I've been living in a house in Tucson, AZ for about a month now. That means I've been cooking stuff this whole time. You know, difficult stuff like hotdogs, mac&cheese and bowls of cereal.

I should have known better then to attempt to touch food after the ride to work when I poured orange juice all over my shirt. It was a clean, blue shirt. It now has pulp stains. Do pulp stains come out easliy? Or am I going to have to do pre-treating stuff(read: throw it away)?

Anyway, I got home and started getting the grill going. It rained out here over the weekend for the first time in 4 weeks. Of course we left the charcoal outside. Of course its that matchlight stuff so we didn't buy any lighter fluid. No, that type of charcoal is NOT waterproofed. Hence, no fluid for the charcoal.

After about 15 minutes of screwing around with lighters, matches and a fire salamander, I decided to go looking for fluid; hoping the previous tenants had left some. I found rubber cement. Now, I don't suggest doing this at home as you will soon see, but rubber cement is flamable. So I thought to myself, "if it burns, you can make a fire with it!" And out the doors we went, the cement and I.

I coated some birquettes with cement. Got a bunch on my fingers. Lit the birquettes. Lit my finger on fire. After quickly shaking out my finger, I squirted some more cement onto the charcoal to really get it going. Then the tube of cement lit on fire. Twice.

I got a little fire going and it was looking like the beer brats were going to be cooked. Then I got a nice, solid wiff of the charcoal. Note to the crowd: I had forgotten how toxic glues in general are. So, I get a nice, solid snort of the smoke. I almost went blind. That was the end for the grill.

Our final solution to "grill" the brats? Take the oversized foreman grill the prior tentants left here and put that ON TOP of the weber, so it kinda looked like we were grilling. It was, in fact, the Saddest Grilling Adventure evar.

Side note: putting three brats in beer for 10 hours is excessive. Don't do it.
- posted by Pat @ 2:58 AM