The Grill

(I came across this journal entry the other day and it made me laugh to remember how I fared on one of my first cooking ventures. Note: this happened four years ago so I hope I've learned a little since then. . . not much, but some =)

There were four of us. We just stood there staring at it. The hot dogs sat on the table, unopened and cold. Finally one of us broke the silence.
“You do know how to use this, don’t you?”
Silence. . . .
“Well we should be able to figure it out. After all, how hard can it be to use a charcoal grill?”
We returned to our staring. It just stood there. An open-ended box with a rack on top standing on one thin leg like a stork.
We weren't quite prepared for this. Each of us had sort of assumed we were the only ones who didn't know how to use a grill. Turned out we all were. While it came as a relief to each of to learn that we weren't the only one not skilled in this fine culinary art, it also presented a problem. Who was going to cook dinner? Secretly each of us had hoped that the others would have such a vast storehouse of knowledge and experience that we could sit back and watch them cook dinner without betraying our ignorance for this uniquely masculine skill.
We all knew the stereotype . . . we’d seen it many times: a man wearing an apron (not one of those frilly girl aprons but a real man's apron) standing over grill with tongs in one hand and a delicious platter of succulent meat, usually some game animal he's just killed, in the other. In the background mother and kids sit at the picnic table, perfectly secure in their man’s ability to perform the age-honored tradition of grilling. Now there was a real man, a rugged individual as able to prepare meat as his leather clad ancestors!
The only problem was he wasn't here.
As we stood there, painfully aware of this insult to our manhood, something stirred in each of us. We were men, too. This was our element! This was our time!! We would start the fire and grill those hot-dogs!!!
We started out with ardent fervor, which was more than could be said for our fire. Lynn, Shannon, and myself reached for the charcoal and the Leo, too slow get a hand on the bag, grabbed the lighter fluid.
It was then that we noticed it. A rock, rather large, sitting in the grill, covered with ashes. None of us wanted to be so dumb as to not know why every grill needs a big rock in it, but after looking around and seeing three other confused expressions, we took comfort in our collective ignorance and decided it was a pretty dumb chef who would leave a rock in a grill. We deposited the rock outside the grill and scraped out most of the ashes. This done, we poured a couple briquettes in the pit and doused them with lighter fluid.
Nothing happened.
We poured on some more.
Same result.
After a hurried huddle, we remembered the lighter.
Success! Oh the sweet smell of burning fumes! Our mission accomplished, we broke to wash our hands which had become quite dirty during the lighting process. When we came back we found a cold pile of charcoal. Obviously this lighter fluid was pretty weak stuff. We poured on twice as much and lit it off again.
It flamed nicely, but each of us kept an anxious eye on it, afraid it would mysteriously fizzle like the last one. Sure enough, the flames began to flicker and it started to smoke, a sure sign that our fire was dying. Leo grabbed the lighter fluid and hovered over it, ready to sauce it at a moments notice. Just as the last flame began to sputter he squirted it with the fluid.
He extinguished it completely.
We grabbed the lighter once more. However, before we lit it off once more, I offered a careful suggestion. I seemed to remember people stacking the charcoal in a pile before they lit it, something about conserving the heat. When I suggested it, they looked at me in awe. From then on I was the resident expert on grilling.
We stacked the charcoal in a crude little pile, adding one or two more briquettes for good measure, and for the third time we touched the lighter to the soaked pile. This time it stayed lit. Eager to grill supper we placed foil on the rack, which was rather dirty, slit it to allow heat through, and placed the hot-dogs on top.
While we were waiting for our meat to cook, we opened a bag of chips and dug in. We chatted confidently about how easy it was to grill and how good the hotdogs were going to be. We might even start our own grilling service depending on how good the hot dogs turned to be. Eventually Lynn decided it was time to check the dogs. Walking over to the grill, he grabbed the fork and flipped a dog. We all rose to inspect it. It had changed colors. It was no longer pink; instead, they were a quite light tan color--on one side. He proceeded to flip them all.
We returned to our chips thinking how foolish we had been to doubt ourselves. There was nothing to grilling, at least nothing we couldn’t figure out. To round out our soon-to-be meal, Shannon, Leo, and I broke out the drinks: Coke, Sprite, and Dr. Pepper . . . three two-liter bottles for four guys. We wouldn’t be getting much sleep that night. Meanwhile Lynn broke out his own drink, a small plastic container with a suspiciously healthy looking label sporting bananas and strawberries.
“What is that?” I asked him.
“It’s soy milk,” he replied. “My mom really likes this stuff so she sent it along for us.”
Leo eyed it up. “It doesn’t look that bad. I’ll try some.”
“I'll take some, too,” I chimed in. I was feeling adventurous.
We both drank some and agreed that it wasn’t that bad. Not necessarily good, but not bad either. We ate some more chips and washed it down with soy milk. Pretty soon we figured it was time to check the main course before we made an entire meal of the condiments. The hot dogs were slightly warmer but they weren’t going anywhere fast.
