As Father's Day approached, I looked for new grilling tricks that a smoky old dad, a fan of live fires, might employ. Leafing through a slew of new grilling books and testing recipes, I found several.
In retrospect, I see that most my insights would qualify as "Duh!" - or as Homer Simpson, one of my favorite father figures, might say, "Doh!" - moments. They involved simple changes in procedures and taking liberties with recipes.
For instance, one of the tastiest dishes I made was grilled shrimp flavored with a sauce made with Old Bay seasoning.
Usually any time I place raw shrimp on a hot grill grate, some of the shrimp fall through the grate into the fire, a loss I wrote off as an appeasement to the grill gods.
My "Doh!" moment came when, instead of trying to place shrimp on a hot grate over a sizzling fire, I removed the grate from the cooker. When the grate was cool, I placed the shrimp on it and could position them in safe spots without fear of burning my fingers.
Then I returned the shrimp-laden grill grate to the cooker. When it came time to flip shrimp, I used tongs. When the shrimp were done, I donned insulated gloves and carefully lifted the grate from the fire and dumped the bounty of cooked shrimp into a large bowl. There were no casualties, human or crustacean.
I liked the Old Bay sauce a lot. But the trouble was that much of it ended up on the shrimp shells, not on the flesh. I spotted a pool of the sauce at the bottom of the bowl and used it as a dipping sauce, dragging the peeled bodies of the shrimp in it. Eureka!
If form holds, a lot of us dads will be firing up, grilling shrimp and other fare, on Father's Day. Father's Day is the fourth-smokiest holiday of the year, trailing the Fourth of July, Labor Day and Memorial Day, says the GrillWatch survey sponsored by the makers of Weber grills.
Moreover, according to the big boys of barbecue that I spoke with, the current corps of backyard fire-starters is getting smarter and is wielding more gear.
Steven Raichlen, a Baltimore native and author of the recently revised 10th anniversary edition of The Barbecue Bible, told me that sales of barbecue paraphernalia pick up around Father's Day. Three top-selling tools on his Web site store are spring-loaded tongs equipped with LED lights, a grill cleaning brush that has the size and feel of a baseball bat, and the ever-trusty instant-read thermometer.
