1 Hour till Friday night prep...

Back in the day, we used to have a costume party the night before the Big Game, and then roll in hot on Saturday morning. We've gotten rid of the party, but we still gather together, prep food, have some fun, drink some beers, and revel in the party that we are about to win the next day.

Here's a teaser for you guys as to what you can expect if you're coming to Big Game 2013.

Butt Rub getting settled in. We have 55 lb. of pork smoking as we speak.

Grilled cheese...comfort food at its best.

We nixed the baked beans, but here's what the batch looked like at Test Kitchen.

DBo and his magical bacon cups.

Pork, after people picked at the bark.

Pork sliders w/ "Pig Paint" mustard sauce.

Pork sliders, "The Sweet Stuff."

Tinkering in my lab. Making dressing for the slaw.

What the baked beans looked like when finished. The bacon melts like butter in your mouth.

Big Game 2013 Menu: Comfort Food

Ok, so here is the menu for the Big Game Tailgate, 2013.  Theme? "Comfort Food."  It's been a rough year, friends, so come take comfort with us and ease the pain.

Ohio St. Tailgate Recap

In case you didn't realize it...but the Bears stink this year. We're awful. We haven't beaten a single DIV I opponent.  And the Ohio St. beat down got me so out of touch with football, that it's taken me many weeks to get back to the computer and continue the blog.

Well, guess what, I'm back!  And we'll start with a basic recap of the day, show you some photos...and then move on to the next chapter, which is the Big Game 2013...First, the tools...

After a bunch of tailgates here's the workhorse.

She's been a good soldier so far. Hoping for a few more years.

We start with the basics. The Bacon Explosion.  In case you want detailed explanation of what it is...click here Bacon Explosion.  Here are some photos of our version, which came out great.

The bacon weave. I know I missed an over/under at the bottom.

Spicy Italian Sausage.

Add cooked bacon pieces and bbq seasoning.

Rolled and smoked.

Interesting to note, the SPICY version was WAY more popular this year. I made 1 spicy version and the rest regular. Next year I'm doing probably 3 spicy and 2 regular...Anyhow...moving on.

Our egg cooking station.

 See our earlier posts about how we cooked the eggs. This was the best way, by far, that we've tried so far.  And as you see below, the assembly worked great. Toast the muffin, cheese on one half, bacon explosion on the other. Top with egg...and boom! We literally we have this thing dialed in. It is the most perfect breakfast sandwich ever made.  I say that with a straight face.

General assembly line.

 Here's what they look like coming off the grill. How can you possibly not want one right now?

The finished product. It's perfect!

 I bought DBo a chef's jacket (that he's not wearing in this photo) as a token of my appreciation for all he does.  We're a great team.

 Bacon cups. See previous posts...but these were brought out for the special crew who helps put the tailgate together. Add egg and mac and cheese (see previous posts) and it's a great snack!

DBo's bacon cups. Came out better than test versions.

So, excluding the game itself, the tailgate was a great success. We kept the menu simple (more or less) and people chowed down on the Mac & Cheese. It was such a hit that it's coming back for the Big Game in a couple of weeks.

The Mac & Cheese ready for transport.

Brought a pot of extra sauce to ladle on before it was served.

There was an unsubstantiated rumor that I may or may not have allegedly supposedly gotten into it kinda sorta with Ohio St. fan at our seats...and that the names of Aaron Hernandez and Urban Meyer were invoked...I am neither here to confirm, nor deny such rumors...

So, that's a short but sweet update. Up next, we move on to the Big Game Tailgate...and "Comfort Food 2013."

Oh ya? Well go roux yourself!

The Cal v. Ohio St. game happens in less than a week.  I think there are stories from our trip to Columbus in 2012 that are ripe for sharing.  In fact I may need someone to help guest write that entry for me because there was a lot to talk about.  Today, though we focus on an event that we have made a tradition over the last few years... Tailgate Test Kitchen.

