Super Bowl Contests: Judging Chili

My Super Bowl Sunday started hours before the actual festivities. St. John's Episcopal Church asked me to be a judge for the Souper Bowl, a chili and soup contest that was a fund-raising kickoff for their hunger awareness week. Given the enthusiasm people showed when they hit the tables, it will be awhile before anyone who was there will be aware of being hungry.

Luckily, I didn't have to judge all 27 entries, although I did my best to try a ridiculous number of them. Church members paid $1 for samples and voted to narrow the field to the final six. Then the three judges - me, Father Todd Dill from St. Margaret's in Waxhaw, and the senior warden, who paid $80 for privilege - had to narrow those down to the first-, second- and third-place winners.

For a dish that is basically meat, spices and possibly beans, an amazing variety of things go under the name "chili." There was cinnamon-spice chili, wild boar and venison chili, sweet-hot chili, brisket-based chili, beer-flavored chili, vegan chili and your basic chili-chili.

Despite that, the first-place winner wasn't actually a chili. The contest also had been opened to soup, and the pot that blew away the competition was Creamy Chicken Risotto Soup by Michael Ragon. It was as thick and satisfying as a good chili, but it had enough cream to wring out a cow. Ragon was kind enough to send me the recipe. The Super Bowl may be over, but soup season continues on.

Creamy Chicken Risotto Soup

By Michael Ragon, St. John's Episcopal Church

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 large onion, peeled and diced

2 cups diced celery

2 cups chopped carrots

1/2 gallon chicken stock

2 cloves chopped garlic

2 tablespoons tarragon

2 tablespoons dillweed

10 black peppercorns

1 large bay leaf

1 quart cream

1 quart sour cream

1/2 stick butter

1 roasted chicken, skin and bones discarded, meat diced

2 cups cooked Arborio rice

Chopped flat-leaf parsley for garnish (optional)

HEAT olive oil in a large soup pot and saute onions, carrots and celery until onions are translucent, then add a generous pinch of kosher salt.

ADD chicken stock and garlic. Tie bay leaf, tarragon, dillweed and peppercorns in a square of cheesecloth and add to the soup. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer about 20 minutes. Remove cheesecloth bundle.

ADD cream, sour cream, butter, chicken and cooked rice and heat through. (Don't bring back to a boil so the sour cream doesn't curdle.) Serve sprinkled with chopped flatleaf parsley.

The perfect Super Bowl soup

Ed Levine, the editor of the web site Serious Eats, commented in a Tweet this week that the Super Bowl is almost as much of a food holiday as Thanksgiving. And I think he has a point.

My colleague Andrea Weigl has a roundup of recipes from both Pittsburgh and Wisconsin on this week's food front, all worthy contenders for Sunday's Super Bowl parties.

But before you chisel your menu in stone, I wanted to offer one more. I ran this with last year's Super Bowl package that I think may just be the perfect football-watching soup. I got a reminder at a Christmas party this year when I ran into a woman I had never met. When I told her what I do for a living, she grabbed my arm and said, with real excitement, "Do you know about the Buffalo Chicken Soup?" Sure, I said - I wrote the story that ran with it.

She turned and hollered across the room at her husband. Pointing at me, she just said, "The soup! The Buffalo chicken soup!"

I get it, ma'am. And I understand - it's a terrific soup. You could double it, although it's very rich so you don't need big servings. It's just the right thing for a football afternoon in February.

Slow-Cooker Buffalo Chicken Soup
I adapted this originally from "Make It Fast, Cook It Slow," by Stephanie O'Dea (Hyperion, 2009). Feel free to keep right on adapting it.

