The playbook for a perfect tailgate

The season is upon us.

Football season, sure, but what really matters is tailgating season.  Because any garden-variety lunatic can slather himself in body paint and accessorize with foam rubber.  It takes a special variety of lunatic to haul a truck's worth of cooking paraphernalia to his favorite team's parking lot, then ignore the team so you can focus on cooking the perfect slab of meat.

Backyard food obsessions are one thing; asphalt food obsessions deserve their own special chapter of the DSM-IV.

This fall brings not one but two new cookbooks devoted to the tailgater's art. David Joachim's "The Tailgater's Cookbook" (Broadway Books, $14.95) scrimmages against Bob Sloan's "The Tailgating Cookbook" (Chronicle Books, $15.95). An extra point to the reader who can remember which is which.

They've got an ample audience. The American Tailgaters Association estimates 27 million fans tailgate annually. The recipes in both books signal that tailgating culture has grown far beyond brats and beer. You're just as likely to find Jamaican-style leg of lamb or maple-rosemary planked salmon, though you certainly can't go wrong by sticking with the classics.

Even so, it's crucial not to go overboard. Prepare much of your food in advance and treat your afternoon in E Lot as you would a camping trip: The more you plan beforehand, the more fun you can have in the wild.

"You don't want to be slaving over the food while everyone else is enjoying themselves," says Joachim, a Pennsylvania-based author who previously penned "A Man, a Can, a Plan" and is partial to Penn State's 80,000-strong tailgating bonanzas.

Both books feature recipes that separate at-home prep from those last steps you perform on site. Final touches range from lifting the lid off Tupperware to hours of low-heat barbecuing.

Some key considerations:

(1) Choose one masterpiece for the grill.  No rulebooks say you have to grill at a tailgate, but it's certainly what separates the casual grazer from the true have-charcoal-will-travel gourmet. True grill skill is the source of tailgate bragging rights. And it's not for nothing that Weber's most recent Tailgating Study found 96 percent of tailgaters say grilling is at least occasionally part of their plans. Forty-six percent bring more than one grill to a tailgate.

That said, resist the temptation to plan your entire menu around the open flame.  A single, perfect dish will make more of an impression with your guests than a whole host of second-string entrees — and will hopefully leave fellow fans drooling with envy.  "I think you should make your fellow tailgaters as envious as possible, and hopefully you have some bulky guys to have the velvet rope in front of your area," says Sloan, a New York-based teacher and writer.

(2) Don't forget the sides. One perfect main course may cement your reputation as a pre-game perfectionist, but a proper tailgate meal requires snacks, salads and dessert.

These are the easy parts; most can be prepared up to a week in advance and served up in a flash.  Salads rarely need more than some dressing poured over, while most desserts can be passed around on a paper plate.

If you're more ambitious, you can even prepare soups and stews at home and reheat them right before the game. Joachim proposes items like venison stew, while Sloan suggests burgoo, that Kentucky tradition made nowadays with lamb and chicken. (Squirrel's hard to find at the meat counter.)

(3) Or the drinks. Beer is the obvious choice, almost canonical, but by no means the only one. Decent wine is now available in 187 ml single-serve bottles and sealed boxes, which is important because it's essential to leave breakable glass at home and bring disposable plastic containers and cups. (Many venues prohibit glass containers.)

Soda or hot cider are good choices too, and it's essential to bring water — for cooking and to keep your guests well-hydrated, especially once the beer starts flowing. On that topic...