Chef Andrew Gruel

The Super Bowl is the time of year when you're going to make budget food the centerpiece of the table.

That's what it comes down to because you can use the crock pot.

You can do that low and slow cooking that produces a lot of protein that you can stretch out over various carbs.

Whether it's nachos or whether it's

you know, putting it over chips and fries and dips.

This is dip season right now.

I posted a recipe up on X and Rumble and YouTube as a foundation for dip, right?

So the way in which you create this perfect foundation and then you as the chef can improvise over it with whatever ingredients you want to fold into it, be it smoked salmon, blackened shrimp, roasted chicken, it could be braised meat, bacon, you name it, however you want to spin it.

Then I also tell people that, you know,

This is also the time of year where let the guests, when you have that Super Bowl party, 15 or 20 people, let them do the work.

So lay out the ingredients and let them in a buffet style kind of pull it all together.

As long as you create the centerpiece, can be the braised meats and the pork shoulders and the chuck roasts, et cetera.

You can even just leave the cooker plugged in in the middle of the table and build around that.

Well, I really appreciate that because that's the goal.

And sometimes we could be afflicted by that curse of knowledge and we make it more confusing.

But really, cooking is, you know, recipes are roadmaps.

And ultimately, you just need to know that you got to get from point A to point B. And there's various ways in which you can get there so long as you get there and you can make mistakes along the way.

So I think people take cooking way too seriously, especially in this world of

reading ingredients within the recipe.

And they need to understand that it's more of an art form and not a science per se, although there is science to it, specifically.