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We are a nation of foodies and amateur chefs, and although some men have protected their barbecuing from excessive fancification and recipe reading, one can’t deny that home cooking sophistication now extends to the back porch and the backyard.

Depending on where you live, you may now be as likely to see lemongrass marinated pork as a Ballpark frank at a neighborhood cookout. As Steven Raichlen, author of “Planet Barbecue” and “The Barbecue! Bible,” and host of “Primal Grill” on PBS explains, city folk have “adopted Southeast Asian sates, Indian tandoori, and Jamaican jerk as their own” (although most Texans and Southerners will probably never be convinced to depart from their local barbecue flavors). This article includes some tasty ideas for things that Americans wouldn’t normally grill. But if you think that being adventurous with your grilling recipes sounds too difficult, just remember one thing: a barbecue recipe created by a friendly Southern man in a dirty apron can also be difficult to execute. These new ideas are not excessively complicated, and they may actually prove easier than some of the grilling recipes you use now.

Equipment

Whether you use gas or charcoal is not particularly important. A charcoal grill adds a nice smoky and supposedly carcinogenic flavor to meat (a calculated risk that is often worth taking), but charcoal takes longer than gas to heat up and clean, and it doesn’t usually become hot enough to properly cook items that must be grilled at very high heat. A smoky flavor can be added to a gas grill using wood chips, however a smoky flavor is not helpful for all items—desserts particularly don’t need it. The smoky charcoal grill flavor can at times cross the line from “smoky” to “tastes like lighter fluid.” Whatever you cook with, just make sure to have a number of bamboo skewers soaked and ready to use.

Vegetables

A number of vegetables can be grilled whole to create easy appetizers and accompaniments. Just rub them with olive oil before placing them over medium heat and remember to salt and pepper them before serving. Thread skewers through whole small, sweet tomatoes, grill them until they become soft, and serve them with fresh basil and mozzarella for a sweet, summery caprese. Or place a whole eggplant on the grill for about half an hour so it balloons up, deflate it, and when it cools down, scrape out its insides and douse them in cumin and fresh salt and pepper for a tasty dip.

Meats

Your first order of business is to develop a good relationship with your butcher. In many places, supermarkets have made independent butchers all but extinct. Some better supermarkets have butchers who take requests from customers, but many supermarkets treat meat quality as an afterthought. Fortunately, as people are becoming more concerned with the quality of the meat they eat, the American butcher is making a comeback. Although your neighborhood butcher may never display rabbit or duck, he can get it for you if you ask, usually within one day. He may also be able to get you wild boar, gator, and venison or elk. You may have to go to a halal butcher to purchase goat (don’t worry, you won’t be put on a watch list) and if you pick up some beef while you’re there, you might never go back to non-halal beef. If you’re looking for a meat that you can’t get from your butcher, call D’Artagnan (www.dartagnan.com), a gourmet meat purveyor used by many Manhattan restaurants. Unlike many specialty meat providers, D’Artagnan doesn’t require a $100 or $200 minimum order, which makes them accessible to home gourmands. Marx Foods (marxfoods.com), a mail-order food company in Seattle, also has a good selection and fair prices, although you have to buy in bulk. Note: the more exotic the meat, the more likely your butcher will receive it frozen. Make sure that you plan for a few hours of thawing time.

Rabbit

Rabbit tastes like both chicken and pork, which makes it the other other white meat. Rabbit is exceptionally lean, which is partially why some extreme locavores have been replacing their chickens with rabbits (http://www.good.is/post/backyard-bunnies-are-the-new-urban-chickens). This is also why hare is seen stewed or braised more often than grilled—it can become tough on the grill if you’re careful. Rabbit does well with simple European flavors. Chef Jamie Oliver suggests a mixture of rosemary, thyme, garlic, lemon, and honey in olive oil. Similarly, Stephen Stryjewski of New Orleans meat mecca Cochon likes to marinade rabbit for the grill in a brine: “I like to make my brine with red wine, salt, pepper, sage and garlic,” he says. Either way, let the rabbit marinade in the mixture for a couple of hours to spread the flavor and to allow the meat to become too tender. As Raichlen explains, one strategy for dealing with the leanness of game meats is to simply add artificial oil or fat with an oil-based marinade or by wrapping the meat in bacon. Another is to “chemically tenderize,” which is where the brine comes in. Whisk the meat with some of the marinade while it grills, and you’ll get a flavorful and healthy dish. Unless you have the stomach of a butcher or a Special Forces officer, buy a saddle (i.e. torso) of rabbit rather than a whole rabbit, which can have the unmistakable look of a skinned mammal.

