Superbowl Food Roundup

I may not be the biggest NFL fan but I still watch the superbowl every year. Before you get into a heated debate over the teams, the winner and even the commercials, let me just warn you that this entry is entirely about the food.

When you talk about the football, some food naturally come to mind: hot wings, chips, chili, ribs, more chicken, snacks, finger foods. You want to bring the platter around in front of the tv so you could best enjoy the game. I got my chicken recipe from beefolks which has an awesome selection of honey products and honey recipes.

Honey Mustard Chicken Nuggets (original recipe here)
sauce
-1/4 cup mustard (J and I used mostly brown mustard, with a bit of dijon)
-2 tbsp blueberry honey (we only had this on hand). You can probably use whatever you have in the house, I think a darker honey may work too (I personally think Killer Bee would be nice)
-2 tbsp apple juice (I had Mott on hand)
//combine above and mix well. divide in two dishes, one for dipping and one for coating raw chicken.
nuggets
-around 1 lb of chicken, cut into 1 inch cubes
-1/2 cup of crushed pretzels (or more...this is pretty time-consuming actually, although entertaining for the neighbors I'm sure)
directions
1. roll chicken cubes in the bowl containing sauce
2. coat sauced chicken cubes with crushed pretzels
3. bake at 375 F until middle is no longer pink. for 10-12 minutes
4. dip cooked chicken nuggets and eat!

prep station...or "assembly line" as J called it. you see there's the plate full of chicken, a bowl of the sauce, and some (not so) crushed pretzels.



Warning: the dipping sauce is insanely addictive. Once you have this you don't want to go back to the bottled honey-mustard sauce. Trust me, we tried it as a comparison. The recipe has a better version! J. says we can probably crush the pretzels more but we lacked tools! You can see from the photo that we still had pretzels sticks that are recognizable.

Finished product to the right. Sometimes I wish I had better food photography skills...oh well. Now you see why I rarely put up photos! (ok, most times I'm too hungry and the plate is empty when I remembered to take a photo.)





Snap Peas
Instead of the regular celery and carrot sticks, I made a veggie platter with red pepper and snap peas. You can probably just wash snow pea and eat it raw, but I like to just cook it a bit. Very simple instructions: boil water, dump in a bunch of snap peas (you can snap off the tips if you want), boil for a few minutes until it reaches the right texture (try it yourself! I like it crunchy) and brilliant green, run under cool water and drain. I have instructed J to make a mayo dipping sauce which came out better than mine. Basically, you mix mayo with a generous sprinkling of paprika and pepper (crushed peppercorn or powdered). You can dip almost about anything in this and love it. Try it out!

In the end, while we missed the National Anthem part and the entire second half, I have to say making the super bowl dinner was a fun experience. Cheers for having great food, even for non-NFL fans!