Endangered Adobo

So this is probably a bit of a late post but gimme a break… preparing all that food for our little Superbowl party was biting off way more than I could chew. But chew we did, and I gotta say I was pretty happy with most of the food.

I don’t have a whole lot of experience feeding a dozen or so people so I went hunting around on the internetz for some inspiration. There are a ton of amazing food bloggers out there and so it felt like I got a bit of help in planning out what to make.

Chopping for Vegetarian Gumbo. This recipe wasn’t really all that great… wasn’t too happy with it at all, so I’m not going to bother linking the site to you. If you do happen to search for it and it asks for vegetarian sausage, let me save you some grief right now and tell you that it does not exist. The guy at the meat counter will just give you a dirty look and banish you to the frozen foods aisle, where you will find  other vegetarian “meat,” but definitely NOT sausage.

Can you tell where my shirt is from? Bonus cookie if you can.*

Seven Layer Dip… More like 5 layers really. I forgot to make the guacamole. D’oh. I also didn’t want to put shredded lettuce on it. I borrowed this recipe from a member of Allrecipes.com. Here it is.

Jalapeno poppers. These suckers were more labor-intensive than anticipated. Cut in half, seed (the seeds go flying EVERYWHERE), stuff with cream cheese then stick some bacon. Sounds simple but it took me close to an hour to prep. Guh. But it was a huge hit. Here’s the recipe, from one of my favorite food bloggers, Pioneer Woman. She takes beautiful pictures, makes amazing yet simple food and she has a great story (city girl turned ranch wife). Go check out her stuff. Be warned though, her website is picture-heavy so it is not friendly to slow internet connection.

Adobo-glazed wings. Now I probably broke a Superbowl Rule of some sort by not deep-frying these babies but I just did not want to deal with a vat of oil and my house smelling like a KFC. I had Boyfriend grill them instead and I gotta say I think that actually added a lot of wonderful flavor. So I’m not apologizin’ to nobody. For the glaze, I turned to another Filipino food blogger, Burnt Lumpia, a genuinely funny guy with some really incredible recipes. Here you go.

And finally, the piece de resistance. Brisket. Oh wow. This had so much flavor in it that it made my head swim. I pulled this from Smitten Kitchen, who has AH-mazing recipes. I have yet to be disappointed with anything on that site. Her recipe is a slow-cooker recipe but I just cooked mine in the oven for about 3 1/2 hours and it was perfect. Either way you go, you have got a real winner with this one. Here it is.

We had a few other munchies but these are the highlights. Unfortunately we forgot to take pictures of the desserts, all of which were prepared by my sister Nikki. Cupcakes, Oreo truffles, chocolate chip cookies… oh my! She totally saved my ass since I had no time at all to make dessert myself, and what is a big gathering without fattening sweets? She remains reigning Dessert Queen at our house. I’ll make sure to talk her into doing a guest post eventually.

Hope you guys had a fun Superbowl Sunday too! Unless the Cowboys are playing, I don’t really care who wins (come on Cowboys, stop breaking my heart). I do tend to root for the underdog, though, and during this Superbowl, it seemed like everyone who came over had the same idea. So congratulations Saints! Sounds like Mardi Gras is going to be a long affair this year!

*No cookies actually awarded