Tailgating is a great opportunity to get to hang out with your friends and kiddos while cheering your college sports team on to victory! Get the party started with fun and festively decorated collegiate serve ware from Magnolia Lane. The chip and dip or divided vegetable trays make for excellent center pieces. Other pieces available are bowls, trays and glassware. Here is a super easy fruit dip that would be great to take to your next tailgate.

1 8-ounce package cream cheese, softened

1 jar of marshmallow creme

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Step 1 - Soften cream cheese by leaving it out on the kitchen counter or by microwaving it on low power for 30 seconds

Step 1 - Place cream cheese in a bowl and beat with an electric mixer until smooth

Step 3 - Add marshmallow creme and vanilla and beat until fluffy

Step 4 - Serve with an assortment of fresh fruit.

Looking for more tailgating ideas? Join Big Cedar Lodge's Chef Andy for a Tailgating Workshop and learn the tricks of the trade! It will be a fun interactive day full of recipes, ideas and of course tastings! Click here for more information on the tailgating workshop.

I have an addiction to pork and everything about it.

Lots of people think that a pig is a dirty animal. In fact, pigs cool themselves using water or mud during hot weather. They also use mud as a form of sunscreen to protect their skin from sunburn. Mud also provides protection against flies and parasites. A pig will live in any condition and it’s up to the farmer what those conditions are. Pigs are foraging animals, primarily eating leaves, grasses, roots, fruits and flowers. But, they will eat anything if it is put in front of them.

In the restaurant, we use a brand of pork called Berkshire Pork. Berkshire pigs are said to be "Britain's oldest pig breed," originally bred in the Faringdon and Wantage regions of the English county of Berkshire (now Oxfordshire).  These pigs are fed a full vegetarian diet and are let loose in the pasture to roam.

You can eat pork on just about anything. There is a donut shop in LA that has a bacon and maple donut! I‘ve even created chocolate covered bacon. Bacon is one of the most universal food items sold today for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, on a sandwich, or on a baked potato.My addiction to pork started when I was very young. Growing up in England, I ate a lot of pork. One of the first memories is the Full English Breakfast. This is a pork lovers dream:

2 pieces of bacon
2 big pork sausages
Black pudding (a fried tube of meat made out of pork fat and pork blood)
Fried mushroom
Grilled tomato
Baked beans
2 pieces of toast with about an inch of butter

Another favorite is sausage rolls, a savory pork sausage wrapped in flaky pastry and baked till golden brown. I used to get these from the local bakery on a Saturday or Sunday morning. And finally, Pork Pies the old English classic. You take ground pork and spices wrapped in warm water pie dough and bake until golden brown. Then in a little hole in the top you pour in reduced pork stock to make a seal all around the meat and between the pastry so it sets and forms a jelly. These are best eaten cold, UNBELIEVABLE! 

To round up I love Pork so much, I have a tattoo of a pig on my right bicep. From the head to the tail you can eat the whole thing.

Tomatoes, Ozark or Arkansas, in my opinion are some of the best in the country. They are great because of the rich soil they grow in and the good amount of sun they receive over the summer. The tomato is a sun loving fruit. These tomatoes are so good most people can eat them like an apple with a little bit of salt. One of my favorite sandwiches in the summer is a sliced tomato on wheat bread with a little mayonnaise and salt and pepper, or a BLT with avocado on toasted wheat bread.

The best place to buy these tomatoes will be your local farmers market. Most of the tomatoes are grown by local farmers in a field not in a hot house, which is your best option.

Look for tomatoes that are a little gnarly and not uniformed. Also, when you squeeze them they need to have a little give, this means they are ripe and ready to eat. If you are not going to eat them right away you can buy them a little firmer and store them on your window sill. NEVER store tomatoes in the refrigerator. The perfect place to store them is on your window sill until they are ready to eat.

So if you have not eaten a good tomato in years and you live in the Ozarks get out to your local farmers market and enjoy all there is to offer.

Hamburger History

The modern day hamburger is one of America’s best known and most loved food. The burger first came to the States in the late eighteenth century; the largest ports in Europe were in Germany. Sailors, who had visited the ports of Hamburg, Germany and New York, brought this food and term "Hamburg Steak" into popular usage. To attract German sailors, eating stands along the New York City harbor offered "steak cooked in the Hamburg style." In 1802, the Oxford English Dictionary defined Hamburg steak as salt beef. It had little resemblance to the hamburger we know today. It was a hard slab of salted minced beef, often slightly smoked, mixed with onions and breadcrumbs. The emphasis was more on durability than taste. them was Hamburg Steak. The Germans simply flavored shredded low-grade beef with regional spices, and both cooked and raw, it became a standard meal among the poorer classes. In the seaport town of Hamburg, it acquired the name Hamburg steak.

Fletcher Davis is believed to have sold hamburgers at his café at 115 Tyler Street in Athens, Texas in the late 1880s, and then brought them to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

My Kind of Burger

This is probably one of mine and America’s favorite foods. You cannot beat a well cooked, well seasoned medium rare cheese burger.

When I am buying ground meat in the restaurant or at home I buy 75/25, or 80/20. If you don’t know what this means it’s the proportion of fat to meat. As everyone knows fat is flavor. When portioning and cooking the burger you want a nice size thick burger, 6oz to 8oz is a good size. Portion them up and make them into balls, once you get to that point push down on them to form a burger. The way you cook and season the burger is important as well. I don’t put any seasonings in the ground meat, I think it takes away from the flavor of the meat. All I do is season the outside with a lot of kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper.

There are two ways I cook a burger, either in a really hot cast iron skillet or a very hot grill. The reason I say very hot is because you want to put a good sear on the outside. The heat also gives the burger a really good texture. For medium rare you want to cook it for about 3-4 minutes on each side depending on the thickness.

Everything you put on the burger is important, from the bun to the cheese. We use aged cheddar on our burgers at the restaurant. Its sharpness helps to cut through some of the fat of the burger. Our Devil’s Pool Burger is topped off with iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, and red onion on a sesame seed bun.

We also have two more burgers name after our favorite Cow Boy, Clay Self and our favorite bar tender Adam. The Clay Self is made up of a Grilled burger, basted with barbeque sauce, topped with coleslaw, smoked bacon and a breaded onion ring with a sesame seed bun. The Hey Adam is a black and blue, spicy grilled burger, topped with Maytag blue cheese and a thick cut piece of white onion on a sesame seed bun.