“I don’t think their getting enough heat,” said Shannon, stating the obvious. “Maybe it would help if they were closer to the charcoal.”
Lynn, probably only one in our group with much engineering ability considered this. “Well the rack can’t be lowered so the only way to get them closer would be to move the charcoal up” He concluded. (Lynn was truly brilliant with that type of logic).
“That’s kinda hard to do after the fire’s already started.” said Shannon doubtfully.
“Not really,” said Lynn. “All you have to do is . . . “ He thought about this for a couple seconds. “Well yeah, I guess it is. If only we would have had something to put under the charcoal before we started it. Something like. . .”
“A big rock?” said Leo quietly.
Everybody wished he had kept that thought to himself.
It was then I noticed that everyone was looking at me. As the resident expert on grilling, and also the one who had decided to take out the big rock, charring these hot dogs became my dilemma. My first suggestion was walking over to the neighboring camp which looked like an extended family get-together and borrowing a few of their flames. Their grill was huge and obviously putting off way more heat than they needed. My plan was for two of us could sneak our hot-dogs on beside their steaks spare ribs while the other two created a distraction. Shannon thought maybe we should just ask them if we could use their grill. I think he secretly hoped that if we openly contributed to their grill, we might get invited to some tastier cuts of meat . . . kinda like a vending machine: you put hot dogs in and get T-bone steaks out. However, none of us were bold enough to take action on this daring plan, so the brainstorm continued.
My second suggestion was roasting-sticks. Since none of us had a knife, this would be hard, but the other were willing to give it a try. Shannon was the first to find a stick, actually it was more of a twig, and with this he speared a hot dog. It was then that we found out the hog dogs were cheese-filled. Cheese oozed out and dripped on the coals, causing a burst of flame.
With both of my brilliant plans shot down, I decided to try a different tactic. I thought that maybe if we turned the grill into the wind it would trap the heat against the back and force it up past the hot dogs. Accordingly we turned the grill into the wind.
We couldn't see much for the next few minutes as we tried to wipe ashes out of our eyes. Apparently my plan had overlooked one little detail. It was a rather windy day and a particularly strong gust of wind happened along just was turned the grill, catching up the ashes that we had neglected to scrape out and flinging them in our faces like a miniature volcano.
Now all three of my plans had failed and the hot dogs had a nice coating of ashes, Lynn decided to take matters into his own hands. It was time for desperate measures. Taking a hot dog off the rack, he wrapped it in some tinfoil we had used to cover the dirty rack, and placed it directly on top of the coals. Feeding off his idea, I suggested we wrap all the hot dogs in the protective foil and mass grill them.
They all agreed that if I had earned my first hot-dog with my first suggestion of piling the coals, I had definitely earned my second hot dog with this second suggestion. All fully convinced that this idea was a real winner, we busily commenced wrapping the hot dogs in the protective foil. The end result looked something like a large tin burrito. We placed this large burrito on the coal and waited to see what would happen. After about five minutes we checked them. They were nicely burned. . . on one side. The other side was barely touched. Also, because we had punched the foil full of holes, there were a lots of little pieces of ash burned into them. Not too thrilled with the outcome of our hard work, we discussed opening the second pack of hot dogs and trying over again. However, considering how well our attempts had worked – that and the fact that our tin foil burrito had smothered our fire and none of us had the heart or patience to try to get it going again – we decided to ditch the experiment and make the best of what we had.
We ate our hot dogs -- with lots of ketchup -- and waited to get sick. We didn’t. Feeling slightly better about the meal, I figured I’d push my luck and try a mixed drink. Soy milk and Sprite. That nearly succeeded where the hot dogs had failed and I almost threw up. I had hoped the smooth and soothing texture of the soy milk and tangy fizz of the Sprite would equal each other out to create a nice blend. Wrong! It tasted like something that would work well to fuel a new breed of car. We ended up the meal with some leftover veggie pizza that Lynn’s mom had sent along in case of emergency. She must have known that we couldn’t prepare supper on our own. We ate and talked for a while and really had a nice time of it, even laughing a little at our mistakes.
When we exhausted our supply of edible food, we decided it was time to pack up and head home. As we drove off, Leo suggested that we might have saved ourselves a lot of time and trouble if we had just walked up to the large camp beside us, the one with the big grill, and pretended that we belonged with them.
“All we would have needed to do is say ‘Uncle!’ and pretend we were long lost relatives from California,” He said excitedly. “We could have had a gourmet meal for free and they would never have known the difference. They don’t look like a close knit-family anyway.”
We drove off thinking that, all in all, it had been fun. The freedom to fail should never be taken for granted and I'm sure we all learned something out of it – although I'm not quite sure what. I imagine we've all learned a little bit more about cooking since then . . at least I hope we have! However, as much fun as it was for us four guys to rough it for an entire meal, we were all looking forward to going home to a woman's cooking for a change.