November 07, 2018
As the Eagles enjoyed their bye week, following a big momentum-gaining win against the Jaguars and before their Sunday night matchup with the Cowboys, the team’s grill chef Tim Lopez re-launched his Feeding the Birds podcast.
Lopez doled out six episodes of the podcast last season, then two in the offseason, and now he’s back for another go-round.
The first episode of the new season featured a sit-down with Doug Pederson, ice cream’s biggest fan and head coach of the team.
The whole thing is worth a listen — Pederson tells us in the first two minutes that he just isn’t into “the cheese curd thing” — but the ice cream talk is, unsurprisingly, worth breaking down.
Let’s lead off with a great story from Pederson’s Super Bowl week, that has now carried over into his approach to dinner parties. He said:
“When we were at the Super Bowl this year, my wife and I were out there all week, I come back from our practice and I noticed there were two big cases, just brown boxes, in our room.
“I opened the first one up, there was just a styrofoam ice chest-looking box inside the big box. I open it up, it’s eight cartons of ice cream. And it’s two of these (boxes) now, so 16 cartons of all different flavors. Neapolitan, vanilla bean, chocolate chip mint, all kinds.
“I had to figure out a way not just to not eat it, but to get it back to Philadelphia. So, yeah, it got into the hotel freezer, and then we shipped it, overnighted it, back here to Philadelphia, here to my house. I’ve got a couple freezers at the house so I made room, put the ice cream in there.
“And now, every time my wife and I get invited to somebody’s house for dinner, we bring dessert. We bring ice cream. It’s a great way of getting it out of the house, so I don’t have to eat it.”
Pederson said a few weeks after the Super Bowl that Haagen-Dazs hadn’t reached out to him despite his very clear preference for their products, so if it wasn’t Haagen-Dazs … who sent him the ice cream?
Also, it’s pretty neat that his friends get to eat what is ostensibly Super Bowl Champion ice cream. That’s top-tier stuff.
Here’s another tidbit from Lopez, on Eagles fans being Eagles fans:
“A lot of people were sending you ice cream after the Super Bowl. We were getting deliveries to the backdoor of 50 to 100 pounds of different stuff. Everybody wanted to congratulate their coach Doug Pederson on the Super Bowl by sending him some ice cream.”
That’s so much ice cream! Eagles fans are something else.
And finally, if you’re looking for the official Doug Pederson Sundae recipe to pair with Sunday night’s game against Dallas, let’s do it:
LOPEZ: “What’s your favorite ice cream?”
PEDERSON: “Vanilla. Straight-up.”
LOPEZ: “Old school vanilla? Or like the high-end, Tahitian, vanilla beans, stuff like that?”
PEDERSON: “Well, yeah, you know, a little vanilla bean, vanilla flavor. Because you can do so much with vanilla. You can put sprinkles on it, you can put chocolate sauce, you can put strawberries, caramel, whipped cream, cherries, bananas, whatever you want. It’s hard to do that when you’ve got, like, pistachio or some buttercream.
“If I’m going to do a straight-up sundae, if I have a banana I’m going to put a banana in it. If I don’t, no big deal. Put some chocolate sauce, maybe a little bit of strawberry sauce, whipped cream and a couple cherries, and I’m out the door.”
LOPEZ: “That’s the Doug Pederson sundae right there.”
PEDERSON: “And if there’s walnuts or any kind of nuts available, I’m gonna put those on top. Maybe a sprinkle or two.”
LOPEZ: “You prefer the dry walnuts? Or those ones in the little bit of syrup they have?”
PEDERSON: “Just the dry ones.”
LOPEZ: “I’m with you on that.”
PEDERSON: “I’m as plain as they come. Just vanilla and a couple toppings, and I’m good to go.”
He’d touched on the toppings before, so this one isn’t a huge revelation, but now we have an official recipe for Eagles fan canon.
