I don’t know if you guys know this, but I’ve been working—very occasionally—on a grilling cookbook for the past eight months or so. I got the first maybe 10K words down and ran into something of a wall. I realized that I needed to experiment more, that I’d gotten stuck too deeply in a rut with my grilling to write an interesting full-length story.
I needed time and space to experiment.
My daughter’s emerging pescetarianism has been an unlooked-for ally. Now that we’re eating less chicken and no beef, I’ve been forced to get more creative. That’s not exactly a bad thing. Among other changes, I’ve been able to take myself off the hook as far as putting words down on paper goes, at least for the time-being, while simultaneously taking more notes and keeping a separate grilling-only Instagram account to track my progress. @GrillGeek_PWF if you want to follow the journey. I’m hoping to develop some second-order themes along the way as well, but that’s kind of the point. I started this book like it was a destination when, in fact, the book should document the trip itself.
As always, it seems, the whole thing has been harder than I thought it would be. I mean, sure, I could crank through some pages and throw something down, but that fails the “So What?” test. There are already a bunch of grilling cook books on the market. If I’m going to put out mine, there has to be a reason why. In that sense, having to push myself has been a Godsend.
Among other things, I’ve started cooking simpler more often. Which might make it sound like I’m cooking easier, but that’s not exactly the case.
It’s a little like running a 40-yard dash. Conceptually, all you have to do is go from here to there as fast as you can, and even if you’re not particularly good, the race is over in, like, five seconds or so. As you’re prepared, and you do all the little things right, it shouldn’t be a problem. But a race like the forty is over so fast, if you do anything wrong at all, you have no chance to recover. Screw up the start, and you may as well stop right there. By contrast, a 10K road race might take anywhere from forty minutes to an hour, but if you misjudge the start or just run a crappy second mile, that’s not necessarily the end of the world.
As a collegiate swimmer, my best race was the 200 Butterfly. It’s not a long race, exactly, but it’s also not the kind of race that hinges on getting an especially fast start or hitting a single good turn. It’s a race that’s very much about managing effort over time, and perhaps not coincidentally, that’s also the way that I’m most comfortable grilling.
Basically, I got into a rut grilling chicken legs and thighs and occasionally breasts or whole chicken quarters. Because while cooking chicken isn’t fast, it’s also not like cooking tuna or scallops, where a single mistake can ruin a perfectly good, often quite expensive meal. So long as you manage your heat over time, grilling chicken is pretty easy. The meat itself is essentially forgiving, and anyway, you’re just gonna cover it with a rub or with barbeque sauce. You might make a mistake, but you’ll still have a chance to stick the landing. By comparison, steak or scallops—or even hamburgers—can be a lot more challenging even though, conceptually, all you have to do is cook that stuff fast over high heat.
Unfortunately, you actually need to get the heat just right with simple foods in order to get the right cooking effects. If you cook too short, you’re liable to give folks salmonella. Cook too long, and dinner gets rubbery and tough. Cook on heat that’s too low, and you’ll wind up cooking too long, and everything gets tough. Cook on heat that’s too high, and you get an over-charred mess.
None of that is easy, even though it’s also not complicated. It’s maybe two steps, but you have to do them both correctly.
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| Tuna steaks with two different rubs, a basic paprika/garlic rub & a lemon-chipotle rub. |
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