[PULSING MUSIC] VO: This program is brought to you by the members of WCNY - thank you!

VO: The William G Pomeroy Foundation helps people celebrate their communitys history by providing grants for historic markers and plaques nationwide.

Information about Pomeroy Foundation grants and partnership opportunities is available at WGPFoundation.org Bear Creek: gourmet burgers, craft beers, custom twists on classics and desserts.

More on Facebook and Instagram at BearCreekRestaurantInc Feed the bear!

[BEAR ROARING] MATT: Spatchcock Funk in the house... Our house, and your house too.

You know where the party's at?

Wherever you're at.

We're gonna teach you how to throw the best parties, the best dinners, the best get-togethers.

All you need are the people that you love, and we'll take care of the rest.

Spatchcock Funk.

Dope food, strong drinks, great stories.

[instrumental hip-hop music] MATT: Warm up the amplifiers and get your head right, because things are about to get loud.

At the Funk, we believe in the power of live music.

We love arts, culture, and nothing connects us more than a killer concert.

Whether you're in a sawdust-on-the-floor joint or screaming your lungs out with 20,000 fans, that rattle and hum gets our hearts running.

From country swang to a searing guitar solo, or someone cutting up the 1s and 2s like a samurai, hearing that feedback on the sonic highway is how we celebrate life, baby.

Sometimes the opening act can be the best part of the show, but we're not talking about the undercard; we're talking about the tailgate.

This is how you really warm up the crowd.

Time to crank the dial all the way to 11 and then break the knob off, because this is 808s and License Plates.

[instrumental hip-hop music] MATT: Time to make this party hype!

You want to get a tailgate party going, you got to have a killer cocktail.

And this is Hell on Heels.

It's a Paloma basically and it's dedicated to all those awesome women going to country music concerts.

You hear those boots clicking through the parking lot, them sundresses.

"Girl, you're looking good!"

So we're going to make a drink that feels good too, that gets you ready to party.

The Hell on Heels is a combination of different flavors that's refreshing but a little powerful enough to, you know, kickstart your heart.

So let's get started.

We're going to batch this cocktail.

Whenever you can, if you need it, batch something so it's easier to distribute at a party.

This drink has 6 ounces of tequila, 1 ounce of fresh lime juice.

It has 2 ounces of fresh pineapple juice.

This creates a really good sweetness and balance to all that tart.

Then we have about a half ounce of some orange liqueur.

We're going to take that, and this is basically our liquor section.

So now, in a plastic cup that we're going to be serving at the party, we're going to go about halfsies with it.

Then we're going to top it with some grapefruit soda.

Now to garnish it and make people - you know, a concert should have something extra.

What we did is we took some gummy bears, which we soaked overnight in more tequila.

So we're going to drop two of those beauties in here for some fun color.

Then we're going to throw one lime wedge in it and then one on the side.

You know we've got to taste it and see how we're doing so... Ah, whoomp, there it is - thought you knew.

[instrumental hip-hop music] MATT: One of the main courses for our tailgate is going to be Bad Bunny Empanadas, y'all.

Now, empanadas have been on a world tour.

They were born in Spain, but they're in South America, Central America, Europe, everywhere, man.

They are everything.

And we've named this after the great Bad Bunny because he takes different styles, man.

One day, these dudes were in a tank top and shorts, the next day, a 7-piece suit.

I didn't even know they made those, but that dude can rock it.

So this is the type of thing that comes together and like him, it gets funky on the mic and funky in the fryer.

Let's get our dry ingredients in there first because we're going to make things wet like we like to.

But first, the dry ingredients.

2 1/4 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of good old salt, 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder.

And then 2 teaspoons of granulated garlic.

Now we're going to mix all that evenly.

Now comes the ooey gooey stuff.

We're going to put in 1/2 cup of duck fat and a butter mixture we made, but you can use lard, shortening, but the duck fat and butter really makes it a really, really great, great connection there.

Keep mixing it until it looks like a little sandy, like you got wet sand in there.

We're going to add 1/3 cup of ice water.

It's got to be cold.

And then 2 teaspoons of white distilled vinegar.

