Buffalo Bills game-day food: Fool’s Gold Crunch

Whether it’s tailgating or homegating, fans of the Buffalo Bills are known to be elite tier when it comes to food. Wingin’ It returns for it’s eighth season of Mad Hatter-esque recipes, taking inspiration from the Buffalo Bills and their opponents.

Fool’s Gold Crunch

While I’ve done a few Denver recipes already, I thought I might dive back into the research to try and find something new. I stumbled on some Elvis Presley lore, that he loved a sandwich in Denver so much that he once flew his entire entourage out to the city just so they could try it.

Called the “Fool’s Gold” — the sandwich is a decadent, King-sized peanut butter and jelly sandwich with bacon added to it. The simplicity was intriguing, but what Buffalo twist could I add? As you can see in the picture, I landed on Cheerios. But you know me by now. These aren’t ordinary Cheerios.

Fool’s Gold Crunch

Serves: about 4
Active Time: 5 min
Total Time: About 8 min

Ingredients

Bread of your choice (see below)
Peanut butter
Grape jelly
Cooked bacon
4 Tbsp bacon fat
2 cups Cheerios
1 tsp ground cayenne pepper

You will need: Stable A1C numbers or stick to “non-Elvis” portions

1. Preheat pan to MED/HIGH (7 of 10 on my stove).
2. Add bacon fat to pan.
3. Stir in Cheerios, trying to get an even coat of bacon fat.
4. Sprinkle on cayenne pepper and stir.
5. Allow Cheerios to brown slightly (see below), stirring occasionally; set aside to cool.
6. Hollow out bread, both sides (see below).
7. Fill one hollowed-out half of bread with peanut butter and the other with jelly.
8. Add spicy Cheerios to both the peanut butter and jelly.
9. Add bacon (your call on how much) in the middle and put sandwich halves together.
10. Invite entourage over.

Wingin’ It Tips

If you’re curious as to why I keep insinuating “don’t be like Elvis” it’s because what he ate had an ingredient list of an entire loaf of French bread, one jar each of peanut butter and jelly, and an entire pound of bacon. I dare anyone to read that list for one sandwich and try to make a convincing argument that Elvis is still alive somewhere.

So I used a hoagie roll and even then, as a normal human being, that was plenty of food. Now on to the tips and pictures. The first one shows off the Cheerios. You can see some are browning a bit more than others, but collectively they’ve all gone a little gold.

The next pictures show the bread sliced then hollowed, followed by them filled with peanut butter and jelly. I think the rest of the pictures speak for themselves so I won’t bore you with an explanation. What I will finish with is that the bacon fat fry worked exactly how I wanted. It crisped the Cheerios even further, but made them lighter and...