My First Tailgate! @ Fresno State

 Saturday, 9/17/11: Fresno State vs. North Dakota

I'm well aware that this being my first tailgate and first Fresno State football game is shocking, but I finally did it, and it was fun. Saw lots of Blake's friends and relatives, and then Michelle F and her friend, Derek, stopped by. Oh--and the food was awesome! Here's Blake's mom's yummy seven layer dip, which my mom has made before too!:

  

My orzo salad, which was a spin-off of this orzo salad. Ingredients = cherry tomatoes, basil, sundried tomatoes, bacon bits, fresh mozzarella, red onions, salt, pepper, red wine vinegar, & olive oil. I used to make it with just tomatoes, mozarrella, & basil as the main ingredients like I did here, but then I got bored and branched out to this, which I think tasted pretty good. I don't have a recipe because I just kept adding, mixing, and tasting.

 

 My potato salad (used my mom's recipe that she keeps in her head). Boil potatoes, chop them into cubes and soak them overnight or at least for a few hours in Italian dressing, mix in diced pickles (just a little), black olives, four hard boiled eggs (and leave two for the top if you want), onions, mayonaise, salt, and pepper. Sprinkle paprika on top of the decorative eggs and put some parsley on top just for garnish (optional). Once again, I don't have a recipe, but it all just depends on how much you want to make. For this we used like eight medium-to-big potatoes.

 Aaand to make this a little Japanesey/Hawaiiany, my mom made some spam musubi for another event and gave two containers to us for the tailgate. All you do is form the rice using the proper equipment, fry some spam, cut it up, and dunk it in some teriyaki sauce. Then you wrap it all with nori (dried seaweed). One of my favorite things to eat.

I also brought homemade kettle corn (I posted about this HERE and got the recipe from Joy the Baker). I can't tell you how many times I've made kettle corn. SO easy and awesomely delicious. I can't find Joy's plain kettle corn post, but here is the maple bacon kettle corn one, which I want to try!

Fun!! The actual tailgate:

 Timeout, the Fresno State bulldog mascot: