Sapori and the Super Bowl

What a weekend!

We had some friends visiting from Arlington, Virginia for Super Bowl weekend. If you don’t already know, I live just outside of Philadelphia, so this year’s Super Bowl party was about more than just the food. But the food was still very important.

We wanted to take our friends out for a nice dinner on Saturday, but we thought going into the city was not the greatest idea since we weren’t sure how crowded it would be. So we thought about what kind of food we wanted and decided on Italian, since that’s not as common down in the D.C. area as it is in South Jersey. Luckily, my brother and his wife gave us a gift certificate for Christmas to a local place, Sapori, in Collingswood. We had been there a few years ago and knew it would be great. Sadly, I did not take any pictures. Happily, it was great!

We made reservations for 8 p.m. so as not to pressure Colby and Courtney to rush to our house. They arrived Saturday afternoon with plenty of time to settle in and for us to relax, catch up with them since our last hang in November, see honeymoon pictures, and play some games. They brought a new board game, Photosynthesis, which was pretty fun. During that game we snacked on cheese, crackers, and trail mix, and after we finished I made a round of Negronis to whet our appetites. Once we finished those, it was time to head to dinner.

Sapori is a BYOB and boy, did we. We had a double bottle of Chianti hanging around that didn’t fit in our wine fridge, so I insisted we bring that. Colby and Courtney brought two bottles of their own for dinner. It was pretty crowded even for a Saturday night, but we only waited about 5 minutes to be seated. After sitting down and setting up a game plan with the menu, our waiter Mateo ruined everything by going through a list of incredible specials. We needed a few more minutes to rethink. We ended up with two appetizers: calamari from the regular menu, and a baked cheese special that we couldn’t turn down, featuring a cross between mozzarella and brie (I didn’t catch the name unfortunately) wrapped in prosciutto, topped with a nutty truffle oil concoction and artfully surrounded by a balsamic glaze.

For the main course we also were split down the middle between the regular menu and specials. I had a pasta special with braised oxtail in a red sauce. Pat had the rabbit special, absolutely falling off the bone in a red sauce, accompanied by mashed potatoes and broccoli rabe. Colby had the red snapper filet from the menu, which included clams, mussels, and calamari served over crostini in a red sauce. Courtney had the gnocchi from the menu, bathed in a veal/pork/beef ragu. All four of our meals were off the chain, and even though they were all tomato-based, they were wildly different in flavor. I think the snapper was the tastiest of everything we ate.

We were too full for dessert but we did all have espresso and that was excellent. Even without our gift card, it was a reasonably priced meal for the quality and quantity. We polished off 3/4 bottles and took the last home and opened it there.

Life pro tip: don’t try to make cookie dough while drunk. It took me over two hours to make this recipe, which should have taken about 15 minutes. I was trying to balance engaging conversation with recipe reading and ingredient measuring, and the cookies kept getting pushed to the back burner.

These were Triple Chocolate Eagles cookies, for the Super Bowl, so I only used green M&M’s. The recipe came off the back of a peanut butter M&M’s bag but I used regular M&M’s because I’m an animal and I couldn’t save the peanut butter ones from my mouth.

Actually, there was only a scant 1 cup of green M&M’s in the bag so I supplemented with mini chocolate chips.

Bonus life pro tip: buy the clearance Christmas candy and separate it into red and green (and split the silver if you got Hershey’s Kisses I guess) and use them for Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day, respectively. You’re welcome, candy budget.

After throwing the cookie dough in the fridge we called it a night. The following day, after breakfast and a quick visit to the in-laws, we started prepping for the party. Team CoCo was clutch in this department, chopping veggies like madmen for crudité and the taco bar. We had a bit of a situation when it came time to make the margaritas and we realized we had no citrus juicer, but the four of us powered through two Costco bags of limes. Once that was done, I started baking off the cookies, Pat got working on the wings, separating and then frying, and Colby and Courtney churned out a bathtub-sized bowl of guacamole. At this point the crowd started to arrive, 11 in total which is about the perfect size for me. In addition to our margaritas, tacos, wings, veggies, and cookies, people brought beer, bourbon, mint chocolate chip cannoli dip, and an out of this world cheesesteak ring. So we were eating pretty good.

