Grill on Fire

I love to cook.  I hate to clean.  I will grudgingly clean my messes after I make them, and have recently learned to clean as I cook, which saves time in the end, but I still hate it.  Needless to say, aside from the grate, I have not cleaned my gas grill in more than a year.  Unfortunately, after all that time, the greasy build up is volatile, waiting for the right moment to ignite.

Have you ever looked down into the guts of your grill and seen the nastiness waiting below?  I use my grill frequently, and so I had more than a year of melted fat, carbonized grease, and mildly burnt meat parts, all built into a thick layer of detritus coating the bottom.  The way my grill is built, I would have to mildly exert myself to see the bottom - very mildly; the grates and the heat diffusers partially block the view.  And, I would have to be motivated to acknowledge how disgusting it is.  The grossness just gathers, fuel for a future fire.

I think the same can be said about ourselves.  If we looked deep inside, would we see the leavings of arguments unresolved, family and friend drama, social opinions we aren’t sure we really believe anymore?  These are all the elements of yesterday’s version of us.  As we grow and move towards who we are, we leave the remnants of who we were behind.  Sometimes, these little bits are just as flammable as the nast collected at the bottom of my grill.  The longer we ignore them, the more potent they become.

One of my menu items for this week was Teriyaki Chicken.  I use a recipe from my Dad, picked up from when we lived in Hawaii.  The recipe is simple.  Combine soy sauce, a homemade weak simple syrup, white onion, ginger, and garlic into a marinade.  Marinate chicken thighs and drumsticks overnight.  Grill.  Be prepared for flareups from melting chicken fat and dripping juice (the sugar).

I was ready to go.  I had my tongs for turning the chicken after eight minutes.  I had my timer.  I had my spray bottle for squirting the flareups.  I put the chicken on.

We are usually ready for personal flareups.  We know how to put out small fires and handle small dramas life throws at us.  Every once in a while a larger piece of our past catches on fire, but we deal with these as they come.  We don’t think about everything else lining the bottom, waiting for the big explosion.

The small flames are expected and manageable.  With a squirt here or a squirt there, I put out the fires quickly.  If they flare up too much, I move the piece of chicken.  This particular batch seemed to flare up quite vigorously, so I moved the chicken into the open spots between heat diffusers.  The grease and fat still dripped, but it fell in the depths of the grill instead of onto the diffusers right below.  Any flareups would be away from the chicken and wouldn’t lead to charred meat.  Smart right?

Well, this plan, while seeming intelligent at the time, didn’t end up that way.  See, the chicken still dripped.  And there were still some flareup on the grate and on the diffusers, just not as many.  And I still sprayed them with the squirt bottle.  And the water from the squirt bottle would scatter the flaming grease, knocking it to the bottom.  Where it would land on freshly dripped grease.  Where it would flare.  And ignite a year’s worth of fuel.

Have you ever seen a grease fire?  It is quite magnificent.  The way it ignores water as if it isn’t even there.  The way it just bigger as it finds more fuel, burning through a year of my laziness.

I have seen some spectacular meltdowns in my life and participated in a few.  People who haven’t dealt with their own issues, burying them deep below the surface, hoping they won’t ever ignite again.  I can remember doing the same thing beforehand.  Leaving them there, ignoring the need for a resolution, creates a flammable situation, sure to explode some point down the road.  

After emptying my squirt bottle to no effect, I ran inside and grabbed the baking soda and dumped it on the flames.  It wasn’t enough.  Thankfully, we had a second box and I doused the remaining flames with the white powder.  My hand has now been forced.  If I plan to use my grill again, I have to clean it.  

We can never plan for the explosion, preparing before hand to manage it.  All we can do is deal with it when it arrives.  Avoid burying issues; deal with them instead.  Look deep, clean out the garbage, take care of yourself.  Avoid the fire before it happens.

About my meal?  Don’t worry.  I took the chicken off before putting out the fire.  It was delicious

Fatty McHeartAttack

I live in one of the most obese cities in the fattest country in the world (take a quiz here).  It is no surprise that everywhere I look, beautiful pictures of high calorie, high fat, high carb, low quality, “food” crowd my view.  With all the temptation, it is amazing I haven’t blown up like Mr. Creosote from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life.

Since I have climbed back on the ground chuck wagon, I have found that healthy is hard.  I should have remembered this from the last billion times I abandoned vegetarianism for meatatarianism because of my cravings for greasy, fatty flesh.  I can promise you that every time I have gone back to meat, I have done so with pledges to only eat lean meat, only a couple times a week, and only in small portions.  I am in breech of contract with myself.  Just this weekend two of my three meals on Saturday were double quarter pounders with cheese from McDonald’s - I later gave myself a quintuple bypass.

Samantha and I swear that McDonald’s is addictive.  Sometimes the craving is so strong, it is all I can think about.  I can imagine the Big Mac recipe actually looks like this:

Two all beef patties (crack), special sauce (heroin), lettuce (coke), cheese (meth), pickles (opium), onions on a sesame seed bun (nicotine).

Today, after my weekend binge, I had to get a quick bite in between teaching lessons.  My options were plentiful - Waterburger (which is how I always pronounced it as a kid), Sonic, McDonald’s, and Chick-Fil-A.  On my way to the Chick-Fil-A drive through, because it is healthy (yeah, right), I passed the McDonald’s.  The next thing I knew, I was ordering the number 3 - Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese (oxycontin).  My rationale was that the line at the Fil-A was too long.  I think the real situation is that McDonald’s has a tractor beam and I was caught in its snare.

As I was gorging myself on the half-pound of beef, I couldn’t help by notice the caloric content on the empty fry carton - 380.  That got me wondering about the burger.  I hadn’t seen it on the sides of the carton or the top.  I had to finish the burger first in order to flip over the greasy box.  How many calories was it?  780.  Throw in my Dr. Pepper and I basically consumed the combined daily calorie intake of the Victoria Secret Angels.

Regardless of the restaurant, fast food is not quality.  One of the methods nutritionists suggest using to figure out which foods are good for which body part is to see what they look like.  Walnuts look like the brain, carrots the eye, celery the bone, etc.  What does a smushed up patty of ground beef look like?  Nothing I remember from anatomy.  The only thing that comes to mind is the by-product excreted by one of our body parts containing indigestible portions of our food along with solid waste from our cells.

If I were a cow, I would be mad that this is how I ended up.  I guess the only solace the expired cattle can take is their eventual revenge: heart disease is the number one cause of death in the US.

Unfortunately, despite all of this information I have at my disposal, am I done with fast food?  Probably not.  It is too easy, too convenient, and too cheap (but not so cheap we don’t trust it).  While I can make claims, promises, and pledges to do better, my addiction to Fatty McHeartAttack will sneak up again and steer me in the wrong direction - right into the drive through line at the local McDonald’s.