibrant marinara sauce and fatty Italian sausage. To that end, get a 1-pound bag of either cannellini beans, great northern beans, butter beans, or – if you so dare – the dreaded, hated, and feared Lima beans. Dry beans need to be rinsed off, and they need to soak in water for 7-8 hours prior to cooking. So, either the morning of or night before the day you intend to cook your beans, dump out your dry beans into a strainer or colander, rinse them with cold water, place them in a bowl, and cover them with 8 cups of cold water. You must measure out these 8 cups of water, as you will be cooking your beans in the soaking liquid. Therefore, cooking a precise amount of beans requires using a precise amount of soaking water.

Once the beans are done soaking, haul out a large pot and add your beans, along with every drop of the soaking water. Add a generous amount of salt to the pot, then place it over high heat. When the water starts to boil (I know you know this, but it’s worth repeating: the key to bringing a pot of water to a boil quickly and efficiently is keeping a strict eye on it at all times), turn the heat down to medium so that it comes to a simmer.

You have little else to do at this time except give your pot of beans a stir once every so often, skim off any foam that rises to the top of the water, and make sure the pot is simmering adequately. I’m not joking about the stirring; the water level in your pot will decrease as the beans cook, and that means some beans might end up beached at the top of the pot without the water they need to finish cooking. Therefore, when you stir, do so with a mind towards circulating beans from top to bottom, and vice versa. You may also find you need to stir more frequently as the beans approach doneness, when the water levels are lowest.

If you’re in the mood to earn some extra credit (and extra flavor), here are three things you can do to your beans as they cook in order to gussy them up a bit. You can do one of these, two of these, all of these, or none of these, according to your means and whims:

1. Grab a few sprigs of fresh thyme, tie them up with kitchen twine as you did with the fresh basil for the tomato sauce, and place it in the simmering pot

2. Add a rind of Parmesan cheese to your simmering pot

3. Cut a lemon in half, haul out your frying pan, and place it over medium-high heat (on a separate burner, obviously). Drizzle a bit of olive oil in the pan and wait for it to heat up. When it does, place your lemon, flesh side down, in the pan and cook it for a few minutes, until it starts to char attractively. Place both charred lemon halves in the simmering pot.

In any event, you can expect the beans to take about 30-60 minutes to cook. Your beans are done when they are firm and toothsome, yet not at all crunchy; check 3-5 beans for doneness, as a single bean can misrepresent the state of its fellows. If you soaked them in 8 cups of water, and used this soaking liquid to cook the beans, too, your beans should be done right around the time that the soaking liquid has finished cooking off entirely. Neat, huh? If your water has cooked off fully but one of your sample beans is still a bit crunchy, add more water in small bits (no more than a cup or so) until they do finish. I’m not going to go so far as to say you fucked up if this happens, but I will point out that this does mean your pot was simmering too much and the water was cooking off too quickly. Make a note of that for next time.

Once the beans are cooked, remove your pot from the heat and turn your attention to the sausage links. As you know, Italian sausage is typically sold in hot and sweet varieties; either is appropriate here. I prefer using hot sausage for this, but some people prefer sweet sausage, while others prefer hot but are stuck cooking for toddlers that flip their shit if they encounter anything so spicy as cracked black pepper, so do what makes sense for you.

Place your links in a pan that is set above medium heat. Do not add any fat to the pan, as the sausage links will render some of their fat as they cook. Cooking sausage links in a pan can be a bit of a pain, because they can and will look for all the world as though they are completely cooked through and through on the outside and yet be not at all cooked in the middle. You must be patient, and you must turn your sausages frequently as they brown on one side or another. If you have a meat thermometer of any kind, now is the time to use it; your sausages are cooked when they register a temperature of 145° F at the dead center. Once they are fully cooked, remove them from the heat and set them aside.

It’s time to assemble everything. Preheat your oven to 375° F and bring out the tomato sauce. Combine your tomato sauce and your beans a splash at a time; you want the beans to be generously coated with your sauce but not swimming in the stuff. Place your sauced beans in a standard-issue 9”x13” casserole dish and spread them out evenly, then place your sausage links on top in an equidistant arrangement. Stick all of this in the oven for, gee I don’t know, 30 minutes? The vibes and the smells will guide you; everything is already cooked before it goes in the oven. You just want everything to hang out for a while. Once your casserole dish looks and smells nice, bring it out and let it cool for a few minutes before serving.

