I was wondering if it was a good idea to get a domain, put a lot of keywords on it, get a lot of backlinks, and let the site "marinate" for a bit before putting up the site. Is there any benefit to doing this?
haha. The word marinate is cracking me up. I would say that the sooner you put something, anything on your site, the better. If your finished content isnt ready yet, put up a "placeholder" page and let it...um...marinate until the real content is ready. Make sure your "placeholder" pages arent spammy though - otherwise google might not want to come back after your real content is available.
There's nothing wrong with putting up a "coming soon" type of site. I'm not sure who would want to link to it, though, and there's absolutely no point in adding keywords beforehand. It won't improve your position compared to the position of the finished site, which will be as keyword-rich as you like anyway. I think the only point in doing this would be to do something about algorithms that factor in the age of links.
That recipe sounds a bit shit, since when did you have the main course before the starter? Engines like google like to find the meat before they dabble with the pudding so if you banging away getting links on zero content, your spam.