Monday Night Football

I like sports in general, and love two in particular. Those two are cycling and football. I also love to have people over to watch those sports on TV. Naturally you have to feed those people.
My husband, Fred, and I have been watching the Tour de France since the mid 90's. About 5 or 6 years ago I started cooking dinners that reflected the cuisine of the region the racers were cycling through on that given day.
I'm pretty sure I stole the idea from Robin Rosenberg who's been hosting Superbowl parties featuring regionally appropriate food (from the teams' respective homes) for years. It's a great conceit; if you love to make food of all sorts it's nice to focus your efforts. And if you can do it for Cincinnati and Minnesota, say, you can certainly do it for the Savoie and Provence.
July is dedicated to 3 weeks of intensive French cooking. Sept-Dec, though, is football season, and therefore 17 weeks of American food.
In truth I don't host 17 monday night football (MNF) dinners. I'm ambivalent about football in September; I'm not entirely willing to let summer go, and football is, of course, synonymous with fall. Also, Sept can be spectacular in Oregon and California, and Fred and I are often backpacking or riding our bikes or in some other way trying to cram in the last of summer.
The 2010 MNF season at our house started on Sept 20, week 2, with New Orleans at San Francisco.
Sometimes I like to cook a specific, emblematic dish of a region, like, say, Cincinnati chili. Other times I'll come up with a menu that reflects my feelings or impressions of a place. San Francisco was the latter. Oh, I almost forgot-- in general the home team dictates the menu.
This year I thought about old Italian North Beach San Francisco.

The menu:
Fresh Pacific oysters with lemon
Bucatini with anchovy sauce
Green salad with lemon juice and olive oil (happily late Sept is still CSA season around here, so we had gorgeous, hearty, sweet and bitter farm greens)
Spumoni sundaes--vanilla and coffee ice creams (I strongly prefer coffee to chocolate) with chocolate sauce, toasted pistachios and boozy cherry sauce.

Anchovy Sauce:
For 1 lb of pasta slowly saute a couple lbs (3 or 4 good sized) of yellow onions, sliced, in a good amount of olive oil. Let the onions get soft and caramel-y. This will take 30-45 min.
Add a couple ounces of anchovy fillets, rinsed if salted. Smash a couple cloves of garlic and add to the onions. Mash the anchovies into the onions and garlic and continue to cook until the anchovies dissolve. Add lots of black pepper and season to taste.
Toast about 1/2 cup of bread crumbs, chop a big handful of parsley, and toss with cooked bucatini and onion/anchovy mixture. Add a little of the pasta cooking water if the sauce is stiff or stodgy.