Kentucky Backwoods 4

Relighting the Fire

I was unsuccessful at quitting smoking.

They say it can be addictive, and I guess that must be true. I was up to several times a week on several different devices. I had reached the point where everything tasted of smoke and my clothes and hair lent their smell every room I entered, like some gigantic campfire scented Airwick. So I tried to go cold turkey. (Ever notice how most cold turkey is smoked? But I digress.)

My burgeoning fleet of smokers and grills were sold, permanently loaned or in a couple cases just plain hauled to the dump. As I transitioned to a nomadic life, there would be little time for such toys, and even less space to store them, I reasoned.

But as vice usually does, the urge to smoke crept back in my mind. My father asked me to do it with some dogs at a family gathering. Johnny entreated me to help him out with a case while he was out of town. In campgrounds, I would get a whiff of other people doing it, and finally one day in Florida my will crumbled. Even on the beach you are not beyond the reach of Amazon, a.k.a. The Candyman. To quote Jimmy Buffet, “temptation got the best of me, and I took a slash.”

So I bought a new grill.

Only a little one, mind you, and just for personal use, not for distribution. After careful consideration of available storage I decided to go back to the thing that originally hooked me and ordered a Lodge Sportsman’s Grill.

When I was in college, I was in an Ace Hardware where they had a stack of cheap Chinese hibachis on sale and I squandered a twenty for one on impulse. My folks had the ubiquitous Weber kettle on the patio for years, but I was rarely trusted around it as a kid. (Did anyone not love creating immense GulfLite fireballs as a child? But I digress again.) So the hardware hibachi was the first grill that was truly mine, and it was surprisingly serviceable.  With such a tiny surface area, fire management was crucial, and if things got out of hand there was no lid to slap on to squelch the flames and cover up your sins.

I burned a lot of cheap meat on that little guy, and learned a lot in the process. The lesson I learned too late was that cast iron and rain don’t mix kindly. By the time I left college the hardware hibachi had devolved into a flaky lattice of rust scale and creosote, looking very much like a the wreck of an old warship stranded on a reef.

When I looped back through Georgia, The Candyman had delivered a sturdy box containing my new Sportsman’s Grill. It was made of heavier cast iron and better engineered than my old hibachi, but basically the same design that has been around Asian countries longer than plastic chopsticks. Vowing it would not end up a beached hulk like its predecessor, I found a plastic tub to store it in that would protect the grill from the weather and protect my truck from grill grime at the same time. I topped the tub off with a few leftover kamado tools and a bag of lump charcoal and snapped on the lid.

The tub lived in the bed of the truck for a couple weeks untouched, but I could hear it whispering smoky promises to me from the dark as I went about my business. Finally I found myself in a Kentucky park on beautiful summer day with a freshly stocked fridge. I braced myself for an afternoon grilling marathon.

And oh, how good it was to cook with fire again! The little Lodge rose to the occasion despite the ridiculous amount of food I had. Managing the limited space was a challenge after years of ever-increasing capacity cookers, but doing more with less was part of the fun.

I cooked a family pack of chicken breasts, a raft of vegetables and a celebratory ribeye on about two pounds of charcoal. Results were spectacular – nothing beats a direct fire close beneath a cast iron grate for searing. A two hour session provided enough protein for me for two weeks worth of meals. Cleanup was a breeze, after a thorough cool down I just dumped the ash into the fire pit and stored the grill back in its tub.

No doubt the Lodge SG and I will share many wonderful moments together in the future, but that first time is always special.

Smoke on!