I am in love with a man who loves Pizza Rolls.  Several of our first dates involved heated debates about the pros and cons of Pizza Rolls.  My list of cons always ended up being more substantial than his “They just taste good” list of pros.  Once I even let him prepare a taste testing session for me in an effort to convert me to the Pizza Roll Fan Club.  Fail.  While I have yet to try the imitation recipes floating around out there, I have come up with a semi-decent substitute.

These whole wheat calzones may not pack the same mouth-melting explosion of Pizza Roll volcanic lava filling, they are healthier and tastier!  They are endlessly adaptable, can be filled with whatever you can dream up and if you stick with the creamy spinach riccotta filling you can actually slip some veggies into your football-friendly munchies without anyone even noticing!  Simple to whip up, these calzones can be frozen ahead of time so you are ready to go for a fast weeknight dinner or easy game day snacks.

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Football food is not known for being beautiful.  More often than not, it falls into the Roll-Up-Your-Sleeves messy category and comes with a side of napkins.  This dish turns the tables on the traditional football fare: Buffalo Hot Wings.  These inside-out, fork-and-knife wings may still require a side of napkins but they certainly up the ante on traditional game-time wings.

This more refined version of traditional wings is also considerably healthier.  While most wings are fried and coated with sugary sauces, these babies are baked and can be topped with a hot sauce that contains as few as 5 calories (my personal favorite is Frank’s Red Hot Sauce).  Old fashioned hot wings have become a football food you don’t have to feel guilty about enjoying!

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After relocating from Southern California to a much colder climate a few years ago, every winter when the temperature would dip below my comfort level I would find myself developing the most inexplicable craving for chili.  Despite having attended several chili cook-offs during my childhood (yes, I am actually admitting to that), I never developed much of a taste for chili.  It was either too spicy, too bland, too meaty, too tomato-y.  Now, I’m a fan of tomatoes, meat, spices and beans but it was always too something and I was never happy with the result.  Plus, it inevitably called for hours of cooking and loads of specialty ingredients which felt horribly wasted when the result was such a let down.

These predicable disappointments aside, every winter I would bravely ventured into chili recipe territory in the hopes that some new recipe would set my chili streak straight and each year I was again sorely disappointed . . . until this year.  I came across this gorgeous photo at Smitten Kitchen and was suddenly optimistic that this might be the chili recipe to cure my years of bad chili luck.  When my boyfriend informed me that he is a major chili fan, that was all the encouragement I needed.

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