And now you can use 2 forks.

You're going to keep mixing this stuff together and get it into your nice fluffy dough.

You're going to take the dough and roll them into a golf ball-sized ball around 2 ounces.

We're going to throw them into a storage bag, food storage bag, and let them sit for an hour.

The dough, a little sleepy, taking a nap.

Meanwhile, we are going to bring out the remix.

DJ Khaled is going to be really pumped about this because we are mixing things up.

Not in the 1s and 2s, but on the stove top and a mixing bowl.

So first, we're going to heat up some butter in a pan and throw in 4 diced shallots.

[instrumental hip-hop music] The meat, baby, let's get to it.

This is mild chorizo.

So we took it out of the casing - you can get it ground, or chopped up chorizo, any way you want to.

We're going to mix this into our translucent shallots.

Get that flavor going, it's going to start smelling real good.

The next ingredient to make this thing wet and chewy and juicy in all the best ways, because we like things to be juicy is - just like Biggie and Nicki Minaj do - we're going to take about a cup of sofrito.

Sofrito you can get in the grocery store.

It's basically cooked down tomatoes, cilantro, onion, garlic.

It's fantastic.

It's almost like a tomato sauce with like the cilantro-y spice to it.

We're going to add this and about half a teaspoon of some garlic salt.

[instrumental hip-hop music] We've got our chorizo, sofrito, shallots.

Put them in a nice mixing bowl.

Then we've got 8 ounces of shredded manchego cheese.

You can use white cheddar if you can't find manchego, but the manchego adds a really nice, crispy addition to the flavor profile.

So it just blends well with the chorizo, the mild chorizo.

You can use spicy chorizo too.

And this gives us a really nice, fat-salt, just nice mix, with the sweetness of the shallots.

This is going to be the stuffing for these beautiful empanadas.

You want to make something hot, you've got to top it with something, y'all.

So we're making a cherry lime sour cream that just sings, like someone at a concert, you in your car getting ready to go to the concert.

So we have 8 ounces of sour cream, we're going to put into a food processor.

We've got 10 ounces of Maraschino cherries with the juice.

Then finally, we've got the juice of one lime.

The acid brings out all the sweetness and creaminess.

[food processor whirring] Now, we've got this beautiful creamy sauce that we'll drizzle or dip depending on what you want.

If you want it thicker, add more sour cream.

You see us rolling, but you ain't hating.

We are going to roll this out now.

We've got our golf ball sized piece of dough.

Get it on your cutting board or your counter, and you're going to flatten it with the palm of your hand and then pick it up, massage it and spread it out.

You want it to be about that big.

The dough is good and sturdy, so it's going to be able to take a beating.

You know what I mean?

And sometimes you've got to be a little rough as long as people want it that way.

Like Bell Biv DeVoe, you want to smack it up, flip it and rub it down.

Oh no!

we need some chorizo stuffing.

So take around a tablespoon, a little bit less than that, and put that in the center of this doughy, beautiful pillow.

Then take one end, you're going to fold it over, press it with your fingers a little bit.

And to make sure it's sealed well, in an empanada, we're going to take a fork and use the tines of the fork, and we're going to press around the entire thing.

Now we're going to take this beauty with some of her friends and drop them in some hot oil that's going 350 and fry them till they're golden brown.

Oh, look at that.

We've got some sea salt on top - take everything outta the fryer and salt it.

And then some fresh cilantro with our cherry lime sauce.

Let me tell you something.

The duck fat in the dough certified banger.

[instrumental hip-hop music] Every good party's got to have some starch.

To us, it's like a bass player in a band.

It just brings things together, absorbs alcohol, allows you to really get the party going.

So these are cupcakes by the ocean.

Now, they're actually a savory cupcake because it makes us think about - you ever go to a show, like we saw Zac Brown come out and cover Metallica, when your favorite band does something different.

So someone thinks they're getting a cupcake and it's got a savory kind of spin on it, and this really does it.

One of our favorite recipes for a long time.

Our friend Jess actually taught us part of it.

So what we're actually going to do first is we're going to saute one whole diced up peach and two diced up jalapenos.