*Unnecessary side note. Or as my friend Jenn would say...Catnip! Matthew Berry has not yet read the last blog entry (Mutton, Lettuce, Tomato, and Matthew Berry)...or if he did read it, he hated it and chose to spare my feelings and ignore me. I didn't think he would read it, mind you, but I'm disappointed anyway. Consider this now an obsession to have him at least read my one blog entry that is dedicated to him. Ok, moving on.*

At my daughter's 2nd birthday party, my PILs (Parents in Law...really just my MIL but I want to give them both credit since they work as a catering team most of the time) brought over a vat of mac & cheese.  How big, exactly is a vat? Bigger than will fit in a Tupperware,  but smaller than a barrell Heisenberg would use to bury his cash. 

Let's just say it's more than enough to serve a bunch of screaming kids, and have enough left over for their parents to go back multiple times, pretend to have another half scoop, but really take two scoops and eat one on the way back to the table so the other parents don't say to themselves..."How many grams of carbs is he going to eat today, Jane?!"

Let's be straight and to the point.  It was really good. No cracker crumbles, no 4 layers of fancy cheeses...just noodles, and pure orange gooey goodness.  Sous Chef, and soon to be contributer to this blog, DBo and I agreed without question.  Mac & Cheese was a perfect tailgate option, and needed to make an appearance this year.  And so it was said.

A few years ago we did chili test kitchen... as you can imagine many pots and beans and spoons and testing and tasting etc.  It was great.  Last year was schnitzel schliders.  Test kitchen is awesome. But it's more than just testing out recipes to see what tastes best.  We have to always think in terms of, how can we make something tasty, but do it on a gas grill...or if cooked ahead of time, how do we transport it...and if we have to make huge batches of it, how do we store it, or make the recipe work for larger volumes...oh, and will it fit in our budget of $20 per person which has to cover food, booze, water, soda, supplies etc.

So we sit around and watch football...GO NINERS! and we cook.  This year the plan was two fold. How do we improve on eggs for the bacon explosion breakfast sandwich, and getting the right recipe for mac & cheese.

The bacon explosion (or bacon armageddon as we make it) will take up an entire other blog post.  But for information's sake, here is a refresher course.  We copied it, and then improved it.
The Bacon Explosion

You may say to yourself, how do you take that awesome bacon log and improve upon it?  Or you may say, why would you possibly do anything to something that perfect besides eat it as is.  Here's the answer. Bacon explosion = awesome. Bacon explosion breakfast sandwich 2328 style is memorable... Sorta like how memorable a heart attack would be.

How many is that for you Todd?
That makes a baker's dozen for me.

Our version = Toasted english muffin, topped with sliced bacon explosion, melted cheddar cheese and a fried egg. It's as healthy as it sounds.  But let me ask you this, have you ever tried to make fried eggs for dozens of people on a gas grill with regular grates? It's not easy... haha. We started by just bringing a frying pan and doing it on the grill top.  That worked, but took forever.  After 2 years, I decided to try something new...poached.  It worked last year, but there could be improvements.  *As an aside. Great way to poach in advance...Bring water to near boil. Drop in an ounce or two of regular vinegar.  Crack egg and put in a ramekin or dish, and gently let the egg into the water. Cook for 3-4 minutes depending on how you like them, and remove.  You can keep these overnight stored in ice water...and to heat them up just dunk them in hot water and serve. The yolks, believe it or not, stay runny and the eggs taste great.*

But the poaching requires we have pots of hot water which are hard to arrange at a tailgate party, so I wanted a better way. Enter, the muffin tin, and a griddle top.

Seems too good to be true. But thanks to the Beauty and Bedlam blog I got some really good tips, and we have modified it just a bit for our tailgate purposes.  Tested it in the oven to start, but at test kitchen we wanted to see if it would work straight on the grill grates.

Start by getting a regular non stick muffin tin. For us we can't use silicone since we are putting it directly onto the grill.  Spray with regular cooking spray.  Gently crack an egg into the tin.  Uh, is it really this simple? Yes.

You can scramble the egg inside the tin, if you desire.

