It’s no secret that we like to grill food and that people like to eat food that we’ve grilled. That’s why the slow and ultimate demise of our grill over the past year was a bit upsetting.
The grill didn’t survive the move very well. I think it’s also possible that something broke inside it, but every time we used it after the move it essentially caught on fire. The insides would flame long after the gas was off, and it would happen every time we cooked with it. The flames were high and uncontrollable, and we just couldn’t use it any more.
At some point, the wildlife became aware of the fact that we weren’t using the grill any more, and decided to make use of this sheltered space. When Berta cut down the tall grass surrounding the deck, the local birds made great efforts in moving a ton of it into the grill to start building their second home in its confines. Yes, they did this twice.
We do a cookout every year (or try to) for my birthday, and invite everyone over. This year, we hope to invite a brand new crowd – Some old friends, some new neighbors, some co-workers, and some other friends we don’t usually invite to these things for one reason or another. But in preparation for the big cookout this year, we needed a new grill.
We shopped around a bit. Part of the problem with selecting a grill is that you don’t want something that is going to fall apart after a year or two. Not that our old grill was this way - it lasted about 8 years - but I’m simply under the impression that a grill is a piece of hardware that you should not have to replace but in a rare circumstance. We have friends with grills that are very old, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t have our grill for just as long.
We looked at a few different brand names that we knew would last long. We wanted a big grilling surface, and I specifically wanted some different options for cooking. A griddle was top on my list beyond the standard grilling, and a rotisserie followed shortly after that.
Many of the newer grill models have this “infrared” cooking business, where they essentially heat up some ceramic element, and the radiation from that element cooks the food. It’s supposed to be more like cooking with charcoal. I think it’s a gimmick.
In any case, we settled on this Perfect Flame model. It has three sections of grill that can be removed for cleaning, and it comes with a griddle section so that I can cook my veggies and eggs on the grill itself. There is one of those weird infrared side burners that is supposed to be good for roasting. (I wonder if I can cook corn on it.) And there is a burner for a rotisserie, but there the rotisserie parts themselves - including the spit and turner - are sold separately.
We’ve only cooked a couple of burgers on the grill so far, being that it’s so new yet, but they turned out alright. I’m looking forward to tossing a steak or some salmon on there to see what we can do with it, and I hope that it serves use well for this year’s cookout as well as many cookouts in the future.
