When you think of Super Bowl parties, you usually would think chips, dip, sandwiches and the such – well, my mind wandered just a bit and I thought I would try my hand at making sopas and filhos.

What the heck was I thinking!

I have not ever tried making sopas but the middle of winter seemed to be a good time to have some hot soup instead of the traditional middle of summer when it is 110 in the shade and the furthest thing from your mind is eating hot soup.

One small detail – I didn’t have a sopas recipe and for the life of me I couldn’t find the one we printed several years ago that Jim and Helen Vescere had shared with our readers when we did a feature story on them.  Instead of just calling Helen, I went onto the internet and searched for sopas recipes. I did not know that there could be so many different recipes for sopas but there were.

When I started comparing them I realized that this was much like finding the perfect recipe for filhos – it depended on the person that you were talking to and what island they decended from and all of those other meaningful things that come into play when you talk about ethnic food.

As confused as I was, I still moved forward with the idea. I found the perfect roast meat at Wolfsen’s and Vance was kind enough to share some words of wisdom from his last attempt at making sopas, which he said was ages ago. His recipe came from Madeline Amaral and she had a few secret ingredients that were not included on any of the recipes that I found. More ideas!

As I unloaded the ingredients from my grocery bags I became petrified that the sopas might not turn out and then I would be left with nothing to serve – better start them early just in case. One thing lead to another and the sopas were on the stove cooking overnight so that they would be ready on Sunday. After all, that’s what they do at the festas!

Miraculously, nothing overflowed or got stuck at the bottom of the pot. The aroma of sopas filled my house Sunday morning and everything seemed to be falling into place. One last detail, the taste test!

In my mind, I could remember the sopas that Tony Santos made for many celebrations – if only mine could taste like that.

Well, they weren’t like Tony’s but I they weren’t bad either. After trying to figure out what was missing - I realized that I had mistakenly left out the pickling spice which is one of the most important ingredients. So much for all of the homework!

That just means that I will have to try my hand at making them again.

The filhos on the other hand are a totally different story. Not a good day for filhos in my house. I was really feeling good about making them as the week before they had turned out perfectly.

My problem is that I get the hair-brained idea to try a different recipe and then everything goes south real quick!

I am on a mission to find the perfect recipe (for me that is) as my great-nephew Quinton has asked me to make filhos for his GATE class because they are studying special breads of other countries. Poor child – I think I am going to ask Ti Emily to go with me so that the class doesn’t get the wrong idea about such a wonderful delicacy.

Since lent is now upon us, no more filhos for several weeks, I’ll have to wait until Easter to try, try again!

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