While it cools, chop up some fresh parsley and grate some Parmesan cheese, then serve your beans into bowls and sprinkle the cheese and parsley on top. I usually leave the question of side dishes up to my readers, both for my sanity and theirs, but in this instance I will point out that this dish really sings alongside any kind of sauteed greens, or a nice fresh salad. You re strongly encouraged to have one of those alongside. But even if you can’t be bothered, you have delicious beans in a delicious sauce alongside delicious sausage; what else do you need? Dig in!

Wild Card Weekend Results

Record Against the Spread: 4-2

Now it’s time for me to turn my attention to football, even though this sport is bullshit and I hate it and it brings me no joy right now, and it never has and never will, and it can only make me sad. I yearn for nothing so much as the sweet embrace of oblivion, or, failing that, a dissolution of society sufficient to render the NFL incapable of continuing operations. Every single second of the Vikings’ loss on Monday was listening to Elliott Smith in complete darkness-level depressing. I am working as hard as I possibly can to be a chiller and more grateful sports fan – winning is fun, but sometimes your team loses, and that’s OK – and yet, I woke up Tuesday morning thinking they may as well have won 6 games instead of 14, for all the good it did ’em. I will always prefer a playoff ass-kicking to a close game lost in the margins, and in the long run this is a Vikings playoff loss of lesser devastation, but I’m not over it yet.

As is always the case when I get worked up about the Vikings, I gotta shut myself up, lest the entire remaining column be swallowed by the sound of wailing and gnashing of teeth. (I may or may not write a proper obituary for this year’s team over Pro Bowl weekend, we’ll see.) Both my playoff pool and my picks against the spread went about as well as I could ask for; 4-2 seems pretty good for a guy who doesn’t pick against the spread normally, to the point that I wonder if it’s damning to the idea that spread betting is a skill. And 52 points in the playoff pool with a +21 differential is a frankly gaudy total, albeit an inflated one that must come crashing down, and will start to this week.

I find myself caught in a trap of overconfidence. According to my guidelines, it is best to fill out a playoff bracket, note what teams you have advancing (or not advancing) to what rounds, and assign points according to this bracket. I filled out just such a bracket, and when I filled out my playoff pool, I did so very rigidly, according to said bracket. 14-13 are my Super Bowl teams, 12-11 are my conference runners-up, 10-7 are my losers for this weekend, and while I was only wrong about two games this weekend, the Commanders’ upset is a real problem for the NFC side of my pool. Now, my 13 (the Eagles) and my 11 (the Rams) are facing off a weekend earlier than I expected, so I can only gain a couple of points from that; ideally, if my bracket logic were correct, I would be getting 3 to 6 points.

That’s not a huge deal, but it does add up, and it feels preventable in hindsight. My two losses were the Wild Card games I thought about the least, and I feel that if I had been more honest with myself about that fact, I would’ve hedged the Commanders’ upset up a bit. But no, I had to give residual respect to a Steelers team that manifestly did not deserve it, and protect myself from an emotional failure of Vikings fandom that I would be forced to endure, anyway. I saw both teams’ losses coming from a mile away, yet saw fit to hedge their assignments for dubious reasons. But the whole point of assignment hedging is to cover your own ass, especially when it comes to games and teams you don’t have a good grasp of! It’s not that I didn’t hedge what my bracket told me to do, it’s that I didn’t do it in the right place.

All of this is to say that yeah, 52 points is a lot and worth celebrating, but I can only make another 24 points this weekend at the very most, and I stand to lose a lot if the Commanders and/or Texans can pull of their upsets. The lesson, as always, is that sports prognostication is a tightrope walk over the endless yawning void, and that any and all confidence pool and spread betting opinions exist for entertainment purposes only, and none of you should even presume to dream of thinking about doing any of this at home.

With that said, it’s time to make some more picks against the spread, because I said I was going to.

Divisional Round Picks

All lines pulled from at ESPN at 12:56 PM Eastern Time on Thursday, January 16th, 2025. My pick for each game, and the relevant spread, is always listed first. Home teams are displayed in bold.

