From failure comes education—I learned a quick little trick from my dinner fail the other night.

Somehow, I scored tickets to go to the Super Bowl. I’m not sure where my seats are yet or how I will get there. But I also only got ONE ticket, so E can’t come with me. I feel bad, like I should hustle to get him a ticket, or turn down mine and stay home with him. But E told me to have fun. “I’d rather be at home,” he said. He’ll get to see all of the good Super Bowl commercials while I’ll be sitting in 30 degree open air at Met Life Stadium. It will be worth it for the once in a lifetime opportunity to be at the Super Bowl. It may never come back to New York again.

I promised I’d make dinner the other night, and was inspired to make Super Bowl-friendly sandwiches since I was going to the big game. I took out ground chicken for chicken meatball sliders in the morning. “Honey, you can relax while I make dinner,” I told him. But then I got home late, and when I went to make the sliders, the meat was still frozen. “Um, maybe we’ll order takeout?” I told him.

“I’ll make risotto,” he offered. “By the time I’m done, the meat will be thawed and you can make sliders for lunch.”

The next day, I assembled two sliders for lunch for E to take for lunch, and finally felt like I’d made up for my girlfriend fails the night before when he told me he devoured them at work.

Instead of sharing the recipe, I’m going to share a Super Bowl hack I discovered while making these: what to do when you only have large-size brioche hamburger buns, but you want to make sliders have the size.

If you find yourself living in a place where there’s only one small deli that sells one type of hamburger bun that is too large for your meat (like my neighborhood in Brooklyn) make slider buns by cutting out a smaller circle in a larger bun with a round cookie cutter. If you do this BEFORE you start making your meatballs, you can throw the scraps from the buns into a food processor and grind them up to make breadcrumbs to use in the meatballs. Super Bowl hack, y’all!

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