3 tablespoons canola oil, divided
1/2 large yellow onion, peeled and diced
3 stalks celery, diced
2 to 3 large skinless, boneless chicken breasts, or 2 to 3 cups cooked, diced chicken
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup chicken broth
2 cups nonfat or reduced-fat milk
1 teaspoon celery salt
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 cup hot wing sauce, such as Texas Pete Buffalo Wing Sauce, plus more for garnish
4 ounces Velveeta cheese, diced
Crumbled blue cheese (optional; garnish)

Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a large skilelt over medium heat. Add the onion and celery and saute about 5 minutes, until slightly soften but still crunchy. Scrape vegetables in the liner of a 4- to 6-quart slow cooker and return skillet to heat.
Cut chicken into bite-size pieces. Heat 1 tablespoon oil in skillet and add half the chicken, stirring occasionally, until browned in spots and opaque. Add chicken to the slow cooker and repeat with remaining chicken. (If you're using cooked chicken, skip this step and just add it to the vegetables in the slow cooker.)
Melt the butter in the skillet over medium heat until just foamy. Whisk in the flour to make a roux, stirring well to incorporate all the flour. Cook 1 to 2 miutes, until roux is slightly golden. Scrape the roux into the slow cooker.
Stir in the broth and milk. Add the celery salt, garlic powder and wing sauce. Cover the slow cooker and cook on low for 6 to 8 hours, or on high for 3 to 4 hours. Stir in the cubed Velveeta about 20 minutes before serving.
Garnish with additional wing sauce and crumbled blue cheese if using.

Need your Super Bowl, food-waste tips

Not together, of course. My colleague Andrea Weigl is working on a couple of stories and she could use good people. I'll let her explain them both:

• Are you the ultimate Super Bowl host or hostess? We'd love your advice on throwing a stress-free Super Bowl party - meating you actually get to enjoy the game because you get everything ready before kickoff. Send your tips and recipes to andrea.weigl@newsobserver.com. Please include "Super Bowl" in the subject line.
• Andrea also is looking for tips on how to avoid wasting food. Are you a master at turning leftovers and leftover ingredients into amazing meals? Have you found a way to make sure you only buy what you need? Send your tips and ideas to andrea.weigl@newsobserver.com. Please include "food waste" in the subject line.

Thanks, folks. We get the very best ideas and recipes from all of you. That's what keeps this job fun.

A Charlotte weekend: From sips to nuts

For once, I had one of those glamourous, Twitter-worthy food weekends, and my Twitter access went down. So I saved it up:

Saturday morning: Swirling, smelling and spitting. With the every-other-year Charlotte Wine & Food Weekend coming up in April, the organizers held the first Charlotte Cru Wine Competition, a blind tasting of 28 or so wines that will be featured this year.

They lined up 50 judges, mostly members of the wine group Charlotte Cru but also a few media types and wine wholesalers, and put us to work. It really was work. To keep on schedule, we had about 1 minute per wine to judge them on visual, aroma, texture, taste, finish and overall impression. Working that fast, you're just going on first impressions, so you have to trust your instincts.

All flights were blind, meaning you're presented with four or five glasses in a category, say, "whites under $50" or "reds over $50," but nothing on what kind of wine it is. Pity -- as the wines flew by, I encountered the pinot noir of my dreams (and it was in the under-$50 category) and a few wines I wouldn't taste again on a bet.

Winners will be awarded medals, and are supposed to be available in local wine shops around festival time. For myself, I'll have to wait for the Vintner Tasting in April to see if I can identify that pinot.

Saturday night: Who says this girl is a food snob? For my birthday, the two handsome men in my life took me out to dinner. They offered up the name of a cutting-edge place we all like. But I said, "No boys, this is an occasion for the Beef & Bottle."

I'll admit it: I love the 'Bottle. I love the booths in the dark front room, the Frank-and-Dean atmosphere, the glass-enclosed bar that looks like a fish tank. I love the cheesy cheese spread with crackers, and the plate of chopped-up iceberg lettuce with a tray of vegetables for building your own salad. I love the groups who always seem to be having so much fun, like the three guys in bow-ties who walked in just ahead of us.

And I love their steaks, with that char-grilled taste. Simple steaks, simple sides, short wine-by-the-glass list. Yes, Charlotte has fancier places, but Beef & Bottle is purely what it is. And for my 51st birthday, I wanted to appreciate things that get older but stay just fine the way they are.

Sunday night: A perfect spread of dips for Super Bowl watching -- guacamole, pico de gallo, hot cheese dip with sausage. And a perfect game to go along with them.

Who Dat who loved that game? That would be me.