Welcome to the 1980’s Steve Kramer!

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):

1. I had my trusty Weber kettle that was and remains in perfectly fine shape,
2. I was too cheap to incur the cost of adding a gas grill to our stable of cooking tools,
3. 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.