Duck

While rabbit doesn’t have enough fat, duck has too much. Duck wings and legs can arrive so fatty and meatless that you are often better off purchasing breasts for the grill. With duck, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. A Peking-flavored grilled duck comes out very well, with excellent-tasting skin. D’Artagnan suggests using a simple marinade of hoisin sauce, sake, and ginger. Make sure to boil the marinade and serve it with the duck for dipping. Or, for those with some patience and a hankering for a smoky, simple flavor, Stryjewski suggests grilling a whole duck over low heat and wood chips with a simple salt and pepper seasoning and a pierced orange in its cavity. Regardless of the recipe you use, you may end up with excess pieces of duck fat that you can cook to a gristle for use in a decadent snack (if it won't cause you to lose friends or enter divorce proceedings). Duck is certainly not for health nuts looking for a lean alterna-meat.

Goat

Your first taste of grilled goat chops probably won’t taste exotic—it will probably make you wonder why Americans eat so much more lamb than goat, because goat has a milder taste. For an easy introduction to this tasty, tender meat, grill goat chops dressed simply, with salt, pepper, rosemary, garlic, thyme, and oregano. If you want a little more flavor and spice, try using a Pakistani rub of yogurt, cumin, cayenne and other spices.

Alligator

Don’t worry, it won't bite. Gator has long been eaten in the South, and the best way to grill it is with Cajun spices. The specific mixture you use isn’t particularly important, as long as it has enough pepper and kick. Stryjewski stresses that the meat should be cut “small and across the grain because it can be really tough” (gator hunters say that to cook a whole alligator steak, one must “beat the crap out of it” first). It is an exceptionally lean meat. Rub your mixture on the pieces of gator, grill them on skewers, and serve them with lemon. This will come out tasting like Cajun chicken-shrimp-calamari bites, because gator doesn’t taste gamy at all, but more like a chicken-seafood hybrid.

Wild Boar

If the packaging of your wild boar meat says “feral pig,” don’t worry—for pigs, “feral” means “free.” Although wild boar is found naturally in much of the world, it doesn’t take escaped pigs many generations to become like the bristly, horned and tasty boar.

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Although boar is wild pig, it doesn’t work seamlessly with all pork recipes—boar can taste very similar to beef, with a tinge of lamb, while having the marbled texture of pork. If you get a good cut of boar, it can be amazing. One good way to prepare boar is to use a standard recipe for a Vietnamese lemongrass marinade (use more soy sauce than fish sauce in the marinade—some lemongrass marinades call for large amounts of fish sauce and no soy sauce, even though the two can be somewhat interchangeable and the American palate is not accustomed to large amounts of fish sauce), marinade it for a few hours in this mixture, and then grill it on skewers. And although Latin America is one of the few places on earth where boars don’t thrive, their meat adapts well to a number of Latin beef- and pork-grilling recipes, such as Peruvian anticuchos. To make this marinade, just use garlic, cumin, vinegar, a lot of relatively mild pepper paste, and salt and pepper. Let it marinade overnight, skewer, and grill. (Also try beef anticuchos as a way of making tougher beef amazing, and try a lemongrass marinade with pork….or beef…or chicken. If you want really exotic recipes, read Raichlen's “Planet Barbecue.”)

_{David Dames}

Two meats that were tried for this article but didn’t include were squid and elk. Squid can come out exceptionally well on the grill, particularly with a white wine and garlic marinade, but it’s temperamental, requiring very high heat and having a small window of time between being raw and rubbery. Elk is like a lean, gamy beef, and it can arrive from the butcher looking like something left from a lion kill. This meat is best left to the professionals, such as Anthony Walsh, of the Canadian-cuisine restaurant Canoe in Toronto. One recipe we tried drowned elk sirloin in a red wine and gin marinade, which is not a Canadian recipe, at least not for meat. It didn’t work.

Desserts

Grilling cookbooks love to emphasize that anything can be grilled—soup, pizza, bread, and yes, dessert. Although many fruits can be grilled, grilling doesn’t improve most of them. Fruits and vegetables become sweeter on the grill, because their sugars become concentrated, but most fruits are better with their natural tartness left intact. This is not true for bananas, which become like candy when grilled. Serve them with melted butter, brown sugar and lime, and your guests will love you.

Grown-up kids will enjoy grilled smores. Simply make them like normal, but spray them with non-stick spray before placing them on the grill. Just make sure that the graham crackers don’t burn too badly and be ready to have a chocolate-covered grill and a happy stomach.

—David Dames