So the jalapeno, right, it's not going to add too much heat as long as you do it right.

A jalapeno, if you de-seed it and then cut out all the ribs, you get more of the peppery flavor and not as much heat.

So it's a good trick to know.

So let's throw these in the pan.

[instrumental hip-hop music] So for the batter for our cornbread, we want to really, really fire this thing up and make it good.

So for this old school recipe, we're using about two cups of cornmeal, one cup of flour, a half cup of white sugar - give it sweetness a little bit.

One teaspoon of salt, three teaspoons baking powder.

Get that evenly mixed up - the dry part.

Then we can make things wet, the way a good concert can, you know what I mean?

Now we're going to put about a cup and a half of vegetable oil in here.

And if it seems like it's too oily when you're done, just throw in some more cornmeal, that'll balance it out.

Also gonna put in one cup of whole milk.

And then one egg.

So we're going to evenly mix this up until it gets nice and lumpy in the batter.

You'll have a little bit of oil on top, don't worry about that.

Once it starts coming together and getting a little lumpy, we're going to add in our peach, butter, and jalapeno mix.

And keep stirring.

Ooh, batter up.

This batter looks good.

We got millions of peaches, peaches for me all mixed up in here.

I'm going to slide that over.

And we've got our oven preheated to 400 degrees.

Meanwhile, we've got a sprayed muffin tin, cupcake tin.

And we're going to drop in some of our batter until it fills up about three quarters of the cup.

[instrumental hip-hop music] Cupcakes by the ocean need a killer frosting, and that's what we're doing right now.

This is a cream cheese frosting.

It's savory, a little spicy the way we like to get down.

Sweet and spicy and savory, you know what I mean?

So we've got eight ounces of room temperature cream cheese that we're going to just stuff into a food processor, as messy as possible, as you can tell.

Two tablespoons of chopped fresh chives.

Two tablespoons of honey.

Finally, about a tablespoon of hot sauce, and we're going to use green jalapeno hot sauce.

So it's not super spicy, but the acid and the heat in it's gonna bring out some cool flavors into this beautiful frosting.

So now we've got it all mixed up, let's mix things up.

[food processor whirring] Okay, we're all mixed up, don't know what to do, but I do.

I'm going to take a look at this frosting - it's perfect.

It's got a nice little green tint to it, I can see all the chives ready to roll.

Smells like a party, y'all.

So, when these things come out of the oven, we're going to top things up.

We've got our little cupcakes out of the oven, and such a cute little cupcake, too.

I kind of want to take it home.

We're going to take this cupcake.

We're going to take that awesome frosting we got with the back of a spoon, and we're going to just ladle it on top there.

We're going to top it with some crushed up fried onion rings, the type you see in the gas station in a bag, they're a lot of fun.

Put those on there.

It gives it a little crunch, a nice little flavor.

You can use frizzled onions, fried onions, whatever, but we think this is kind of cool and great for a parking lot.

Then some more fresh chives.

And now, cupcake by the ocean.

[instrumental hip-hop music] MATT: We're going to keep the salty language to a minimum, but we're going to get really salty in here.

But first, we're with a sweet guy, one of our good friends David who makes the best salt in the world.

And David, you make this from groundwater?

DAVID: Yeah, we're standing on what used to be an ocean.

And we pump water from about 300 feet below the surface into these tables, and then we heat it.

And then after a couple days, we end up with this beautiful flaky white stuff here called salt.

MATT: Yes!

DAVID: And then what we do with this is we'll take this after it drains and we dry it, and then - what are you using it for?

MATT: So we're going to make some salty, sweet cookies, brown butter toffee cookies.

DAVID: Oh, awesome.

So you probably are going to want some nice flake salt.

We do infused salts with different flavors, but I don't think you're - MATT: The black garlic salt you make might be one of the greatest inventions in the history of man.

DAVID: That's beautiful, thank you, I love that.

But what you're looking at for toffee cookies is, I think, nice flake salt.

So I'll take this, we'll dry it, and then we'll sift it to the nice finishing size.

And you can sprinkle that on top of those wonderful cookies.

MATT: Love it.

