Posted tagged ‘grill’

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“I’m the nap champion.”

July 28, 2017

The deck is now perfect for summer. The rug is down. The umbrella lights up. The fountain gurgles. The grill is clean, its metal shiny. New white and multicolored lights along the rails brighten the night, but I wonder for how long. When will the spawns of Satan notice and chew off bulbs? I did buy a backup set.

My outdoor shower is all set. The rotten wood plank has been replaced and the inside is clean again. Nothing is better than an outside shower on a warm, star lit summer’s night.

The drip pan under the grill top held a surprise, a squirrel’s nest. It was filled with the fluff I had put out for the birds building nests and fir branches from I have no idea where. It’s gone now, but the fluff is available.

The morning glories are in bloom. They are in a huge blue pot at the end of the deck. Their tendrils are woven around the slats and the top of the rail. One plant is pink and the other blue. In the front garden the hollyhocks are filled with buds. Other flowers, their names unknown to me, have bloomed. Some look like baby Black-eyed Susans. They have spread all over the garden. When I get the papers, I always check the front garden.

I couldn’t get to sleep last night. I turned off the light around 12:30 then turned it back on at 1:30. I decided to watch Star Trek back in time episodes so I went hunting to find when, in each series, they were broadcast. The first, one of my all time favorites, is from Deep Space Nine. It is Trials and Tribble-ations when the DS9 bridge crew goes back to the original Star Trek and interact with Kirk and his crew and save the ship from a bomb hidden in a tribble. I next watched The City on The Edge of Forever from the original Star Trek. McCoy, temporarily insane fro hypospray, goes back in time and changes time. Kirk and Spock follow to restore history. Kirk has to let a woman he has come to love be killed. The last one was The Little Green Men from DS9. Quark, his brother Rom and nephew Nog on their way to Earth go through a temporal anomaly and end up in 1947 near Roswell, New Mexico. Odo, the shapeshifter, had hidden away on their ship. Quark wants to stay and sell technology, but Odo insists, and they escape through an atomic blast which propels them back to the future.

By the time, Quark, Rom and Nog get back to their to-ime, it was almost 4:30, my time, and was beginning to get light. I took Gracie outside so she wouldn’t have to wake me in a few hours so she could go out. I woke up at 9:30. I’m tired. It’s nap time.

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I still love making hamburgers on the grill. I guess whenever I eat them childhood memories come up for me.”

May 12, 2015

Last night was hot and muggy. Poor Gracie was panting so I turned the AC on in my bedroom. It was a delight feeling the chill, and we both slept deeply. Today is sunny but cool and tonight will be back to the 40’s. It rained sometime earlier this morning. I know only because the street was still wet when I woke up.

My mother cooked hamburger more than any other kind of meat. It was the cheapest and the most versatile. My favorite was always her meatloaf. From meal to meal it never really tasted the same. I know it had eggs and breadcrumbs but I have no idea what else she threw in for flavor. In those days herbs came from a bottle. My mother always had onion and garlic powder on hand as well as oregano and parsley. Sometimes her meatloaf had ketchup spread across the top with bacon strips covering the ketchup. We always wanted a piece with the crusty bacon. Sometimes she frosted the meatloaf with mashed potatoes and then would brown the tips in the oven. Every now and then we’d get a round meatloaf hand-formed and placed in a pie pan to cook.

We always thought ourselves quite the gourmands when my mother cooked her Chinese food. We had a chop suey sort of dish with hamburger, bean sprouts and water chestnuts. My mother always put crunchy chow mein noodles on the top. Then there was American chop suey, a name which still perplexes me today. It has nothing to do with chop suey; instead, it’s elbow macaroni, hamburger, tomato sauce and onions and peppers. My mother would sprinkle parmesan cheese from the green container on top.

Hamburgers were a summer staple grilled to perfection by my dad. I always wanted a cheeseburger, and my father would open the cellophane covering each piece of yellow cheese and crown the meat with the cheese. He’d put the top on the grill so the cheese would melt. My mother usually made potato salad. It didn’t matter how often we had hamburgers and hot dogs in the summer. I would have eaten them every night without complaint.

I think my mother was a bit of a magician in the kitchen. We never thought of how often we ate hamburger. All of those dishes tasted different to us and a couple were even exotic.

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“Men cook outside. Women make the three-bean salad.”

June 9, 2014

On the weather front, today is warm but cloudy. On the tooth front, my dentist is out-of-town. The ice skate extraction from Castaway is beginning to have some appeal, and all the movies I’ve seen with crazed dentists are flashing through my memory banks. The worst is the scene in The Marathon Man when SS dentist Szell tortures Dustin Hoffman by sticking a probe into his teeth. I swear I screamed along with Dustin. Dentists are never heroes.

I have a former student who is an oral surgeon. I called his office, whined a little and mentioned the ice skates so they are seeing me at two, but I suspect I’ll have to wait until Thursday for any work because of the blood thinner I take. Okay, I’m done with the teeth talk. It’s creeping me out!

Today is quiet. The birds are the only sounds I hear. The neighborhood is deserted. I like it quite after the hubbub of the weekend.

During the summer, we didn’t have too many Sunday family dinners. The kitchen was small and keeping the oven on made the room swelter. Mostly we had barbecues, meat cooked outside but eaten inside. My dad would put his grill by the back steps so he could sit and read while the meat cooked. He used charcoal briquets as did most backyard cooks back then. My dad was a member of the use as much charcoal lighter fluid as you can school of thought. The height of the flames determined status. My dad was king.

When we moved down the cape and had a large yard, my dad would sit on a wooden lawn chair and tend his grill. He’d have a few drinks. Every now and then we’d hear the whoosh of the flames and knew fluid had been added then we’d check to make sure my dad hadn’t set himself on fire. He did that on occasion.

When they moved off Cape, the new house also had a big yard, and my father assumed his rightful position outside keeping an eye on the meat. He liked to use both a hibachi and a grill to accommodate the growing offerings as the menu had expanded well beyond hot dogs and hamburgers of my childhood. Now he cooked chicken, steak tips, Chinese sausages, kielbasa and even pork tenderloins.

What amazed me was that my father always cooked the meat just right despite the fires and the flames and the pops of his favorite alcohol passed to him through the open window. He was the backyard master of the grill.

 

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