So now, Houston gets a shot a beating the champs, and while the Chiefs handed down a decisive 8-point verdict against the Texans just a few weeks ago, the Texans’ pass rush alone is reason to balk at this line. I can only imagine this line has gotten this high because the playoffs have become, in this age of widespread legalized gambling, even more of an amateur hour than they already were. When just about anyone can place bets legally on their phones, you are inevitably going to have scores of college freshman who don’t really watch football but decided to make some wagers due to peer pressure, to name but one type of person who may be doing this despite being equally in over their heads. Those people are going to pick the Chiefs, because they’re the Chiefs.

But, with limited exceptions, this year’s Chiefs aren’t the sort of team that beats anybody by 8 or more points. They drift along, seemingly lying in wait until third downs and fourth quarters, and then get it done when it matters most, if not any other time. Their offensive tackle situation is apocalyptic, and Houston is in an outstanding position to exploit this weakness repeatedly. Need I remind anyone that Patrick Mahomes’ very worst playoff performance was in the Super Bowl against Tampa, when he spent all night dropping back behind turnstiles and getting his ass kicked for hero-ball hubris. Granted, he’s become much better at playing within structure since then, to the point that there’s little reason to think he will revert to hopeless hero ball if he’s pressured repeatedly. But every quarterback is worse under pressure, and Mahomes could spend his Saturday not just under pressure, but under siege. The Chiefs can still win under those conditions, but they damn sure can’t win by 8.

Still, the Commanders can score themselves some points; they scored 28.5 points per game in the regular season, good for 5th in the league. But can they stop the Lions’ offense? Erm, no. Marshon Lattimore is their best cornerback by no small margin, and he spent all of Sunday night getting burned to a crisp. I don’t know if they are gonna have Lattimore man up against Amon-Ra St. Brown, but I can’t see it going great if they do. The only thing that could go worse than having Lattimore man up on St, Brown is having any of their other corners man up on St. Brown. The Commanders’ front is sturdier, but not half as sturdy as they would need to be to avoid getting ground into burgundy and gold paste against the best offensive line in the game.

I went back and forth on this line a few times, and I must acknowledge that there is a real chance Detroit turns this one into a laugher. If they do, it will be because Aaron Glenn triples down on his new-found tactical doctrine of covering for his injured personnel – a group that wasn’t quite good enough to play the man-heavy style Glenn favors, even when healthy – with even more blitzing and even more man coverage. Washington does not have a great offensive line by any means, and while Daniels has shown polish far beyond what I expected of him, he is still a rookie. Rookie quarterbacks facing near-constant blitzes on the road in front of an adrenaline zooted, success-starved fanbase have their work cut out for them. Still, too high is too high, and -9.5 against a team that has a real chance of putting up 30+ points is too high.

Once again, the answer is pass rush. It is known that Jalen Hurts struggles when blitzed, and let’s face it, the modest amount of pressure offered by the Packers’ modest pass rush was enough to make Hurts piss about and run away for most last Sunday’s game. I’m not saying that the Rams’ 9-sack performance (ugh) is in any way repeatable, but I am pointing out that the Rams pass rush is young, hungry, talented, mature beyond its years, and led by a defensive coordinator who showed his willingness to blitz and stunt in whatever combinations he believe may work. They can rattle Jalen Hurts, and they can give their team a real shot by doing so.

Scoring against Philly’s defense is another matter entirely, and a problem whose solution lies beyond the limits of my imagination, but that’s why Sean McVay gets paid the big bucks to coach the Rams (as opposed to getting the big bucks to smile politely at Al Michaels). This is why I’m worried about my relationship to my priors. The Eagles killed the Rams in the regular season, but because I’ve been saying No One Wants To Play the Rams over and over again for weeks now, I’m picking them to at least cover when I’m not sure that’s even possible. Is this all I have to offer, as a writer? The same shrill, pointless, and intractable takes you can get anywhere else that sucks, for an audience of a couple dozen at most?

The Bills’ other path to victory hardly counts as such, since it is largely out of control. As you know, the Ravens’ whole deal this year is that they are prone to fits of nigh-incomprehensible self-destruction, largely through penalties. They have look more or less invincible when they are not doing this, but these fits have not fit any pattern I can discern, and it’s possible they could strike on Sunday for all I know. I sure hope they don’t; as the latest match in the league’s marquee three-way feud, it has true Game of the Century of the Week potential. That said, try not to be disappointed if this game turns into a sad and perfunctory, 21-10 clobbering. There’s just as much potential for that, too.

Enjoy the games, everyone!