Let's get sifting and not be shifty.

[instrumental hip-hop music] MATT: If you want a concert to be sweet, you've got to bring a sweet treat.

So today we're making one of our favorite things in the world.

These are Monkey Wrench Cookies, named after the great Dave Grohl song, Monkey Wrench - Foo Fighters.

But actually our friend Abbe is the one who gave us this recipe.

The first time she made it for us, we were partying, of course.

And she's like, "Hey, take a bite of this cookie."

And I promptly ate six cookies - every time I'm like, "Give me another bite, I'm not sure, I'm not sure."

So they are absolutely slamming.

We're taking some beautiful brown butter, chocolate chips, toffee, one of my favorite things, and whisking them up into this cookie that you can just float into the sky on, right?

Someone's shredding the atmosphere on a guitar.

This is how that works.

This cookie does the same thing.

You're going to scream your lungs out when you eat this cookie.

That is where we're going to go.

So the first thing we're going to start with is we're going to brown the butter.

We're taking two sticks of unsalted butter, and we're going to brown it in a pan, constantly twirling it until we start to see brown bits form, then we take it off.

[instrumental hip-hop music] Yeah.

Now, brown butter is going to have a nutty aroma to it, which makes a really cool flavor profile and like a toasted-ness.

So we're going to scrape all the brown bits off of the pan and get it right in there.

So we're going to put that right into our mixer bowl for our stand mixer.

Okay, we're going to mix our sugars in now.

We have one cup tightly packed brown sugar, dark brown sugar.

That's going to go in.

Then a half a cup of granulated white sugar.

So we're going to mix all that in, stir it up a little bit, and then put it on our mixer.

While that brown butter sugar mixture is cooling a little bit, we're going to make our dry ingredients.

So we have 2 3/4 cups of all-purpose flour.

We have one teaspoon of cinnamon, one teaspoon of espresso powder, instant espresso coffee type, one teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon of baking soda, and half a teaspoon of baking powder.

Then evenly mix it together.

So it looks like a little browner in color with some flecks of black from the espresso powder.

Yo, so once this sugar buttery mixture is cool, I mean it's cool no matter what, but it's temperature cool, we're going to add in two eggs plus one additional yolk.

And then two teaspoons of pure vanilla extract.

We're going to raise up and we're going to slowly whisk it.

So on our setting we're going to go one and slowly whisk the eggs and the vanilla in to the mixture.

We've got our butter, sugar, egg, vanilla mixture cooled off.

It's been mixed and whisked evenly.

So now we're going to switch to the paddle attachment on our mixer and we're going to slowly fold in the dry ingredients and it's going to beat the dough together on level one.

[mixer whirring] Now comes the special part, you know what I mean, like the guitar solo in the song "Monkey Wrench."

We're going to put in one cup of toffee bits and we're going to put in one cup of chocolate chips and then stir it up.

[mixer whirring] Now we've got our beautiful dough.

We're going to get all this out.

It's going to be heavy and sticky.

Put it on a floured surface and we're going to roll it into a log that's about two inches around.

[instrumental hip-hop music] We're going to get it rolled out into that log and then we're going to let it sit in the fridge for at least 24 hours.

If you need to break into two logs, that's fine because you're going to cut these into discs too.

So you can wrap it in Saran wrap or what we do is take them and cut them into these little discs and in a plastic bag we can stick in the refrigerator, we're going to put those discs in there and again let them sit overnight.

Our dough has been overnight in the fridge.

Then we're going to let it sit out for one hour - get it to room temperature.

Spray a cookie sheet.

Lay them out about three in a row so they can spread out a little bit.

Then we're going to heat an oven to 350 degrees.

Slide them in for 12 to maybe 14 minutes.

Keep an eye on them.

They're already browned butter in here so they're going to look like they're cooked or they're done, they're not burnt but keep an eye on them.

12, 14 minutes.

Let's go to the oven.

Yes, look at these beauties.

We're going to let them sit and cool for two minutes.

But while they're cooling, we're going to take some good flaky sea salt from our boy Dave.

David gave it to us, and we're going to use it right.

