JUNEAU — Like every red-blooded American guy — even those originally from blue states — I love barbecue. I love it so much I spell out the whole word: b-a-r-b-e-c-u-e. Three-letter abbreviations are for posers.
Now, I may not run the most elaborate barbecue rig. I don't geek out on wood-chip blends or dry rub, which sounds more like an unpleasant makeout maneuver than a spice combination. I'll use the verb "barbecue" when I really mean "grill" and vice versa, although I'm aware of the difference.
Along with unsticking cars from snow and belching on command, barbecuing (slow cooking at low temperatures, typically over hot coals) and grilling (faster cooking at higher temperatures, typically over gas burners) are two of the few stereotypically male talents I brought with me to Alaska.
So while I may not be quite as adept at catching, shooting, cleaning, field dressing or filleting food, I can definitely take it from there.
My childhood house in the New York suburbs featured a beautiful grill, custom built by the original owner, a professional brick mason. I can picture it now: a party-sized propane job set into a massive structure that resembled a sacrificial altar — apt, considering all the burnt offerings my father made there.
Don't get me wrong. He was a great dad, taught me how to ride a bike, how to tie a tie (which I still can't do without video-conferencing him) and various techniques for placating Mom. But Dad incinerated everything he ever grilled. Perhaps this owed to the several sports magazines he'd routinely consume in the process. Or perhaps it was the several black Russians consumed.
Going veggie
Not that my mom respected protein either. Again, great mom — hand-sewn Halloween costumes, cookies if we behaved, techniques for placating Dad. But her signature dish was meatloaf that somehow managed to come out blackened on the outside yet raw in the center. The middle slices — those with the least surface char — were sometimes still a little frozen. Evading meatloaf was the prime motivational force behind my becoming a vegetarian at age 16.
Interestingly enough, this transformation ensured the mantle of family grill-master would be passed to me. As a condition of going veggie, my parents insisted I pay for special groceries by working as a prep cook at a fried chicken joint, which served to further cement my vegetarianism.
Turned out, the non-meat grillables were spendy, and I certainly couldn't trust either parent with portobello mushroom steaks, let alone heirloom tomatoes and halloumi cheese (which was, like, $10 for a 6-ounce block, and we're talking 1992 dollars). As long as I was caramelizing Vidalia onion skewers and toasting Not Dog buns, I figured I might as well as cook for my parents, too. Plus, if they weren't out there, I could sneak a cigarette under the camouflage of grill smoke.
In college, barbecues tended to emphasize liquids over solids. Still, my roommates and I hosted plenty, and sometimes someone actually brought an item to place on the Weber kettle. I was the only one to be trusted with fire. One summer, I worked for a caterer as an on-site grill guy — I still have the super long, commercial-grade spatula, which continues to inspire tool envy in all who behold it.
These days, now a 30-something Alaskan with a house and family I periodically need to flee, I find grilling provides the perfect excuse to stand on the deck and down black Russians (Dad was on to something there).
More than that, I take pride in my grilling, similar to the satisfaction gleaned from perfectly de-iced front steps, or a raging fire coaxed from damp logs. Poor performances haunt me, like the gruesome scorching I administered to a bunch of hot dogs at my son's preschool picnic this past May.
My grilling fantasy
In the bedside notebook originally intended for late-night story ideas, I wake up feverishly scribbling down sudden bursts of inspiration, brainchildren like taking a whole chicken, slathering it in oatmeal stout barbecue sauce, then roasting it standing up with an open IPA shoved up its deal. Yes, deal — that's a technical term.
In my ultimate grilling fantasy, I sear a perfect caribou steak with a crusty rind, red and bloody at the core and cedar-plank a sockeye — just this side of not bearing pathogens, springy to the touch, glistening in a butter-maple-Johnny's glaze — while simultaneously soaking in my hot tub.
My kids are asleep. My wife is awake. And the bar is fully stocked.
Man, that'd be killer.
Geoff Kirsch is a Juneau-based writer and humorist.