At 1:50 on Saturday, Sept. 5, we pulled the Pilot into a tailgate lot in Murfreesboro with two coolers, a folding table, a borrowed tabletop grill and four hours to fill before a 6 p.m. kickoff. Jack, three days into being nine, asked if this was going to be the whole day. It was.
I went to MTSU from 2005 to 2009 and I'm still a Blue Raiders fan, mostly out of loyalty, but I hadn't been to a tailgate in years. This fall the kids are finally old enough to sit through a night game without anybody being carried to the car. Ryan was in charge of the grill. I was in charge of what went into the coolers, which, it turns out, is the real job.
The grill is a little tabletop propane model that Deb and Marcus take camping, borrowed in exchange for a pan of Nora's blondies. It runs on one-pound propane cylinders and fits about five burgers at a time. Ryan was unbothered: "A small grill just means you cook in shifts."
The menu
- 10 burgers, 5 ounces each, from 80/20 ground chuck, with cheddar and buns
- 8 hot dogs, because Jack
- A big container of pimento cheese and two sleeves of Ritz
- Vinegar slaw with no mayonnaise, so it holds up better in the heat
- Sliced tomatoes, onions and pickles in a divided container
- A whole watermelon, cubed at home
- Nora's blondies, a 9-by-13 pan cut into 24 squares with blue icing
- A gallon of sweet tea and a case of water
What we did at home
Friday night, I formed the patties, stacked them between squares of parchment and packed them flat in a container, so nobody had to handle raw beef in a parking lot. Salt and pepper went in a little jar for the grill. I sliced the tomatoes and onions, made the slaw and the pimento cheese and cubed the watermelon, while Nora baked and iced the blondies and guarded them from her brother. Ryan packed the grill, two propane cylinders, a spatula, tongs, foil, paper towels, paper plates and a trash bag. The instant-read thermometer rode in his shirt pocket, where it always does at a cookout.
Two coolers is the whole system. The drink cooler gets opened every five minutes, and every time it opens, warm air rushes in and the ice melts faster. The food cooler held the raw meat on the bottom, sealed, with four frozen half-gallon jugs of water and a block of ice, and it stayed shut except when Ryan needed the next round. A cheap fridge thermometer inside it read 37°F when we parked and 39°F when we left.
Burgers went on in rounds of five. Ground beef has to reach 160°F, and on a small grill with a lid that doesn't seal, the $25 thermometer earned its keep again. Hot dogs filled in the gaps. It was 91°F at three o'clock, so anything cooked and anything with mayonnaise got one hour out, not two, before it went back in the cold cooler or into the trash.
What came back
We packed for a family reunion and fed four people. Here's the honest list of what rode home: three raw patties that never left the cold cooler, which we grilled for Sunday lunch; two cooked burgers that went into the cold cooler within the hour; two hot dogs still in the package; half the watermelon; most of the slaw, which nobody touched once there were burgers; and four blondies, which is a small miracle. The pimento cheese came back half full, but it had sat out past an hour in the heat, so it went in a trash can in the parking lot. I didn't love doing it, and I'd do it again.
The food for the day cost about $70, and close to $15 of it came home in the cooler. Next time I'll pack six burgers instead of ten and skip the slaw entirely.
We stayed through the third quarter, which for a nine-year-old at a night game counts as the whole thing. Jack was asleep before we reached I-840, still holding a blondie.
