After years upon years of lobbying from Agnes, I finally
broke down this past Sunday, and bought a gas grill. Water on a rock Steve. It is futile for the rock to resist
Steve. Yes dear.
She’s a beauty. A sleek,
shiny $99 beauty that is the perfect size for Agnes and me. A sleek, shiny $99 beauty that also required
the better part of said past Sunday to assemble.
This fact my father, an expert and professional assembler of
all things outdoor, found extremely amusing, “We do those in 20 minutes at the
shop.” Yes, but I am neither an expert
nor professional assembler of all outdoor things. Oh never mind.
If you do not know it by now, life is one big trade
off. Buying a sleek, shiny $99 beauty at
Aldi, the discount German grocer, means you will spend four hours or more of
your life putting the damned thing together.
You will need to make at least one call to your family’s
expert and professional assembler of outdoor things (or the 800 number if your
family lacks such an expert professional) to solve an issue with the
igniter.
And you will have to make another run to a local retail outlet
to buy a propane cylinder before you are able to fire up your new sleek, shiny $99
beauty. Which I will forever call our sleek,
shiny $99 beauty even though the cost is closer to $160 what with the cylinder
purchase and associated taxes.
I will let you do the cost benefit analysis of buying and
assembling the sleek, shiny $99 beauty from Aldi vs. purchasing an equally
sleek, shiny assembled unit for another $100 or so, possibly with a free
cylinder thrown in at one of the other local retailers. Consider it homework.
Of course I am not a gas grill virgin per se, I had one
brief fling back in the late 90’s, a hand me down or hand me sideways I suppose,
but that one eventually shit the bed.
In the name of reduce, reuse, recycle, I
re-purposed its base as a fire pit on a camping trip and put the rest of
the mess to the curb for the scrapper swarm. The fire pit idea proved a good idea in theory and
problematic in practice. The cast
aluminum base melted in the intense heat of the camp fire, but it was mesmerizing watching the molten aluminum drip, drip, drip for hours as we downed ice cold
beers from the cooler and swatted swarming mosquitoes. Good times!
Anyway, forgive the digression, I just never replaced that
grill. It’s a pure case of Make Do or
making excuses (you make the call):
- I had
my trusty Weber kettle that was and remains in perfectly fine shape,
- I was
too cheap to incur the cost of adding a gas grill to our stable of cooking
tools,
- Sure it’s easier to start a gas grill, but the trade off (that term again) for taking an additional half hour for starting charcoal is that food cooked over charcoal invariably tastes better than that cooked on a gas grill.
And so it progressed for an embarrassingly long time until
this past Sunday when I bought the sleek, shiny $99 beauty now in our backyard
and I must admit, the convenience is addictive.
Fire it up, grill, eat. I get it.
But as Agnes said after eating two perfectly gas grilled
cheeseburgers the other night, “These are good, much better than when you broil
them inside, but they are not as tasty as when you grill them over charcoal.”
To which I said, “Life is a trade off.” There’s that damned term again.