Tailgate at Home: Your Saturday Bowl Fest Open Thread

Two Auburn food related things came out in about 30 minutes worth of time last night. One was just how much food was being served at the opening night Outback Bowl banquet for Auburn and Wisconsin. Over a metric ton. Yep. SB Nation figured somewhere around 12 pounds of food per person (and this doesn't even account for Bloomin' Onions).

Auburn ate a lot, and the official site has a video.

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The second little bit infuriated some of our resident writers. At some point in time - the online article shows a date going back a few months to October and was about the Ole Miss / LSU game - the magazine Bon Appetit suggested an "at home tailgating" idea of "regional eats" and suggested tater tot casserole for Auburn.

This sparked many amongst #AuburnTwitter to ponder just where that information came from. I tried various google searches and came up with nothing. Even typing in "Auburn tailgating tater tot casserole" all I got were a few vague pins on Pinterest. Maybe I could have explored that a bit further, but I have no idea how to work Pinterest to see if there's a validity in that being a search string.

So, out of curiosity, I posed the question to the College and Magnolia Twitter followers. Granted, it's not the best metric, but I figured asking 7,200 people the question should produce a fairly representative sample of Auburn tailgaters.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Auburn folks, we have to know: How many of you have ever served tater tot casserole at your tailgates? <a href="https://twitter.com/bonappetit">@bonappetit</a> thinks a lot of you do</p>&mdash; College &amp; Magnolia (@CollegeAndMag) <a href="https://twitter.com/CollegeAndMag/status/548669732355080192">December 27, 2014</a></blockquote>

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I received 14 responses by the time I posted this. Now I know that's not the best return out of 7,200 people at a whopping .002%, but not a single person admitted to having ever served it. Most had never even heard of it.

This all reminds of the article from Connecticut a few years back for the "Backyard Family Tailgate" on how to "throw a Southern tailgater" that suggested such things as quesadillas. That article elicited such wonderful responses as "ROLL TIDE, WHAT'S A QUESADILLA" by SB Nation's own Jason Kirk. So, I have to respond to this Bon Appetite bit with

WAR EAGLE WHAT'S A TATER TOT CASSEROLE.

Let's face it, the only true "staple" of a southern tailgate is bourbon. The food is just there to provide us with something to allow us all to drink more.

That being said, this is the last Saturday filled with good college football, so what all are y'all doing to enjoy this day? Feel free to discuss all the day's bowl games and news below.