Get Your Holiday Grilling Tips Here!

So here it is, the Fourth of July weekend, the showcase time for men and women who know their stuff when it comes to cooking meat over fire. You want to get in on the grilling action, but you're a little intimidated by the array of options and amount of equipment required.

Set your mind at ease, fellow griller, I'm here to help lead you through the minefield.

The Menu

Before you set up the grill or light the charcoal, it would be helpful to know what you plan on cooking. Just about ANYTHING can be cooked on a grill, from tomatoes to tofu, but for brevity's sake we're going to stick to the carnivorous choices.

BEEF: This offers perhaps the widest array of choices. If you're going high-budget or have a small gathering, steak is always a good choice. Season it with a sprinkle of kosher salt and some fresh-ground black pepper and have at it. A cheaper, more homey option would be beef ribs, which are best when boiled before grilling. Brisket, which is on sale just about everywhere this time of year, is a slightly tricky but highly tasty and economical choice. Just bear in mind: NEVER, EVER rush cooking a brisket. Slow and steady wins the palate. You might want to head the burger route, as I will be this year, in which case I'd strongly recommend grinding your own meat. If you have a food processor, just give 2-inch chunks of equal portions of chuck and sirloin 10 1-second pulses and you'll have a perfect burger grind. Kabobs are another great grilling idea. Alternate chunks of sirloin with small onions, chunks of bell peppers and new potatoes. Cherry tomatoes go nicely on the skewer, too.
Pork: From chops to butt, from ribs to shoulder, there aren't many parts of the pig that aren't grill or smoker friendly. As a general rule of thumb, the larger the piece of meat you're cooking, the more slowly you should cook it. Chops and pork steaks are great grill fodder, and there are very few things more coveted by true barbecue aficionados than a slowly smoked pork butt pulled apart and doused with a good vinegar-based sauce. The best flavoring I've found recently for grilled pork is David Zey's mustard barbecue sauce, available at www.zy-sauce.com. It's seriously tangy and will wake up your whole face. Of course, one of the greatest contributions the pig has made to our grilling pleasure is sausage. Whether you prefer brats or smoked links, sausage and grilled onions on a good hoagie roll are a sure winner.
Seafood: Quick to cook and amenable to a wide variety of flavors, seafood of all kinds take the grill like, well, like a fish to water. Put some shrimp on a skewer or fish in a basket and season to your heart's content. For the smoker, a batch of catfish fillets can be turned into a southern delicacy in no time.
Chicken: Chicken is one of the more straightforward grilling selections. There aren't a whole lot of "cuts" to choose from, and the cooking technique is fairly simple: as slow as possible to keep from drying out the meat on the outside while leaving the inside raw.

ANY of the above meats can be marinated for extra flavor, and the options are far too numerous for me to go into here. I will pass along a simple, VERY tasty recipe for chicken marinade invented by the mother of Lori Flanigan, master proofreader and kitchen whiz:

Ingredients:

½ c. Tamari soy sauce
¼ c. vegetable oil
¼ c. red wine vinegar
1 tsp. ground oregano
½ tsp. dried basil
½ tsp. garlic powder or 1 tbsp. garlic juice
¼ tsp. freshly ground black pepper

Mix all ingredients together. Marinate chicken at least four hours or overnight. Good for boneless breasts and chicken fingers, too!

Tools

Grill: Want to know a secret? I do all my haute cuisine grilling, cook all my expensive cuts of meat and seafood, on a grill I got for less than $40 at Wal-Mart. If you've got one of those montrous "outdoor kitchens" that cost as much as a small plane, more power to you; but if you're an average Joe or Jane, don't you DARE feel like an inferior cook because your grill came unassembled in a cardboard box off a discount store shelf. As long as it has a grill, a sturdy firebox and some vents to control the airflow, you've got everything you need. I use a big, square patio grill made by Sunbeam. It has a ton of surface space (I can cook 10 chicken leg quarters at a time) and is easy to clean. Let your wallet and cooking aspirations be your guide.
Tools: Here, again, you can spend a week's pay on your tools or you can outfit yourself completely and still have enough money left over to pay the light bill. First, let me relieve you of one tool you should NOT have or use under any circumstances: a long-handled fork. Poking holes in meat lets juices drip out, and there is no earthly reason why you would ever want to do that. My grill toolbox contains a pair of spring-loaded tongs, a large spatula/turner, a stout wire grill brush, a hunk of 00 steel wool, a squirt bottle full of water, a bag of mesquite or hickory chips and a probe thermometer for testing large cuts of meat. That's it! The steel wool, by the way, is there for the finishing scrub on my grill. A grill brick will do the same job.

Before you go slapping meat to flame, a quick note on creating said flame is in order.

For those of you with gas grills, the options are pretty much limited to creating a spark to make the gas start burning without taking out half a city block, so I'll leave you to that.

For charcoalers, however, it's a different story. Just about all of us grew up watching dad with the metal can of lighter fluid, hearing it make that "ploomp" sound as he squeezed a pint or so of petroleum distillate onto the charcoal. He would then strike a kitchen match and create, for a few minutes, a flame that would have spy satellites thinking the Cold War had turned hot.

Thankfully, times have changed and you've got more options now that don't release near the hydrocarbons into the air or leave your food with that scrumptious petroleum aftertaste.

Electric starters are fairly popular, but they're too slow for my taste. I prefer a sturdy chimney starter, with charcoal in the top and wadded up newspaper or, better yet, junk mail in the bottom. Light the paper, and you'll have rocket-hot charcoal in about 20 minutes. Best of all, you can start another batch of charcoal in the chimney while you're cooking with the first batch, an invaluable option for those really long grill sessions.

A final note, this one about the charcoal itself: you'll hear a lot of hardcore grill cooks talk about "natural chunk" charcoal. This is charcoal the way nature intended. It's shaped like the sticks it's made out of, and lights faster and burns hotter than briquets.

However, it also costs about twice as much as briquets.

I've come to a compromise. For applications where high temperature is of critical importance, like steaks or burgers, I use natural chunk. For long-term cooking, like chicken, brisket or pork butt, it's briquets all the way.

I hope this has opened your eyes to some new possibilities, and made you a little more comfortable with what you've got planned. Now get out there and enjoy your holiday!