X-treme Cuisine

After some foofy cookbooks last week, we thought we offer up the flip side today with Robert Earl's X-treme Cuisine. Gone are the tailgating and wedding brunches...here we have hang gliding, skateboarding and surfing. The tenor of this book is 14-year-old-boy. There is a fair amount of bodily function info, enough to leave an 8th-grade football team more obnoxious than ever. This is not the kind of extreme cuisine that involves eating warthog or live grubs, this is x-treme in that X-Games way. The X's are the tip off.

To Robert Earls' credit, he does try valiantly to introduce elements of fine dining into his tome. He has lovely diagrams for setting a table and offers a Q & A as to why there are two different forks. (One for meat and one for vegetables was a plausible answer.)

He shows our x-treme sports junkie a couple of napkin folds.

And if you need to throw a formal soiree at a surfing beach and find you have nothing to hold the place cards, grab all the Sex Wax you can find. Who knew Mr. Zog and his Sex Wax could be so handy!

Now before I give you a recipe, let me take this moment to make a brief observation... the recipe's these x-treme athletes offer up are strikingly similar to those offered up by the Junior League set we visited last week. I have no great anthropological answer for this, but if you are in a grocery store and find Tony Hawk and Miss Manners heading for the Velveeta, take cover.


Her is a tasty little number from renegade snowboarder Dave Seoane. Amazingly, it does not call for cheese, canned soup or potato chips!

Cinema Zucchini

Ingredients

10 strips of your favorite bacon
1 can of stewed tomatoes
3 baby-arm-size zucchini
1/2 onion, sliced
A handful of mushrooms

What to do

First fry up bacon until golden brown.
Then add the stewed tomatoes, zucchini, sliced onion, and mushrooms.
Feel free to add your favorite spices such as garlic, oregano, and cilantro.
After the zucchini is fully cooked, simmer on low for 15 minutes.
Goes great with your favorite red meat.

If you have a wayward 15-year-old and need a gift, this just might the ticket.