Flipping for the "good" recipes

I always think of gymnasts as being very serious. I mean, they can flip and twist and jump on beams so narrow that I fall over just imagining trying to stand on one, and then they add extra flips and spins when they intentionally jump off the beams. That's got to take some serious discipline.

Recipes You'll Flip Over (Cedar Rapids Association of Gymnasts, 1983, but good enough that we'll overlook the post-'70s date) shows that gymnasts must have a sense of humor after all. The fundraising cookbook offers such delicacies as this:

I'm hoping that the Thunder Crag Mascot was an actual dog, as serving dry dog food and canned stew out of a frisbee to some poor schlub in a hot fuzzy costume just seems mean. (A Google search suggests that Thunder Crag is now mostly known as some kind of Pokémon thing, so no help there.)

If you would prefer to lunch like the coach, well, Coach Russ has an easy enough plan.

I hope the gymnasts don't ask for his dietary advice. I don't want to imagine the results of doing a series of backflips after a couple cheeseburgers and a large fry.

Maybe it would be better to ask Coach Tracy's advice for a good breakfast instead.

The fact that Tracy puts the "Good" in her Good Breakfast in scare quotes is probably all you really need to know. It's going to taste good, as would any breakfast including a couple scoops of ice cream, but it's probably not the healthiest gymnast fuel.

The book has some actual recipes in it, too, and they sometimes reveal pretty singular sensibilities. I might imagine that a gymnast's favorite snacks include things like hard boiled eggs, or celery, or hard boiled eggs impaled on a stalk of celery, or maybe, since so many gymnasts are only kids anyway and not necessarily as serious about it as I imagine, a big pile of Ritz crackers stuck together with Easy Cheese. (Okay, that was my childhood idea of a fancy snack.) But no, here's Beth's Favorite Snack.

I really can't imagine too many people saying their favorite snack is a cottage-cheese-based pastry with a powdered sugar glaze, but here we are. Gymnasts are weird.

These gymnasts are pretty into pastries, too. I'll leave you with their suggested use for cream puff dough. I'll admit, when my family made cream puffs when I was a kid, we were not very imaginative. They were filled with a rich vanilla pudding, and, if we felt extra-fancy, topped with a bit of grated chocolate. Gymnasts, on the other hand, had different plans for that cream puff dough.

Make it into a bowl! And fill it with lettuce and tuna salad!

Okay, I will never understand gymnasts or gymnastics, but thanks to my sister for giving me the opportunity to gawk at their cookbook.