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Musings from Moyieboy ... |
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Get out the fire extinguisher, Mama,
it’s barbecue season |
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May 11, 2017 |
By Ken Carpenter
Memorial Day will be upon us pretty soon,
carried away on a cloud of aromatic meat smoke,
as it is every year. Barbecue season is
officially here, and for four months rare will
be the evening when your nostril radar can’t
detect a whiff of flame-singed beast in the air.
Barbecue has had a lofty status since the first
Neanderthal chef stumbled across a toasted
critter in the aftermath of a lightning spawned
forest fire.
“Yabba dabba doo!” he may have cried when the
first morsel passed his lips, and the world’s
first rib joint could not have been long in the
making.
The savory art of barbecuing is now a
multi-billion dollar business. Grills, sauces,
rubs, books, cooking classes, TV shows,
implements of all kinds, and MEAT, MEAT, MEAT.
There are those to whom the word barbecue is
holy. You mess with a man’s grilling ceremony
and you will risk taking a twenty-dollar
double-pronged serving fork to the gullet.
Saints preserve your immortal soul if you dare
to share your opinion on the preparation of the
sacrificial flesh. Try to restrict the
conversation to something less argumentative,
like politics or religion.
I suppose it should be mentioned that some
things get barbecued that are not removed from
an animal, but they are no threat to the king.
You do not buy a $300 gas grill to sear turnips.
As it is with so many things in today’s world,
much of the barbecue business is fueled by
competition and envy. If the dude across the
street buys a stainless steel, nuclear powered
grill big enough to roast a musk ox, it won’t be
long before one of his neighbors installs one
that can do a hippo. It is just human nature to
one up the next guy.
With all the fancy stuff you can accumulate for
barbecuing, there is still nothing that can beat
cooking a wiener on a stick over a campfire. Of
course, if you have an aversion to eating
tubular beast lips you may want to choose a less
uniform hunk of meat to spear.
I have always liked my hot dogs best when they
are burnt black. Naturally the eggheads who try
to run our lives have now determined that the
black is full of carcinogens, but I am not too
worried. I reckon my coffee, peanut butter
sandwiches or toothpaste will have given me some
other form of cancer long before burnt meat gets
a chance to kick in.
If you believe everything you hear, the only
non-cancerous thing you can put in your mouth is
a boiled rock.
One handy tidbit to remember during the summer
is if you want it to rain, simply move your
grill and all of its sidekicks into the middle
of your lawn. It will begin to cloud up as soon
as everything is packed out from under your
patio cover, and before the burgers are cooked
the first drops will start falling.
As usual, all this talk about food has given me
an appetite for something I don’t have the
inclination or ingredients to fix.
Come to think of it, toast is just barbecued
bread.
I don’t like my toast black though, so it won’t
be quite the same as most of my barbecues.
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