The Eagles must’ve been eating their Wheaties, because that was one of the most exciting games I’ve ever seen. Some of our friends are not big football fans, or even sports fans in general, but everyone was getting pretty into it. One couple who is expecting their first child in March was even joking about naming their future son/daughter Agholor after a few sick receptions (“It’s gender neutral!” “Wait…how do you spell Agholor?”) We were popping champagne at the end of the night. All in all, a pretty great weekend.

Or, as Pat would say, “it was alright.” D- to B+.

It’s Finally Happening

TL;DR: Welcome to my blog. It’s gonna be about whatever I feel like, but there will probably be a lot of food.

It’s been probably about nine years in the making. Well, definitely not the making. Let’s call it a twinkle in my eye. THE BLOG.

I’ve been wanting to blog about various subjects, random interests really, for close to a decade. I’m a top tier procrastinator so that’s a big reason I’ve never gotten started. I also had the problem of not being consistently interested in one or two activities enough to blog about them exclusively. Well, except food. I am very interested in food. But I didn’t want to start a blog about food and not have the freedom to diverge into other fields. So I put it off.

Years went by. My brother harangued me for so long about starting a food blog that it became a running joke. Whenever my SO and I went to a new restaurant he’d ask if we put the review up on the blog yet. Clever names came and went (without being written down, and now I kick myself for that). Recently, I left my job. I started thinking more seriously about starting the blog. After all, now I had more free time to devote to such a venture. I continued to put it off.

I need to stop this boring introduction for a little backstory. A few years ago, I discovered that you can mark a place on Google Maps with a little gold star. I already had a few restaurants in the back of my mind that I wanted to check out. Getting a list of anything floating around in my head onto paper or digital saved format is always good. So I began saving. And saving. I started complaining about the lack of organization with this system at least two years ago because the list was growing out of hand.

a small taste of my saved places (when you zoom in the stars multiply!)

Even today, I’m still saving. Sometimes when I zoom in on a neighborhood and click on a star, I’m told the restaurant is permanently closed.

It's gotten so bad that sometimes I find out about an upcoming restaurant and when I go to save it, there's already a restaurant I saved at that address, permanently closed...so I have to add a "tag" with the pertinent info

My friends have joked that I’m a real-life Stefon (for those of you not familiar), in the sense that I always have some new restaurant or bar (or something sort of in-between the two) to tell them about that, for example, I’ve found through Instagram via a commenter on a post of a bartender of another restaurant which I’m following.

Back to my back story…Just before Christmas, my SO and I decided to start going out consistently once per week (on a weekday, both to avoid bigger crowds and to avoid making dinner) to a restaurant on my list. This was my chance! Time to start this fucking thing once and for all.

But something held me back.

What if I want to write about sewing? Or the band? (I’m in a band.) Or share a recipe? Travel post? A “What Really Grinds My Gears” special segment? A restaurant review (or even general food) blog doesn’t allow all these topics in a regular rotation. So I’ve been thinking about how to incorporate all of my interests into one blog and (the hardest part) trying to come up with a good name.

If you know me, you know that I have the speed of a sloth. I have to give the condiments to my SO first when we’re making sandwiches, etc., because I take too long “Picasso-ing” my ingredients. I can tell you, in the last two months the best name I came up with was “The Long-Order Cook”, because it once took me nearly three hours to make a Rachael Ray 30-minute meal. But that wasn’t good enough. I wanted something more all-encompassing. And that’s how I landed here. The Pantless Pantologist. Just posting about whatever new skill I’m currently working on or interesting tidbit I’ve picked up, whenever and whatever I feel like. Plus the restaurant reviews and recipes.