Football!

I really like football. I like wathing it live. I like watching it on TV. I like listening to it on the radio. I just like football. (I don't, however, like agonizing over statistics and records and such nonsense. When the game is over, you have approximately 5 hours to lament the loss or celebrate the victory and anxiously anticipate next Saturday's game.)

Yesterday, as I was leaving the law school, I heard the familiar sound of the drum cadence that starts the marching band's march to Friday afternoon practice. The drums reverberate against the campus buildings and create this amazing electricity in the air. Even though there's no game, it just makes you want to jump up and down and scream, "Football!" Man, whoever wrote that drum cadence really knew his stuff. I wonder if it was tailored to the acoustics of Notre Dame's campus.

So today is the first game. KP grew up hating Notre Dame football, which used to make for an interesting game-watching experience. Now, I can't tell if I taught him to love Notre Dame or if he just pretends really well. But now that we're 3,000 miles apart, we watch games by text message. I prefer his commentary after a big play to that of the sportscasters. It's usually much funnier. For example, after Anthony Fasano made a particularly brutal block, the text message that came was, "Oof! Fasano is a load." I'm sure that's way better than anything a sportscaster could come up with. Succinct yet descriptive.

For today's football-watching fun, I shall make sausages and peppers.

Recipe for Sausages and Peppers

1 lb. mild (or sweet) Italian sausage
1 green pepper, sliced into strips and then cut in half
1 red pepper, sliced into strips and then cut in half
1 large onion cut however you like it (large dice, maybe?)
3 cherry peppers, seeded and ripped into 1/2-inch pieces
8 mushrooms, cleaned and quartered
olive oil

Brown the sausage in some olive oil on the stove in an oven-save receptacle (We'll call it a "pot", though it doesn't need to be a pot, technically. If you do not have a stove- and oven- safe receptacle, you can use a frying pan of some sort, and an oven container). Remove the sausage from the pot. Carmelize the onions in the pan, toss in the cherry peppers when the onions start to brown. Stir a bit, and toss with the sausages. Brown the other peppers, and add to the sausages. Brown the mushrooms, and add to the sausages. Put everything back in your oven-safe receptacle. Cover and put into a 350-degree oven. Remove about 30 minutes later.

To serve 'Merican style, put a sausage and some peppers and onions on a crusty hoagy roll.
To serve 'Talian style, serve over polenta, ladling some of the broth from the "pot."

Don't eat the cherry peppers if you don't like hot peppers. They impart a lot of flavor because they're very hot.