For me, Sunday is just going to be, well, Sunday. I don't expect to ingest any more French onion dip than I usually do. I don't have an extraordinary amount of money riding on the Super Bowl. I'm not even completely sure who's playing. The Cowboys? Is that not right? Are you sure? It's in Dallas?
To educate myself and assist others like me, I have done some research and come up with a list of football terms for foodies who don't get football. Or, as a friend put it, "Asshats who don't get anything."So here goes:
Turnover
A turnover is less a golden brown flaky crust packed with delicious fruit goo and more when one team has the ball and suddenly does not have it anymore. My roommate explained that a turnover happens when there are no downs left.
"Downs?" I asked.
"Oh, they're basically like lives in a video game," he answered. Which left me with so many more questions than when I began. And people think football is a better use of time than dessert.
Illegal substitution
According to Wikipedia (come on now, we all use it), illegal substitution occurs when there are more players in place than need be. To me, it's like that time I tried to make blondies with all-purpose flour and ended up with a pan of something that smelled like butterscotch but tasted like dense failure. It's also like whenever elderly people complain about switching sugar with salt.
Chop Block I consulted a YouTube demonstration for this one. Although I still have no idea what the hell a "chop block" is, whatever I watched looked pretty illegal. A friend explained it's like "double-teaming" an opposing player.
I like that a chop(ping) block exists outside kitchens and reality shows. It makes me imagine one 300 pound hunk of muscle accusing another hunk of muscle, "Hey man, you knew there was no room for error when you played it safe for the judges, so don't look at me like I threw you under the bus just because you ended up on the chop(ping) block. I'm not here to make friends, OK?"
Illegal Use of Hands
Regardless of how many bottles of Soft Soap you may go through in a week, I still have an issue when people mix things by hand. Or grasp an offensive player with their hands. There are just so many skin cells and nail pieces ripe and ready to slough off, it should be illegal on the field or in the kitchen.
I trace my issue back to an incident at an old workplace. One of the cooks coughed in his hands, wiped them on his pants and continued mixing dough. "Allergies," he told me. Hand-mixing makes me proud of my immune system, but disgusted with the rest of the world.
Piling On
You may actually know this one when you see it on the field but what does it feel like: Everyone looks at things like nachos suffocating beneath nine pounds of cheese, sour cream, refried beans and jalapeños and utters something like, "Whoa, dude, epic nachos for the win," or something lame like that. But as soon as they eat it, the whole group is suddenly made up of Weight Watchers who suffer unbearable food guilt. That's right, NFL players have feelings too.
