July 23, 2014 at 2:10 p.m.

Something's cooking in the back yard (07/27/05)

Back in the Saddle

By By JACK RONALD-

I’ve finally found the grill of my dreams.

That’s not a typo.

I found the girl of my dreams back in 1968 and married her in 1971.

The grill of my dreams was a gift on Father’s Day.

Throwback that I am, charcoal has always been my preference when it comes to grilling.

Our first grill was a cast-metal hibachi we received as a wedding present; we never got over our disappointment since it came in a box that said “color television” on the side.

That lasted us through the early years of marriage, but it was clunky and inevitably started to fall apart. (The grill, not the marriage.) We replaced it with a little tabletop model of the Weber Smoky Joe, a great grill, one which served so well that it’s still in the attic of our garage gathering dust. We keep thinking we’ll use it again some day. We won’t, but that’s what we keep thinking.

It was followed by larger versions of the same grill, both of which were great but started to fall apart after years of use and misuse. (I found it easier to buy a new grill top every few years rather than keep the old one as clean as I should.)

In the interim, there was an odd little electric grill that we bought by mistake at a charity auction. You know how it goes. One minute you’re trying to run up the bid to help the charity, the next minute you’ve bought something you don’t need.

But now, I have the grill of my dreams.

Connie did her consumer homework and found something I never even knew existed.

It’s a charcoal grill, but it has a propane starter. You attach a little camping gas canister to one section of the grill. Then, when you want to fire the thing up, you load the charcoal as usual. But instead of burning the hair off your arms when the lighter fluid gets going, you simply turn a valve and press a starter. The clean propane fire gets the charcoal going within a few minutes, then you simply turn the gas off.

The result: Great coals and a great cookout, without the petroleum taste of lighter fluid and without the “whoomp” that comes when you toss in a match.

There’s no telling what I might cook up now that the right grill has come along.

That’s grill. As I said, the right girl came along back in 1968.[[In-content Ad]]
PORTLAND WEATHER

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