The brats made it out of the Wisconsin snow, to our grill and into an onion-beer bath right on time, but like questions about Aaron Rodgers: Who is this guy? Is he worthy of the supplanting the great Brett Favre?; our Virginia diners were wondering: Is it pork? Is it a sausage? How should I eat it?

A brand new cookbook for only $2.99? Where am I? Kicking and screaming into the new millennium, amazed and excited…

There might really be something to the connection between the food and the teams of the Super Bowl. As the game was a tale of two halves, so it was with the food. There was the consistently good, familiarly reliable versus the uncertain, upstart, new and different. The big plays went to the Saints and to my surprise and delight, it was the same with the food…

While the teams are making late preparations, so are we. They’ve assessed their health–who can go and who can’t, how they match up with their opponent, what works and what doesn’t and how they see it all unfolding. Simultaneously, we have pondered our menu, checked on available ingredients, what goes with what and what doesn’t, matched up main dishes with sides, and also assessed what works and what doesn’t and how we see it all unfolding…