Our newest appliance - a gas grill. Today beloved husband and I finally made the effort and went grill shopping. Well, maybe I should say, I've been researching them online and today we hit one of the local stores and looked at a couple of models I thought would suit our needs.

The grill is a significant piece of equipment for me. That's why I was extra careful. Currently our kitchen has some dandy looking appliances - they were made for house beautiful. Unfortunately, I don't think they were made for actual, real life cooking.

The most frustrating thing, other than the horrific switch from gas to electric (hate it!) , is the "smoking oven". No matter what I do, how I cook, how careful I am, the damned thing belches out smoke whenever I use it to cook. No matter the style of cooking, bake or broil, there will be smoke. I have run the cleaning cycle at least once a month since we moved in. In my last house with a decent run of the mill gas range - I ran the cleaning cycle twice a year - if I remembered. I am so frustrated, I am hoisting the white flag - I give up!

You may wonder why we didn't just get a new oven. Well, the problem is, the original owners (who didn't do much cooking) had builtins of "rare" appliances. Right now, the maker of our oven has a store about 50 miles away. Other stores out here used to carry it, but no more. It's an odd size, so any oven work will also entail cabinet work and very likely a new exhaust fan. Plus I would want to put in a gas cooktop (propane) at the very least while everything is torn up. The price tag on all that is far higher than I want to spend at the moment. Thus the new grill - I'll just cook outside and use gas to do it!

I've never used a gas grill before - only charcoal. I love charcoal, but let's face it, it isn't the easiest thing in the world to fire it up in mid winter. With gas, you just make sure you have propane, and you're good to go. For the summer I'm thinking we'll use the charcoal grill on occasion, but for most cooking I can get back to using gas. Especially nice is the side burner, which I am very much looking forward to using. Yes, we splurged on that - it certainly wasn't absolutely necessary.

We didn't get a huge grill, although it was fun looking at the Viking outdoor oven - it's the Cadillac of gas grills. If I had the money, I'd drop it on that baby in a heartbeat! I love good cooking equipment, I think we've got potential with the nice 4 burner model headed our way. With only 2 people to feed, I can do meat on 2 burners and vegies on the other 2 at a lower temp, plus any extras like rice on the side burner.

But you never know what kind of fun will happen when you mix me with a heated cooking surface. This is why I'm paying a few dollars extra to have the store deliver it and set it up. I can have them show me how everything works and I can make sure that when it catches on fire for the first time - it will hopefully not be my fault for improperly connecting the gas line or some such nonsense.

Stay tuned. Tuesday is delivery day.

Posted by: Teresa in Food and Drink at 05:33 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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