Adventures in grilling abound

It happens more than most people would like to admit. Everyone knows that whether you’re using gas or charcoal, grill safety is important. But sometimes, things just go a little haywire.

Take, for example, the case of Tim Pearce of Stanwood, Washington. Pearce was at a state park on Puget Sound with his wife and another couple. He was trying to barbecue on a portable propane grill, but the wind was quite high and the barbecue kept blowing out. “Each time I would remove the lid and re-light the grill,” Pearce said. “You can imagine that I was getting quite tired of this process. At one point, the grill went out and I failed to remove the lid before pressing the striker. The lid had filled with gas and when I tried to ignite the burner, the gas exploded, the lid blew into the air and my eyebrows and bangs were completely singed.”

Christopher Arpad of Winnetka, California, can relate. About a year and a half ago, Arpad was living in an apartment in West Los Angeles that had a very small balcony. He had purchased a portable gas grill and was eager to try it out. “I had been wanting to barbecue on this balcony for while and when I came across this cute little grill I just had to have it,” Arpad said. “A regular-sized grill just wouldn't fit up there. So I get this thing home and put it together. I couldn’t figure out if the gas knob was on or off. It only has an arrow pointing to an open circle logo and a closed circle logo, no words saying ‘On’ or ‘Off.’ Perhaps it was clearly written in the manual somewhere but I couldn't find it – and I am one of those rare guys who actually reads the manual! But how hard could this be, it was just a grill right?” 

So Arpad said he took a guess and turned the knob completely in one direction. “I can't remember which one I finally settled on, but needless to say, it was the wrong choice,” he said. “I started screwing the gas canister to the bottom of the grill and I heard the gas come swishing out. This is one of those times where you wish you had an extra arm. I was holding the grill in the air with one hand and turning the gas canister with the other. So I attempted to let go of the grill and support it, now half attached to the gas canister, with my right hand, and tried to turn the gas knob quickly to the other circle logo, which apparently was supposed to be a universal off.”

As bad luck would have it, the same knob also turned out to be the matchless ignition button.
“In my attempt to turn off the escaping gas coming from my half-assembled grill, I managed to click this dual function knob and the grill ignites at full throttle and in mid air,” Arpad said. “They should have given this little grill some sort of name like ‘Molotov Cocktail BBQ 2000" because that is what it was quickly resembling. I dropped it, almost losing it over edge where it would have gone crashing three stories down onto some unsuspecting passerby, but it landed on the floor of my balcony and I managed to turn it off before burning down my entire apartment building.”

Arpad too had a few singed eyebrows, but no other damage was done.
“Eventually I was brave enough to get it all put together and light it once again for a quick barbecue,” he said. “But somehow the fun of barbecuing was lost with the ever-lurking fear of lighting that stupid little rocket launcher thereafter. I switched to an indoor George Foreman-type grill for my apartment grilling from then on.”

Susan Meng of McPherson, Kansas, had a similar problem, but with a charcoal grill. Meng said she had just met her now-husband, Jerry, and they were going to grill burgers.
“I had never started coals before, but how difficult could it be?” she said. “I put in some coals, soaked them with starter fluid, lit the match and put on the lid.”

So far so good. “Later I came out to check on the burgers and when I took the lid off the grill, a ball of fire flew out,” Meng said. “I slammed the lid back on the grill not knowing how I had done this. To this day, I have never started coals again. There is something about vents and air flow about which I still know nothing.”

Besides, Meng said if she remains ignorant of this “foreign concept” of cooking, she has yet another excuse not to do it. “While this is funny, I am seriously lucky I wasn't severely burned,” she said. “I do believe that cooking, anywhere, as a general rule, is extremely dangerous and I avoid it at every opportunity.” 

Murray Popover of Leavenworth, Kansas didn’t have as much trouble with the grill as with the food itself. 
When Popover was newly married, he loved grilling on his new grill. He grilled year round, in the rain, the snow, the heat. He was a self-proclaimed grilling fool. “One day I put my chicken on my grill – a charcoal-powered Weber,” he said. “Just as I plopped the meat on, it started to rain. No sweat! I cooked one side, dashed out and flipped it over. The flames were raging so I kept going out to make sure this fatty chicken didn't get too crisp.” 

Popover admits he was getting soaked. “But neither rain, nor sleet or the dead of night (and believe me it was the dead of night) could deter me from my appointed task,” he said. “Besides, my wife was starving.”

When Popover decided the chicken was done, he pulled it, burned skin and all, from the rack of the grill, then dashed up the steps towards the front door. “Unfortunately, my foot hit the top step and I went down, sending the chicken shooting out over the deck at the top of the steps,” he said. “Without missing a beat I scooped it up onto the plate and took it inside, pointing out to my hysterically laughing wife that you couldn't see the dirt through the charcoal burns anyway. And it certainly added new flavor to dinner.” 

Rather than learning his lesson, Popover decided to give grilling another go. “I whipped up some lamb burger patties and was waiting for my wife to come home so I could put them on the grill,” he recalls. “And I waited and I waited and I waited.” Finally, he called her on her cell phone and was able to calculate when he should put the patties on the grill. “So I warmed up the grill and placed the burgers on it,” Popover said. “Then I went inside and puttered around in the kitchen. Five minutes later, or probably what seemed like an eternity to the lamb burgers, I went outside to flip them. Instead of lamb burgers, I found four black hockey pucks. I'd burned those burgers to a crisp.”

So when his wife came home, she smelled the burnt burgers and asked what happened. He explained, but nothing could convince her to try one, and Popover had to admit that he didn’t want one either. “The only one who was willing to eat those hockey pucks was my dog, Murphy Brown,” Popover said. “She's liberated enough to try anything.”

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