Tailgating at Home

I’m a football addict. A straight up gridiron junky.  I can’t wait for the Fall, not for the weather and the holidays right around the corner, but for football.  College, pro, I don’t care.  I love it, love it, love it.  That being said, for the most part, I hate going to the games.  I hate all the stoppages for commercials, the lines for the bathroom, the ridiculously overpriced beers and the mediocre food.

Now tailgating can help out with a couple of those things above.  I can drag a grill down to the game and the beer in my cooler is no where near $8/cup. But the food is still limited as I can’t haul down all my grills and really cook for a crowd. But if I tailgate at home, I can jump to another channel during a commercial break on my 50 inch wide screen with surround sound in HD, there’s no line for the bathroom, the beer is as cheap as it can be without brewing it myself, and the food is as great as I can make it.  This year is the second straight year I’ve invited some buddies over for a day of tailgating at my house for the opening weekend of football. Oh, good God, was it a glorious day of grilling…

We didn’t grill before the game, head inside to watch the game and then go back out to cook some more. We brought the game to the grills by setting up a TV outside:

It wasn’t the 50 inch from the man cave in the basement, but it was all we needed for the eight of us to watch football while still enjoying the sweet pear smoke and the smell of the cooking meat.

Although, inside you don’t have to rotate the TV to another spot so that everyone can sit in the shade:

Here are a couple shots of the organized chaos that was this home tailgate, but it was so glorious, I have absolutely no complaints:

So what did we cook? I will preface the answer with what you read here may make your cardiologist cry.

I started off by doing a taste test between a brined steak and an unbrined steak.  Everyone got a couple bites of these two beauties:

Here are three of the tasters, from the left, Arthur, Roy and Dave:

I will give the results of that test in another post, so check back soon. The write up is done as I do this post, but the pictures have not been edited.

Now I can’t give everyone a couple bites of steak and then serve them burgers, so I had these NY Strips ready for the second course:

Grilling steaks for eight, having them cooked to the proper doneness and all ready to eat at the same time can be a little difficult.  So much so that I wrote up another post on exactly how to pull it off.  Click here to see how to cook steaks for eight.

Some Romaine went on the grill while the steaks rested:

You can find the full write up on how to grill lettuce by clicking here.

Now that we have the roughage out of the way, let’s get back to the meat.  Arthur Aguirre, proud founder of MajorLeagueGrilling.com, and frequent contributor here, brought his amazing grill skills as well as a bacon wrapped meatloaf and blueberry muffin stuffed fatty both ready for the grill:

The fatty sliced:

The meatloaf is about ready for the cutting board:

On the cutting board and slathered in sauce:

Arthur carving that work of art:

But we didn’t stop there.  We had to have some ribs which are my apple pumpkin ribs:

Time for me to slice those bones:

Time for a taste test.  Don’t you love mid chew pictures:

We weren’t done yet.  I know, I know, my arteries are screaming right now as I write this up.

I had a new recipe to try, Pumpkin Ale Brined Pork Tenderloin with my Pumpkin Rub from the rib recipe above.  Check back for the recipe on that one:

We reveled in football, imbibed in adult beverages and most of all, ate like kings:

But all good things must come to an end, and so did maybe the most glorious grilling day of my life as we sampled ribs and some of us packed up to go:

I want to thank Scott, Brian, Roy, Erik, Shane, Dave, and most of all Arthur and his contributions, for coming over and enjoying that first Sunday of pro football and grilling.  It was an insanely over the top grilling event.  Can’t wait for next year. It will take at least that long for my arteries to soften!?!?

If you have any questions about this method, feel free to shoot me an email or leave it below and I will get back to you as soon as I can.

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I posted some pictures on the facebook page of all the grillin we did that day.  You can find the album here.