Triple Tri/flickr

A spread

On Super Bowl Sunday of our senior year of college, a friend's French girlfriend made crêpes. Okay, she wasn't French, but she had lived in Paris long enough to feel like she could affect an accent when speaking English and feign ignorance of the occasion's conventions. She made crêpes and everyone looked at her as if she was the February Grinch. But the crêpes were good. Great, actually. The point is this: Do not be governed excessively by tradition when hosting your Super Bowl buffet. Read on for four Super Bowl snacks that you can make yourself. With or without an accent.

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T. Nguyen

Last year's gyoza eating contest

Think you could eat 264 gyoza in 10 minutes? That's the record the world's best competitive eaters will have to beat in order to snatch the title from 2011 champion Pat Bertoletti at this year's Day-Lee Foods World Gyoza Eating Championship in Little Tokyo.

Two of the biggest superstars in the competitive eating worlds, Joey "Jaws" Chestnut and Patrick "Deepdish" Bertoletti -- who have both held the title in the past two years -- will square off in what's considered the West Coast equivalent of the Independence Day Nathan's Hot Dog eating contest held in New York.

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Cookie Monster

We liked Cookie Monster when we were 5. We realized we loved him seven years ago when he went nuts on Martha Stewart, begging like a pitiful junkie for the cookies she hadn't finished baking, even trying in vain to pimp out Bert for a freshly iced specimen. Now there's yet another reason to appreciate our favorite googly-eyed Chaos Muppet: "Share It Maybe," an inspired, cookie-centric video spoof of Canadian singer Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe," complete with dancing cubicle workers and a band (sort of) tapping away on kiddie instruments.

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Flickr/yoppy

Swedish meatballs with lingonberry sludge at IKEA

In Sweden, Norway and Finland, "Midsommar" -- celebrated the weekend closest to June 24 -- is an especially important holiday that's steeped in tradition and rivals Christmas in popularity. It marks the start of the summer season and celebrates joy and romance with maypole dancing, girls wearing bright floral wreaths, and all that other gay stuff.

But you don't need to buy a plane ticket to Stockholm or Oslo to get in on the festivities. To hail Midsummer (er, a week early), IKEA cafes across the country will be offering an all-you-can-eat Swedish buffet on Friday, June 15. Tickets are $2.49 for kids under 12 and $9.99 for adults. Seating is limited, so hurry in to pick up your tickets; hours vary by store. Turn the page for the menu.

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T. Nguyen

Sonya "The Black Widow" Thomas, center, and others take their first bites at the 2011 World Gyoza Eating Championship.

They came, they ate, some conquered, some were conquered: More than a dozen professional and amateur eaters; one "lucky" audience member who "won" an auction to compete in the contest; and the 2010 Nisei Week Queen and her court eating as one, competed at Saturday's Day-Lee Foods' World Gyoza Eating Championship in Little Tokyo. Held in conjunction with the community's 2011 Nisei Week Japanese Festival honoring Japanese-American culture, the contest paid tribute to the popular Japanese dumpling by giving competitors 10 minutes to eat as many of them as possible.

In the end, number two ranked major league eater in the world Pat Bertoletti dominated, placing first with 264 gyoza eaten in 10 minutes. He not only won the $2,000 first place prize, but also handily shattered the previous world record of 231 gyoza eaten in 10 minutes set by Joey Chestnut in 2008. For those of you doing the math, this means Bertoletti ate, on average, 26.4 gyoza per minute.

Pre-competition table setting, how many hundreds of gyoza the tiny Sonya "The Black Widow" Thomas ate, and, if you can stomach them, photos of the competition, after the jump.

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Courtesy of Chicken Charlie

Fried fair fare trio: Totally Fried Brownies, FryBQ ribs and Totally Fried Kool-Aid

His life's work reads like a chapter in The Fattening of America. Every year, Chicken Charlie a.k.a. Charlie Boghosian, the fried food maestro of Southern California's county fair circuit, invents newer and ever more gluttonous deep-fried creations. His two biggest sellers are deep-fried avocados and deep-fried frogs' legs, though he also does a brisk trade in fried Twinkies and Oreos. His most notorious creation, a chicken sandwich made with Krispy Kreme donuts in place of bread, remains on the menu, and he's bringing back last year's big hit, a fried Klondike ice cream bar. But he also has a few new offerings for fried food connoisseurs.

We caught up with the busy deep-fry king, who's developing a mass-market deep-fryer, working on a line of flours and looking to open his first restaurant (in San Diego). In between all this, he gave us a sneak peek of how San Diego (June 10 - July 4), OC (July 15 - Aug. 14) and Los Angeles (Sep. 3 - Oct. 2) county fairgoers will be hardening their arteries this summer. Because if something's worth eating, it's worth deep-frying.

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Courtesy of Burger King.

With the debut of its BK Stuffed Steakhouse Burger, Burger King hopes to achieve what Domino's et. al. accomplished with stuffed crust pizza: Shove cheap extra calories into its core product to make it exponentially more fattening and, hence, more appealing.

The Stuffed Steakhouse Burger is filled with bits of jalapeño and cheddar cheese then topped with a creamy poblano sauce. Priced at $3.99, it will be available nationwide through mid-February.

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L.A. & O.C. Foodventures

After 650-pound New Jersey resident Donna Simpson proudly ate a 30,000-calorie Christmas meal, we didn't think the Garden State could get any classier. We were wrong.

Williamstown couple Cliff Ranson and Elizabeth Fischer tied the knot on Tuesday in the Dunkin' Donuts franchise on Route 42 South. According to NJ.com:

The pair tied the knot in the Sicklerville coffee shop surrounded by machines brewing their favorite beverage, trays of glazed doughnuts and mounds of Munchkins.

The bride, however, rejected her mother's suggestion that she carry a bouquet of Munchkins. She has standards.

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Donna Simpson

When Donna Simpson dreams, she dreams big. The 650-pound New Jersey mom aims to be the fattest woman in the world. And to be the best, you have to make sacrifices. After gaining more than 50 pounds this year, Simpson celebrated by downing a 30,000-calorie Christmas meal.

Yes, you read that correctly. 30,000 calories. We didn't tack on an extra zero.

How is such a feat even possible?

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