The salt brings out all of the sweet goodiness and the fattiness of the brown butter, making these cookies something that just can't be beat.

Oh yeah, warm, delicious.

I don't know if they smell better or taste better, but they are fantastic, so throw a monkey wrench in that.

[rap vocals] MATT: Every time we're tailgating, we always have a pretty ripping adventure.

But I got to tell you, one time when I was a young'un, I was just like 21, I went to this big music festival with my crew.

We're sitting there, not a lot of cool action going on.

And all of a sudden this crew of ladies walk by and they seem like they're attractive and a little bit older than us, but they're not having fun.

And I ask one of them, "Hey, do you have a light?"

She turns and she's like, "Yeah, kid."

And lifts up her skirt and she has a garter belt that has two cigarettes, a lighter and a flask.

So I'm like, "This person's interesting."

So she lights it up and we start talking and all of a sudden now I'm like, "Oh my God, this is the coolest person ever, I'm not in a position to be talking to her because I'm not cool."

And she took us under her wing like a mother hen, we're walking around the entire tailgate in the concert and she's like, I'm talking to a girl, and she's like, "You don't wanna talk to her."

MATT: Another girl, she's like, "Talk to her," and gave us all the tips, like how to actually get to the bathroom, taught us how to open the door and use that as a bathroom in the parking lot if people are so inclined.

You didn't know how to open the door and use the bathroom?

MATT: I mean, at the time, I would actually just like, you know, I do one of these.

I mean, the table here and just like unzip you talking like, "Yo, so what's going on?"

You know?

Roll it down a little bit.

You ever have any good adventures at the tailgate?

ALEX: Not like that, but I have gotten injured.

APRIL: All the time.

ALEX: I was young.

It was one of my first tailgates.

I was playing football, nice and friendly game of football.

Caught the ball.

Amazing catch, ran straight into a car.

Everybody cheered, booed, laughed, and I was like -- MATT: Faceprint in the glass.

ALEX: "Guys, I don't think I'm going to go in the concert."

MATT: Oh, no!

ALEX: It was bad, but I made it in the concert.

I don't remember the rest.

MATT: Okay.

NAJEE: I feel like some of the best tailgates you shouldn't remember, right?

But one of them that I do remember, it was the dead of winter in upstate New York.

And a couple of buddies of mine - really, really dedicated.

We rented a U-Haul, and we shoved all of our booze in there, all of our music equipment, tables, games, food, and it was a really, really snowy day.

But we set up.

There's probably 10 of us out there just going way too hard.

And it was great.

Cars were going by, honking at us, like, "Yeah, go!"

ALEX: Why the U-Haul?

Just packed everybody in it?

NAJEE: We had so much - we had too much stuff.

We were overprepared.

MATT: That's a party right there.

APRIL: Over prepared.

ALEX: I bet he just packed a bunch of people in to get less, you know - NAJEE: Oh, some of us were on the back of the U-Haul.

Some of us were in the back, but 10 bucks to park, and a whole lifetime of memories is worth it.

MATT: Definitely worth it, absolutely.

MATT: Music just sounds better when you're listening to it with the right people.

You feel me?

So gather your crew, but you got that part.

Then you bring the party.

A banger of a song needs a melody, a hook, and some creativity.

And a great tailgate party?

The same mix.

Grit, blood, sweat, tears makes a ferocious opener.

It could be a killer riff, someone spitting fire bars, so you gotta come correct for your bandmates too.

And that's what we're all about here.

So load up that playlist and your cooler too.

Turn up the speakers and fire up the fryer, because we're going all in - one night only, a sold-out show.

The doors are about to open, so I gotta jet.

See you in the pit.

[UPBEAT HIP-HOP MUSIC WITH VOCALS] VO: The William G Pomeroy Foundation helps people celebrate their communitys history by providing grants for historic markers and plaques nationwide.

Information about Pomeroy Foundation grants and partnership opportunities is available at WGPFoundation.org Bear Creek: gourmet burgers, craft beers, custom twists on classics and desserts.

More on Facebook and Instagram at BearCreekRestaurantInc Feed the bear!

[BEAR ROARING]