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Two weeks ago I began an experiment. I started the The Food Monkey Regional Football Meal Program, where I vowed to host a football party every week and serve the regional food from the area of team that the Patriots were playing.

For the first week, I threw a cheese steak party to watch the Patriots take on the Philadelphia Eagles. While the cheese steaks were excellent, the result was that an purportedly easy game with the largest point-spread in history became the Patriots’ closest call yet. With great trepidation I decided to carry on the tradition to the Patriots’ next game and hope that the close call was just a passing phase. Little did I know what trials were to come.

As the Patriots were taking on the Ravens from the great state of Maryland, I decided to make crab cakes for the next party. The way I usually cook is this:

--Decide what general type of dish I wish to cook
--Look at 10-20 recipes related to what I want to cook
--Pick out the best ingredients/ideas from each
--Combine into my own creation

Post contributed by Mike Prerau. Find out how the crab cakes turned out, and discover the Pittsburgh Sandwich after the jump! Images courtesy of the Food Monkey.

I took this approach for creating the crab cakes. I looked at about 15 different recipes, including I Love Crab Cakes! by Tom Douglas, and found the bits and pieces which I combined into my final recipe. I must say these crab cakes greatly exceeded my expectations and I will definitely be making them many many more times in the future. My recipe with detailed instructions and pictures is available at the Food Monkey.

As those of you who are Patriots fans remember, the game against Baltimore was supposed to be a walk in the park. I expected a nice easy time half cooking/half watching the game, but was sorely mistaken. With the game tied 17-17 going into the fourth quarter, I spent every tense moment of the party running frantically back and forth between my kitchen and my living room ferrying crab cakes to my hungry guests while making sure not to miss a single play.

Maybe The Food Monkey Regional Football Meal Program wasn’t a good idea after all! Maybe this tradition designed to help the Patriots consume the opposition was a harbinger of doom! Trailing 20-24 with 1:48 left in the game, the Patriots marched down the field for a valiant last attempt to save the game. Down in the red zone, they had expended three downs with final fourth down to go a few very difficult feet to make the first.

And before I could even think, it was all over. Brady attempted a quarterback sneak and was stopped short of the first down. Dreams of an undefeated season were ground to dust.

I bit into my last cake in despair—the crab sweet and salty like tears.

No sooner I had swallowed, than the referee signaled that a time out had been called prior to the play: repeat fourth down—a heavenly reprieve from certain calamity.

With renewed vigor, we noble few with room left in our stomachs continued to devour what few crab cakes remained. The Patriots tried again and appeared to have failed yet another time, but were penalized for a false start and pushed back to a fourth and sixth. Brady then ran for a first down at the 18, but with a short hand-off to Faulk and two incomplete passes, it quickly became another fourth down scenario.

Situations like these truly test a man’s (or woman's) mettle. When you’ve had reprieve after reprieve from almost certain destruction, you require the ability to keep your cool and to perform at your best when the fate of a team, nay dynasty, rests on your shoulders. Only a great man can do such things, and his tales are the stuff of legend. The great man I refer to is of course myself, and perform I did. Yes, when all the chips were down, I was able to stretch my stomach beyond capacity and take one final tremulous bite of crab cake—thereby gastrotelekenetically causing Jamaine Winborne to get called for holding and allowing the Patriots the final deus ex machina moment they needed to go on and win the game. Patriots Nation, you’re welcome.

But as the game ended, and as the sounds of the jubilant post-game show hosts became dim echoes in the past, I still wondered to myself if I indeed had done the correct thing by starting The Food Monkey Regional Football Meal Program. Two times it had been tested, and two times almost certain victories were reduced to desperate struggles to stay afloat in turbulent seas of opposition. Was my new practice responsible for reducing the all powerful New England Patriots to actually having to try to win?

I decided to give it one final test. If the Patriots were trounced, I’d have to give it up. So this past Sunday I set to serving up some Pittsburgh related cuisine.

The first thing that came up in conversation about what to eat against the Steelers was chipped ham. Chipped ham is a delightful processed meat popular in Pittsburgh, which by all accounts is halfway between head cheese and potted meat. After a microsecond of thought, I decided to pass on the chipped ham and settled instead upon creating classic Pittsburgh-style sandwiches. Now until I researched it for this purpose, I never even knew that there was such a thing as a Pittsburgh-style sandwich, but they do indeed exist and are the king of 3am-drunken-hunger cuisine.

The traditional sandwich comes from Primanti Brothers, and involves copious amounts of meat and cheese (usually ham and provolone) topped with coleslaw and French fries inside thick Italian style bread. Being The Food Monkey, I had to mix it up a little bit to make my own version of the coronary-inducing sandwich.

Mike's (Defeating) Pittsburgh-Style Sandwich

Ingredients

Sliced ham
Prosciutto
Provolone cheese
Muenster cheese
Fries (frozen or fresh)
Coleslaw (homemade or store bought)
Your choice of crusty bread (I had to use hoagie rolls in a pinch)
Cajun spice

Directions

1. If you buy frozen fries, get the thinnest fries possible. It’s much better when the fries add crunch as opposed to simply being mountains of starch. Bake/fry the fries according to the package directions and then coat liberally with Cajun spices.

2. Prepare the coleslaw. Here’s a good recipe if you’re making your own. Keep in mind that the coleslaw will be the lubricant for the sandwich, so make sure it’s not too dry. But for god’s sake don’t make it a mayonnaise soup.

3. Drizzle a little oil on a frying pan or griddle and layer: 1 slice ham, 2 slices provolone, 2 slices prosciutto side by side, 2 slices Muenster cheese, 1 slice ham.

4. Let cook on medium heat 1-2 min per side, until the cheese just starts oozing out of the sides.

5. Place the layered masterpiece in the bread, add the French fries and put another slice of provolone over the fries.

6. Put this all into a toaster oven and toast until the cheese is bubbling and the bread is toasted.

7. Visit your cardiologist.

This time I did not have the football party at my house. Instead a friend wanted to host, so I became a mobile foodie and brought my ingredients on the road. BBQ was ordered as well, so we chowed down on that while I prepped the sandwiches. As I had to let things cook and thaw, and because the kitchen was not mine, I didn’t get the sandwiches ready until the second half.

With the Patriots leading by a measly four points going into the third with a wavering defense, things didn’t look very good. But the moment my sandwiches hit the table, Brady, Moss, and Gaffney executed one of the most amazing plays I have ever seen, which launched the Patriots into a scoring frenzy that would bring them to a decisive 34-14 victory. I credit the sandwiches, of course.

So it turns out that The Food Monkey Regional Football Meal Program is far from bad luck. Perseverance bore its fruit, and along the way gave me and my friends a wonderful way to enjoy football and food in glorious harmony. Overall, I think Patriots safety Rodney Harrison summed the way The Food Monkey Regional Football Meal Program makes me feel when he was asked about how he was motivated to beat the Steelers by the taunting from a player from the opposing team: “It’s almost like when you go to a pizza shop and you order your pizza, and you say I want extra sausage. There’s nothing wrong with extra sausage.” The Food Monkey Regional Football Meal Program is that little extra something you can do to make game time more special and it’s a heck of a lot of fun!

Next week: NY Jets. Should I do NY strip steak, or cheap Chinese food? Hmmm…

This post was contributed by Mike of the Food Monkey. There's more recipes and local food announcements where that came from over at the Food Monkey website.