The Reflector

Issue date: 4/3/07 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: Andrew Le recipe used with permission from Chronicle Books LLC.

Admit it. We've all been there. It's a nice Saturday afternoon, you're sitting around with a couple of your friends, and you all decide that it's a perfect day for grilling. A few people go to the grocery store to get the charcoal and meat and vegetables to cook while the others get to work on getting the grill ready. You clean the grill, get the charcoal hot, form the hamburgers or shish-kabobs and finally place them on the grill. A few minutes later you all have the best hamburger, ribs or chicken of your life and everyone is truly happy.

Doesn't sound familiar? Unfortunately, while situations do occur like the aforementioned one every once in a while, I'm sure more of us are familiar with this scenario: If hamburgers are on the menu for the night, they are formed into what seems like a normal-sized patty. Then come the bottles: Dales, Lea & Perrin's or a combination of both are dowsed upon the raw patties until they resemble meatballs in French onion soup rather than hamburgers. The grill is rusty, and the grate is caked with muck from three years' worth of cooked food. The burgers go on the grill innocently enough but are soon transformed into slightly larger and more round versions of the charcoal briquettes used to cook them.

Now since I've been at MSU, I've had my fair share of both situations. Fortunately, those bad situations haven't occurred since sophomore year, but nevertheless, they're still burned into my memory as a reminder of why the grill should not be used by the faint of heart; it's rife with disappointment if you don't know what you're doing. And until I came to college, I had never known of these grilling horror stories. All the grilled food I had ever tasted came from my father, who had never produced a bad steak or burger from the grill in his lifetime.

So in a sense, I was spoiled, but I quickly learned that grilled food could be bad if not handled correctly. And I've also just realized that by writing this article, I'll probably never be invited to another cookout again in my life. All the more reason to learn to become a griller myself, right? Well since my last article on grilling, I've had many suggestions on what other people use their grills for, and it sparked many people on to try new things on the grill. I also received a gift from a publishing company in San Francisco, and it couldn't have come at a better time.

Continued...

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