Place the tin directly on the grill and watch magic happen.  Ignore the bacon cups for a second, I'll get back to that.  After about 3-4 minutes the whites of the egg will start to get hard.  After about 7 minutes the outside whites of the egg should be hard enough that if you take a regular spatula, you should be able to pop them out of the tin like a little puck.  The goal for the sandwich is to have the yolks runny like a fried egg, but not have to actually fry the damn things individually. So how do we get there?

When the whites are still loose on the inside, pop them out and flip them onto the griddle grate.

Once the whites are solid enough to remove them, do it. Pop them out and flip them onto your griddle top...ours can be seen here.  Finish until they are done to your liking.  The yolks should remain nice and runny, which is the key to the fantastic-ness of the perfect breakfast sandwich.  As you can see, I scrambled some just for fun, and that works great...you can even add things to them if you want little mini breakfast scrambles.  If you want to know how to best store these puppies, read the blog I linked to above and they have some really important tips about what you need to do to store them or freeze them.  

Ok, onto the bacon and the mac.

Bacon is good, we know that. Bacon makes everything better, duh.  Except beer. NEVER, ever, buy or try to drink this Voodoo Bacon Ale.  It is disgusting, take my word for it.  We'll get to the mac&cheese in a second, but let's look at the bacon cups that we decided to try. After all, what could improve the breakfast sandwich more than adding another element of bacon to it?  So, the goal was simple. Let's make a cup made out of bacon.  It (sorta) works, but is probably more trouble and $ than it's worth.

We started by foiling a muffin tin, and wrapping 2.5 pieces of bacon into what you see below.  If you think about it, that's a lot of bacon per cup.  This was thick cut, it might work better, actually, with thin.  We then baked the bacon on the tin until we got it as crispy as we could.  Problem is that we couldn't get the inside crispy, either due to insufficient heat, or the fact that the foil was not giving us a good heat transfer.

Make sure you overlap the bottom several times, and allow room for shrinkage.

The result after baking.  Not inedible, but certainly not a great result aesthetically.

What you see above is how it came out.  Then, we popped them onto the grill next to the eggs and that seemed to finish them to a point of crispness that may not have been pretty, but it was functional enough for the end result you'll see at the end of this entry.

If you're interested, there is a more specific bacon cup device that you can buy, but we haven't pulled the trigger on it yet. Check it out at buybaconbasket.com. My favorite line is, "make a healthy egg white omelette in a bacon basket!" Haha...nothing makes egg whites healthier than a basket of bacon.

Mac & Cheese

BASIC RECIPE

4 Tbsp Butter

1/2 cup flour

1 1/2 lb. Velveeta Cheese

2 lb. bag "Large" Macaroni noodles

5 + cups whole milk

Point of emphasis. If you like fancy stuff, like cracker crumbles or gruyere and havarti cheeses...you're not alone. That stuff is delicious. I like mac & cheese in all its forms, and that gourmet stuff is incredible. THIS is not a gourmet recipe. I know there are fancier, but this tastes amazing and is super simple so don't give me crap because I used...you guessed it...VELVEETA!

The Noodles

Why in the world did I post a picture of the bag of noodles? It's just a noodle, right? WRONG!  The size of the noodle is super important.  Box mac and cheese has the small ones, and that stuff is yummy. But the sauce in that is much lighter and thinner, and can work with those noodles. The sauce for this recipe is thick and gooey, and if you use small macaroni it won't allow the sauce to properly coat the outside AND the inside of the noodles, which is really important. Trust me.  So just go to Safeway (the only brand I could find) and get the bag of LARGE Macaroni noodles.  I am guessing that shells would work fine, or even penne...but skip anything that is super small that doesn't have a big cavity for cheese input.

We used a single two pound bag to make two tins that you will see below.

Boil salted water and cook the noodles until they are done. You know when that is. If they are a tiny bit overcooked, that's better than under-cooked for our purposes.  But why not just cook them right to begin with? After all, like Jimmy Dugan says, "Anything worth doing is worth doing right!" (If you find a video link for that, please let me know.)

The Roux

Ok, Websters says I can spell it Rue too...do you really care? If you know what I'm talking about you are a sufficient enough chef to know how to spell it on your own.

