We had a big superbowl party on Sunday–it had a large number of people and a large quantity of food. 🙂
Tim had an idea to make a food stadium. He found the idea online somewhere and decided it would be fun. So he did it all from scratch and has been working on it for almost a month, planning and putting the different pieces together. I admit I was a bit skeptical about the whole thing and I told him if he wanted to do it fine, but that I didn’t really want to help. Well… that didn’t last for long. We ended up working on little projects here and there together and, even though I didn’t want to admit it at first, I really did have a good time helping him.
In order to fill this massive unit with food, Tim came up with a “seating chart” of different foods that could go in the sections and each family signed up for what they wanted to bring. That really helped to relieve the stress (and cost!) of trying to fill it all. Plus it really helped to build a sense of unity in everyone helping to make it complete.
And, in the end, it turned out awesome!
Want to see pictures? OK! Here’s the finished stadium just before we dug in!
If you’re curious there are 33 items to eat on the table. 33! But this doesn’t even count a variety of items that wouldn’t even fit… I think there were 5 or 6 more things on the counter beside the table. Did I mention it was a lot of food? But then again there were 30 people here, so we needed a lot of food… 😉
Now for a barrage of in-process and completed pictures:
Thanks for your side of the story and for catching the enthusiasm/excitement for Tim’s vision! It looks and sounds like all involved had a great time.What was the base that the 3field pans were placed on, Styrofoam? Looks like clean up was easy.
That is truly amazing! Kudos to all of you. I am wondering what the playing field is. It looks like avocado dip. I love the dipped strawberry “footballs!” Also wondering what the boxes are lined with. Is that contact paper?
Everything looks really yummy. Thanks for sharing the pictures.
In the first “in progress” picture you can see the tin pans sitting next to each other so the long sides were touching. I felt that this was too big and decided to just use two pans and set them together so the short sides were touching. For inside the tin pans, I took 2 cutting boards and used my table saw to cut them down to size and then used a jig saw to round the corners so they fit perfectly into the two tins pans. Underneath the whole thing, I took a leftover piece of plywood and cut it down to the size of the two tin pans and glued the tin pans to the plywood. This helped hold everything together and support the base when it had to be picked up. I also took a 1×4 and sliced it in half to glue along the sides to give be a sturdy place to pick it up. Finally, I wrapped tinfoil around the cut tin pans to cover up the joints and give it a finished look before placing the cut cutting boards in place.
Yes, we used contact paper inside the seats to help protect the insides, but we also used either tinfoil (for chips) or tin meatloaf pans (for stuff that was messier.)
That is hilarious. And awesome! Well done!
A work of engineering genius!
Wow! That is so inventive and awesome! 🙂 I love the attention to detail. It looks like something that should appear in a magazine.