Gross Football Lunch – Week 11, 2025 NFL Season

Recipe of the Week: Black Bean Salad

The first thing to do is make the dressing, which once again is a basic vinagrette (an emulsion of oil and acid). Grab a medium to large salad bowl and squeeze have a lime’s worth of juice into the bottom. Next, grab your container olive oil and either a fork or small whisk, and place this implement of speedy whipping into your dominant hand. Now use your non-dominant hand to drizzle the oil into the lime juice as slowly but steadily as you can possibly manage while beating the mixture in a quick, tight circle with your for or whisk.

Keep adding oil and whisking the oil and lime juice together until they come together as one more-or-less unified, yellow-greenish substance. Stop adding oil and continue whisking to incorporate the last few drizzles into your nascent dressing. Once all of the oil is incorporated, season your dressing with a generous pinch or two of salt, a few cracks of black pepper, and a shake or two each of ground cumin and paprika. If you and your intended consumers can handle the heat, feel free to add either cayenne or chipotle powder to taste. Your dressing is done! Set it aside, taking a periodic peek at it to see if the oil and lime juice are separating. This might happen and it’s totally normal. Just give it a few quick whisks if and when this happens. Keep checking the dressing every so often and whisking it together if necessary.

Congratulations, you have already completed the most technically demanding portion of this recipe! Now it’s time to do a bunch of busywork. Open a standard issue 14.5 ounce can of black beans, empty it into a colander or fine mesh sieve, and rinse thoroughly. Leave the beans to drain their excess water while you manage the veggies. Finely dice an entire red bell pepper, removing the papery inner membranes, then dice half of a peeled red onion as finely as you possibly can. Place about a cup of frozen sweet corn kernels into a microwave-safe container, add a splash of water, and nuke it in 30-second increments until the kernels defrost, then dump them in with the beans and let them drain.

Next, cut an avocado into quarters and peel the skin off, then cut the quarters in half again. Peeling a whole avocado is a fools’ errand and peeling individual eighths of avocado is an ungodly pain in the ass, so I find it’s easiest to peel the thing when it’s in quarters. Cut each eighth into half-inch chunks, give or take, then add your avocado, pepper, and onion into the salad bowl. Check the beans and corn for excess water, then dump those into the bowl as well. Finally, rinse a handful of fresh cilantro, then peel off the leaves as best you can, discarding the stems (if there are some little bits of stem still attached to the leaves here and there, that’s OK). Mince the leaves up and add them to the bowl.

Everything is all ready to go; the only thing left to do is toss it together. Grab a pair of salad tongs or two large spoons and give everything a good mix together, so that the lime vinagrette coats the beans and veggies and the cilantro disperses somewhat evenly throughout. Congratulations, your black bean salad is complete! Serve within one hour of completion; if you aren’t serving it immediately, stick it in the fridge until it’s eating time. Dig in!

NFL Confidence Pool – Week 11

Bye: Colts, Saints

I picked the Week 10 slate the same way J.J. McCarthy throws the football over the course of an entire game. A promising start soon devolved into an inexcusable and series of baffling near-misses and unnecessary desperation heaves downfield, resulting in frustrating loss after frustrating loss. This tortured analogy is my way of saying that my confidence is shattered, and if these picks and assignments look like the gigantic shoulder shrug of the sort you may see from an underpaid and disinterested grocery stock clerk, that’s because it is.

Filling the top three assignments with division rivalry games reflects a scattered, shattered process, but the Browns are so bad that they lost to the Jets, the Jets are so bad that they’re the Jets, and Kyle Shanahan seems to have finally figured out you’re still allowed to win games when half the roster is injured. Double-digits on the Packers is probably a cry for help of some kind. Did you know that Packers have fallen into third place in the NFC North, behind even the ultra-fraudulent Chicago Bears? To give the Packers double digits on the theory that they are good and the Giants are bad is contrary to the established evidence, and may be a symptom of near total loss of marbles. The only thing worse than giving the Packers 11 points is giving 11 points to any of my other picks for this week.

There’s a couple of division rivalry games at the end of this section as well, of course, featuring four good teams. I’m taking the Rams and urging y’all to do likewise because when in doubt, bet on the quarterback. The Chiefs pick is also a bet on the quarterback, of course, but a hefty if not entirely too large portion of my reasoning is vibes. The Broncos aren’t frauds, exactly; their defense is too good at their jobs and Sean Payton is too good at his. But I do think they’re due to come back down to earth a bit eventually, and facing the Chiefs coming off of their bye is as likely a time as any.

Christ. All I wanna do is complain about my shitty team and their shitty quarterback, but how much can I really bitch about when I’m not even a Commanders fan? They’re gonna give up 40 points to a Dolphins team coached by a dude who’s so sad he felt compelled to personally heckle Buffalo Bills fans after his team beat the Buffalo Bills in a game of football! Consider this your daily reminder that things can always get worse.

Enjoy the games, everyone!