Look in any cookbook, we're working with basics here. Equal parts fat and flour.  I used 4 Tbsp butter and about a 1/2 cup of flour. I'm not sure if that's equal parts or not, but it seemed to work ok.  Melt the butter, get the flour whisked in, and let it simmer until it gets a little brown.

Then, add warm milk slowly and whisk.  It's important, I'm told, that the milk is not cold. If you want to know why I'm sure the Joy of Cooking will explain. I've already gone on long enough in this entry.  I used about 5 cups of milk. I would say you can go with more.  You can use whatever milk you like, but Whole milk is going to give you the best taste and consistency, and that's what we used here.  Mix thoroughly and simmer.

The Cheese (product)

Get a 1 lb.block of Velveeta.  Then get another one and cut it in half.  Heck, Walmart will even sell it to you online and ship it to you if you are too ashamed to be seen at your local grocery store buying this fantastic cheese "product."  And if you are being snobby, let me tell you this, Velveeta was the first cheese product to get the American Medical Association's seal of approval. And if THEY say it's ok to eat, who are we to argue?

Take the 1.5 lbs and chop it, slice it, whatever, add it at low heat to the roux and watch it thicken up into amazing, amazing goodness.  I add a little pepper to taste, and that's it. Super simple.

The construction

It's important, as I said before, that you coat all of the noodles in cheese sauce. So do it in layers. Mix it around, and don't skimp. You may think when you put the noodles into the tin that the mixture is too runny. It's not. We're gonna bake it and it's going to get thicker, I promise.  And too much goo is a good thing, anyway.

Every oven is different. You can see the sizes of tins we used below. I suggest 350 degrees for about 30 minutes...and if you want to attempt to brown the top you can throw it up near the broiler for 5 minutes for color. For our purposes, I didn't bother.  You're just baking it so it thickens and reaches the desired consistency.  Take it out, and you're done.

The Bacon

As you notice, we added chopped bacon to one batch, and, as I said before, it makes everything except beer taste better. OMG this was phenomenal...*HINT* Replace butter with bacon fat for the bacon mac version.  Any fat should work, and just that little added flavor makes for a nice added touch.

The finished product. These two tins were polished off by 8 people, I kid you not. It's that good.

Taking it to new levels

So, you have eggs, you have bacon cups, and you have bacon mac & cheese. Yes, you know where this is going.  The bacon cup was made on the outside of the tin. The eggs, on the inside. Guess what that means...they fit! Insert egg into bacon cup.  Top with a layer of bacon mac...and here's what you get.

Hungry Yet?

About to be devoured.

And, ladies & gentlemen, I present you with your first, and not to be the last, picture of my Sous Chef, DBo, as he throws down a ceremonial bite of what was an extraordinarily great day of tailgate test kitchen.

Up next

tOSU comes to town on Saturday. We did some more prep this weekend and I'll update you with where we stand going into another edition of Beargating...as us Cal fans prepare to win...the party, that is.

Go Bears!

Words cannot describe it.

Mutton, Lettuce, Tomato, and Matthew Berry. Regulators, Mount Up!

I have a theory/dream that I can become the Matthew Berry (aka The Talented Mr. Roto) of tailgate blogging. I'm sure if he ever reads this blog he'll consider that an insult.  If you are a fantasy football player you will know what I mean. But if not, what I mean is that I will say in 1,000 words what could be summed up in 50.  You think you're logging on to find out the best sleepers/busts for the upcoming season, but instead you get a recap on The Princess Bride and his Howard Stern guest appearance. (PB is one of my favorite and most quoted movies of all time, and Stern is my all time favorite radio show...really there is no close second)  But you read the whole column anyway, because it turns out that his Howard Stern appearance was awesome, and you cannot pass up an opportunity to revel in your specialized knowledge of Mandy Patinkin and Carey Elwes' finest work. See what I mean here. So in the smallest of hopes that Matthew Berry might actually read this blog, I'll be dropping a few lines that will make him, and probably nobody else, smile.

