Fanning The Flames Of Tradition

The Memorial Day weekend is the traditional time to wheel out the ol’ propane grill for the first cookout of the season.

Propane has replaced charcoal as the fuel of choice for today’s backyard barbecuer for the simple reason that it allows him to set the food afire much faster than before.

With charcoal, you had to wait nearly an hour before the briquettes were hot enough reduce a $15 ribeye steak into a greasy, smoking pile of gray ashes. With propane, you can achieve this level of doneness in one-tenth the time.

Strangely, this aspect of outdoor cooking is largely overlooked in the barbecue cookbooks. There is a great deal of discussion concerning marinades, sauces, basting techniques, etc., but almost no mention of the proper use of a garden hose in extinguishing salmon florentine.

But before you can incinerate your food, you must first “fire up” the grill. Many propane grills come equipped with a push-button ignition switch that starts the fire safely and easily, assuming it is working, which, of course, it isn’t.

The reason for this is that you assembled your propane grill yourself, probably late at night while drinking beer and watching “Three Stooges” reruns on TV. (Some cynics have suggested that these are the same conditions under which Ford engineers assembled the ignition switches of the 1988 Ford Escort, but that is not true. They were watching “Beavis and Butt-head.”)

So what you have to do in this situation is turn on the gas and flip lit matches in the direction of the grill. The grill will eventually “catch,” producing the telltale mushroom cloud that lets neighbors several miles away know you are either doing some outdoor cooking or conducting an experiment in nuclear fission.

After getting your burns treated at a local hospital, you are ready to begin grilling. If you are cooking hamburgers, it is a good idea to “sear” the meat first. This ensures that the hamburgers will become instantly and permanently bonded to the grill surface so that when you go to turn them, at least half of the meat will fall into the coals. This technique also works well with fish and chicken.

Many cookbooks encourage you to cook vegetables on your propane grill. This is because grilling cookbooks are often written by sadistic monsters who enjoy causing you pain and suffering.

First Cookbook Author: “I know! Let’s tell people that they can roast green peppers on the grill!”

Second Cookbook Author: “But before they can eat the peppers, they have to peel them!”

First Author: “With tweezers!”

Second Author: “In the dark!”

First Author: “While standing on their heads!”

If you are one of those “health nuts” who feels his meal would not be complete without vegetables, just take a big wad of eggplant or zucchini or some other vegetable substance and pile it in your yard, soak it with gasoline and set it on fire. You will find that it is a lot easier than cooking these things on the grill, plus the subtle flavorings brought out by a healthy splash of Sunoco 190 can be quite enchanting, once you get used to them.

Other things that you can cook on your propane grill, but shouldn’t, include bread, pasta, cheese, frozen desserts, lamb, beef, chicken, pork, veal, seafood, Arch Deluxes, things that are wrapped in plastic, things that aren’t wrapped in plastic, jumping spiders and anything that has been sitting in the back of your refrigerator for more than a year.

In fact, you should probably just forget the whole thing and take your family out to a nice restaurant.

Just remember to turn off the grill before you go.

xxxx