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SUPER BOWL CUISINE


What makes a good Super Bowl commercial?  One viewpoint:

A good commercial does four things well: It’s funny, it’s memorable, it compels you to buy the product, and it leaves you with a more favorable view of the brand.

Read that article, it says that GM: No Way Norway, with Will Ferrell, Kenan Thompson and Awkwafina as the best.  Said Amy Schumer's Hellmann's Mayo was the worst.  All of them can also be seen in this article.  Frankly, I don't agree.  Here is a top ten video.  Also not my choices.

A highlight was a pre-game poem by Amanda Gorman.  A Super Bowl first.  She is definitely changing the game of poems.

But the Super Bowl was also more than ads and poems: 

  • About those propositions:
    • The national anthem took 2 minutes 16 seconds.
    • Anyone who took my advice and picked KC to win the coin toss and deferred would have won $5 on a $100 bet, or 5 cents if you could have bet $1.
    • If you bet Blue as the Gatorade color at the end of the game, your  $100 would have resulted in you getting $400 (win $300, plus your $100).
  • The halftime show by Weeknd was, well, appropriate.  Not great, not terrible, not expected.  Yet, it captured the mood of the times.
  • Oh, about the game, Tom Brady led the Tampa Bay Bucs to a 31-9 victory.


What was satisfying about that score was I actually won the 15 Craigside Super Bowl pool.  I will donate my winnings to the Photo Club here.  I've been lucky all my life, but to win all three (Hawaii over Houston in the New Mexico Bowl and Alabama crushed Ohio State in the college championship game) football pools.  You know what the odds are about prevailing on 3 out of 3?  As I had more than one pick in each, it was probably around one in a thousand.  Now, I'm a legend .

The best is yet to come.  I've had terrific tailgates, divine January 1 ozoni breakfasts, fabulous cuisine at 3-Star Michelin restaurants and amazing experiences with Chaine des Rotisseurs.  However, Super Bowl LV might have exceeded them all.

It all began with a weight loss effort that dropped me to my lowest in a third of a century.  It's important to eat without guilt and in a positive frame of mind.

I started this binge the day before the Super Bowl, lunch on Saturday, with some items originally planned for Sunday, but advanced to watch Jordan Spieth score his lowest round in that noisy Phoenix Open to reach near the top.


The wine is a Stanford Chardonnay:


These three items from Marukai and Foodland were served on Saturday:


Also from my herb garden:


Dinner for Super Bowl eve featured pork tonkatsu from 15 Craigside, which I fried in wagyu beef fat and butter:


With hot sake, hot green tea, beer and the Chardonnay from lunch.  I need to improve my cabbage slicing technique, but in Japan, they provide a huge mound with the tonkatsu.  Nothing from 15C.

The following morning began with fruits, as you saw yesterday.  Brunch was a simple hot dog, also fried first in wagyu fat:


Note, I allowed myself only four pieces of french fires.

While watching the Phoenix Open, I had a snack:  boiled peanuts flavored with salt, truffle oil and rice vinegar:



This a very special Nikka Whisky.  An older brother of Nikka's Yoichi.  In 2001, Whisky Magazine honored this spirit, the 10-year old standard, as Best of the Best, breaking the ice for the first non-Scottish whisky to reach the top.  My Nikka single malt is 17-years old.  Much later, in 2013, Suntory's Yamazaki single malt was rated #1 for the year.  In 2018 Nikka's 17-year old Pure Malt was named the World's Best Blended Malt, and Suntory's 25-year old Hakushu became the World's Best Single Malt.  Japanese whiskies now cost five to ten times more than a decade ago, when you can get it.  Fortunately, during the past three decades of my travels to Japan, I regularly bought a bottle of high quality whisky, and most of them are still in the original box.  

See that jump?  Only takes you to 2016.  A 2020 article shows that this Karuizawa bottle recently sold for $500,000.  One bottle.

But back to my Super Bowl meals, at half-time I had a Miyazaki Wagyu sandwich:

The wine was a recent one from Stanford, a Smith Madrone Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.  How's that for fair play?  The Smith brothers running the operation both graduated from Cal, Berkeley.  

I was planning to have an artichoke / Portuguese sausage pizza later in the evening, but fell asleep before I could, so will have it today for lunch.  Also, never got around to the chutoro, so I'll have that with some hamburger stew, which will be delivered for dinner.

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