Throughout the course of this blog, I expect that you'll get a mixture of stories, recipes, miscellaneous thoughts, and in this case, gadgets!  This entry will properly demonstrate 1. how we over analyze and over prepare for our tailgates...and 2. that we like to think of ourselves as way smarter than we really are.  Inconceivable! But nonetheless, we love doing what we do, and talking about it, and now we love sharing our obsessions with you!

One of the things we pride ourselves on is that for $20, people can eat and drink as much as they want.  We will feed them until they are no longer hungry. And we will provide enough booze for them to have as good of a time as they want.  Enough even to get drunk enough to get involved in a land war in Asia, if they so choose!

Iocane powder, I'd bet my life on it!

In 2006 I got married. In fact, it was "mawwage" that brought us together that day.  (Grandpa, they're kissing again!)  In getting married, we decided that we were going to do wine/beer instead of a full bar at the wedding. So, it became obvious to me that this was the perfect excuse to buy a jockey box...and that jockey box is what we've used at the tailgate ever since.  (If you don't know, a jockey box is basically just a portable tap system for kegs of beer.)  So gone, now, are the traditional party keg taps that you learned how to install during your freshman college orientation.  Enter instead: a double tap, BLUE (of course), cooler style jockey box that looks just like this.  I Just realized, I wish I would have worked "Hello Lady!" into my wedding vows. Damn!

Like, this is what the beer comes out of.

One of the problems that came about, though, with our new found box, is that the beer didn't always flow perfectly out of both taps. We try to have light and dark beer going to appeal to all tastes...but it usually takes more/less pressure to run different types of beer. So while one tap gets great pours, the other is foamy, or vice versa. And then there are a ton of coils inside the box that need to stay ice cold. And temperature also affects the release of gases that influence the quality of a pour. Oh, and then there's the rubber tubing that connects the coils to the keg, and of course there are tube fittings, and valves, and all sorts of random crap that can all fail, and more importantly can all cause us to spend an inordinate amount of time wondering WHY IN THE HELL DID WE GET THIS DAMN JOCKEY BOX IN THE FIRST PLACE? WOULDN'T CANS JUST BE A WHOLE LOT EASIER?  WHAT I WOULDN'T GIVE FOR A HOLOCAUST CLOAK!

The answer to that question is, yes, cans would be much easier. As would the regular old taps we used to use. But we are idiots, and we like to do things right, or not do them at all.  So, instead of declaring a failure in the war against foam, we have invested!  (And we can now list this amongst our assets)

I'm told the large knobs are important, for some reason.

DBo and 2 Bags (lots of stories introducing you to our buddy 2 Bags in future posts) are our resident beer experts.  They fiddle with pressure gauges and pretend to look knowledgeable on the subject. (DBo works as a chemical engineer at a refinery, so he will tell you about the properties of various inert gases and covalent bonds while he does this...and did you really know there is a UC Davis ChemWiki?)  And you should have seen the look on his face when DBo received the new double awesome CO2 regulator in the mail this week. I wasn't with him, technically, but let me just tell you, I bet he's already played with the knobs a few times on his own, just practicing for the big installation day.  Hey Beavis, you said knobs.

What's the moral of this story? There is none. I like to type, and this is more entertaining than whatever else I should be doing right now.  The hope, however, is that this ultra cool new regulator will help make sure that we have smooth flowing beer of various varieties from the moment you step foot at the tailgate until the last drop is poured.  Now, aren't you glad you read all this way so far?

How do you like your MLT?

(Miracle Max likes his when the mutton is nice and lean, and the tomato is and ripe, they're so perky, I love that)  Well, in 2012 we finally did it, we broke something important.  Halfway through the tailgate we couldn't figure out why one side of the grill was not getting hot, and thus why our MLT's were not cooking properly. Uh, that's because there's a propane leak, Bobby!  So we called out to Texas and got our propane and propane accessories salesman Hank Hill to send us a new gas regulator. Because butane's a bastard gas!

