Putting on a summertime barbecue, with its enticing smells and tasty treats served hot and juicy off the grill to a contented, grateful family, is a lot like buying exercise equipment for your home. The idea of doing it is exciting. When you actually go through with it, the results are always disappointing. Ever look at a new barbecue in a hardware store? Too bad the cookout isn’t always as bright, clean and perfect.
Television news, which is very good at hyping stories about household products, everyday appliances or foods we commonly eat that can kill us, recently aired one of those “health reports” (which should be called “death reports”) warning of new dangers associated with grilling meats. The study concluded that 95 percent of all ulcers are caused by bacteria in foods. (The other 5 percent must be caused by these reports.)
The advice for anyone who wants to barbecue a hamburger is to cook it well done. In other words, make it tasteless to be safe.
I do not need another reason to give up barbecuing. My weekend cookouts have never resembled the neat, clean and easy picture of Ozzie Nelson, with chef’s hat and apron in place, happily serving up perfectly cooked dinners for a beaming Harriet and the boys. When I barbecue, it’s more like a scene out of the life of Ozzy Osbourne.
Almost every evening I’m served a good home-cooked meal, so when Mrs. Sirott utters the fateful question, “Should we just put some steaks on the grill tonight?” I should jump at the chance to give her a well-deserved break.
But instead I quickly check the weather, hoping to report back that a massive storm front is arriving any minute, thereby forcing all adults, small children and filets mignons to seek immediate shelter.
Hard to say no
My family members often use the word “we” when suggesting “we” barbecue.
I find that interesting. Who has to clean the grill of last month’s carcinogens before the fun begins? Me. Who has to stand in the sweltering heat, hovering over a fire that occasionally flares up to singe my eyebrows at temperatures approaching that of Apollo 13 on re-entry? Me. And who sacrifices himself to protect the family feast, becoming a mosquito magnet while swatting bugs, gnats and flying ants from what they hope will be their dinner? Me.
But who usually forgets all this and agrees to barbecue? Me.
It’s hard for men to say no to the female request for a cookout. It strikes us as a challenge to our manhood. It must be a leftover from the caveman days of hunting and then returning with a dead animal for the family to enjoy.
But I don’t believe that burning meat in a metal box proves anyone’s masculinity. The modern man hunts for prey to provide for his family by finding a good takeout menu in the drawer, making a phone call and venturing out into the wild traffic to pick up the order and return safely and quickly.
The last time I was coerced into a holiday barbecue– I think it may have been on Groundhog Day–I managed to render eight expensive steaks tasteless. My wife marinated the meat in some sort of flammable, but tasty, liquid, that in contact with the grill sent flames lapping up toward our roof. The result was charred steaks with crusts the texture of a hockey puck.
I have one of those super-duper gas grills, so I don’t go through the agony of futilely tossing match after match into increasingly larger puddles of lighter fluid. But even though the grill has controls that resemble the dashboard of a small vehicle, I can never cook the food the way they do in a restaurant.
Slow cooking
One time, determined to not overcook another meal, I followed all preheating instructions, adjusted the flame to below medium and tried the much-heralded “slow-cooking method.” About an hour and a half later, after my family’s plaintive cries of “We’re starving, we have to go to bed,” I served up well-done, blackened T-bones that were somehow ice cold at the center.
Sometimes disaster strikes even after the cooking has been completed. Am I the only guy who has watched helplessly as prime meats have slid off a greasy plate and landed at the cobwebbed wheels of the barbecue grill?
Last weekend, miraculously, perhaps by sheer luck, I lifted the top of my barbecue to discover perfect-looking hamburgers, with those blackened grill marks that you see on meat from other people’s grills or in TV commercials. Cooked just right. Juicy and slightly red on the inside.
Now that I think about it, I probably gave my loved ones a new lethal bacteria that you’ll be hearing about on the news tonight at 10.
