Saturday, November 22, 2008

cooking outdoors at sixteen below

by some fluke or miscalculation, my propane tank still has some gas in it after a summer of hamburgers and so last night i decided to spark it up and cook some steaks. now for the record, my family does not eat a lot of meat. one person is a vegetarian, one person is more-or-less vegetarian but will eat chicken that is disguised as whatever it takes, and two others are omnivores. so the steak was a bit unusual for us.

so out i went into the biting wind and blowing snow crystals to render these steaks for the omnivores. did i mention it was cold? sixteen below (celsius) with the windchill! my first task was to hammer on the lid to break the icy seal that closed it shut. this took a few mighty wacks to each of the three sides that i could reach and i discovered that (being hollow) the barbeque gives off a lovely bell-like quality when treated with such disrespect . . . . i turned the dial to get the propane flowing and failed to hear the usual obligatory hiss . . . . so i chucked a match in and messed with the dials until whoompf!!!(and you really do have to see a barbeque in the dead of night - a cold cold night to really appreciate just how widespread and pretty that "whoompf" actually is.) there was a nice orange, red, yellow and eventually blue glow.
i lowered the formerly-attached-to-four-hooves product down onto the grimy grill which mercifully i couldn't really see because it was pitch black but for the blue glow of the flickering propane. then i realized i'd forgotten to get the tools - found them frozen onto the barbeque. a little more hammering and i loosened up some tongs and a spatula.
the food was good - i made up a nice batch of fried herbed potatoes and a gravy that included the heel of a bottle of chilean red.

my boy and i were delighted!!!

3 comments:

Goldenrod said...

Fried herb potatoes? Sounds delicious, Steven!

I am now in the process of impatiently waiting - let's see, another almost 3 hours now - for my slow cooker to deliver its fait accompli. (Pretty soon the magnificent smells will begin to permeate the whole house, and then I will be in really deep doodoo!)

Second time in less than a week that I have made chili ... ... delicious!! Altho I now have the 'breakfast sausage', I have yet to attempt that recipe - am enjoying the chili too much just now!

I'm doing my very best to try and send warm thoughts your way, but I don't know if I can penetrate that icy cold 'Canadian front' that passed through here less than 24 hours ago!

Goldenrod said...

Should probably amend my last comment to say that, when I lived in the frozen north, we didn't call them 'Canadian fronts' ... think we called them 'Arctic air blasts/masses' or some such. I imagine you do the same?

steven said...

i figure it'll be fairly cold from now until march or april. the cold fronts? well i know them as arctic air masses . . . we track the jet stream daily in this household to figure what's coming our way as the weather moves in from the west and the north so you can pretty much predict what and when something narsty is arriving.
steven