Geez, I feel like I should also have a Warren G regulators joke ready to go. You can insert your own below.  So next week we look forward to saying the following, Regulators! Mount up! The point remains the same, doesn't matter how much propane Hank sells you have if your propane accessories are broken.  Now you can rest assured that in 2013 we will have enough propane to feed Fezzik and the entire brute squad. Oh wait, he IS the brute squad. 

Our new gas regulator.

So with that, I'll sit and wait, longingly, for my fantasy hero, no, not Robin Wright...@MatthewBerryTMR to acknowledge my existence. In the meantime, you will love what's coming next if you are a fan of bacon, cheese, and combinations of both.

Until then,

Have fun stormin' the castle! 

(Think the Bears have any chance of beating Northwestern? It'd take a miracle)

What is 2328 and Friends?...and thanks to Chris Kelly!

So, this blog has been a long time coming. I've wanted to write a book for a few years now, detailing the prep and fun that we get out of putting on the Official Unofficial Tailgate for Cal Football.  In a nutshell, the tailgate is named the "2328 and Friends" after a group of friends who lived together in Berkeley while going to Cal.  2328, of course, was their address.

Every year for the Big Game, Cal v. Stanfurd (purposefully misspelled, forever), they would get together and do a tailgate party, no different from any other. Gas grill, beer, good times, and a football game...and for many years in a row, a loss.

Around 2000, the group added a party the night BEFORE Big Game, and decided that the only way to do it right was to have a themed costume party, with a theme related to the current woes of the football team.  For example, in 2001 the team was winless going into Big Game. Thus, the theme "O." We had people dressed as Orgasms, OJ, you name it.  The themes were simple, and allowed us Cal fans the opportunity to do what we do best, be creative.

Around that time, I was an attendee at the parties, but had no official role in the tailgate party itself, other than to go and numb myself before the annual beat down took place. (We lost 7 in a row starting in my freshman year in 1995)  But it was around 2002 that this all changed...

It started as a simple request...Chris, grill master by necessity, nonchalantly asked me a question. "Hey man, can you watch the grill for a minute, I'm going to take a leak."  He has yet to return to the grill.

I flipped a lot of burgers that day at the Foothill Parking lot in Berkeley.  Cal won its first Big Game in recent memory, and Jeff Tedford was the new coach that was going to rescue Cal football.  Everything was good. I even remember the great sunset.  Now, the exact evolution from, "please hold my spatula" guy to "Executive Chef of the most fantastic Cal football tailgate party" took a little time.  The "Captain" of the tailgate, as we'll call him, still runs the show and is the Tsar.  However, over time his general fatigue from his 54 extra ciricular activities has taken its toll, and he has ceded much of the planning...and generally all control over the food, to the two Matts. Me, and DBo.  As you'll come to find out through the course of this blog (and my book once I decide to put that ball in motion), is that I (and DBo) spend an obsessive amount of time planning, plotting, prepping and sometimes procrastinating...but always prognosticating about how the next year's event is going to be the best tailgate we've ever thrown.  The food has gotten tastier, the recipes more diverse, and the menus more plentiful.

So here we are in 2013. Cal football starts in a week. Our first event is the Cal/Ohio St. game on Sept. 14th. And what are we doing? Test kitchen. DBo comes to my house and we cook, and test recipes, and generally figure out logistics on how to make the Official Unofficial Tailgate (aka The 2328) the best  possible event.

The basics
$20 per person - covers all you can eat and all you can drink...usually pre-game AND post game (except late night games)

The equipment
Much more will be written about our workhorse. The 6 foot Coleman Event Grill. Many a better grill have probably been made, but none has treated us as kindly as this monster of a grill.  Purchased, used, and sold in Tennessee, and repurchased when we returned...this puppy is going on its 8th year in service, and will host its 9th and 10th parties this fall.  That may not sound like a lot, but with the amount of abuse this thing takes, its impressive that it's still around.

Coming next...
You'll meet the players, you'll hear some stories, and you'll of course see pictures of, and get way too much detail about, THE FOOD!

So thanks for reading. And thanks to Chris Kelly for taking the longest pee in history.
I hope you enjoy.
Go Bears!