One of my favorite parts of the warmer months is backyard cookouts. I grew up with a father who enjoyed grilling and would grill at least once a week throughout the warmer months of most of my childhood (a habit that faded as I got older) and the act of grilling out has become indelibly printed on what my idea of “summer” is to the degree that I just don’t feel like it’s actually summer unless I’ve gotten a chance to grill out at least once. Or to eat when someone else grills out, as is most-often the case because I’ve lived in apartments all of my adult life and only one of them has allowed grills. So I’ve done what I can to guarantee myself at least one grill-out per summer, to make sure I get my fix, but sometimes that doesn’t happen until the end of the year. It really depends on when my local home-owning friends are available and what they’re up to on major US holidays, birthdays, and random nice weekends during the summer. It takes a lot of stars-aligning for grill-outs to happen without extensive planning, but they’ve been known to happen. I know that when I get my own house and have a basement/garage freezer for storing all kinds of extra stuff in the longer-term, I’m absolutely going to be the Spontaneous Grill-out Person. Someday.

To be honest, I just really appreciate the grill as a method of cooking. Depending on your preparation, there’s usually fewer dishes to do after the fact, you can cook just about anything with the right tools, and you don’t have to worry about heating up your house/apartment while rushing around your kitchen or running your oven. It’s a level of perfection that’s difficult to find in any other method of cooking. Even the dishes you do use rarely get as dirty or difficult to clean since they’re usually serving dishes or containers, rather than a dish, pain, or tray that had stuff baked or cooked directly on it. Plus, you can make nicely balanced meals with relatively little fuss. A bit of oil, salt, and pepper is all you really need for most vegetables and meats you want to just slap on the grill and cook. Or you can get super fancy if you’re feeling up for it and make something more complex but just as delicious by doing more preparation and seasoning work. Almost all of grilling works the way I prefer my cooking to work: its based on gut instinct, experience with your cooking implements, and baseline knowledge of when certain foods are safe to eat. You don’t have a specific time you need to cook a steak or a burger or a hotdog (though you can get those if you’re SUPER into temperature maintenance and monitoring on your grill). You just need to get them hot enough or to have the right look on the outside.

Beside all that are the excellent foods that often accompany grilling. Various types of melon, pretzels or chips of various flavors, tons of types of pickles and olives, and so much more. All things that are easy to lay out, enjoyable to eat, and typically plentiful in quantity. Now, I’m sure I’d get sick of all this stuff if I ate it with the frequency that I consume most of my low-preparation-effort meals (just like I eventually get sick of the current versions of those things and have to swap them out for something new), but having access to this whole line of meal options would really add some variety to my life. It would be a lot easier to keep myself from getting tired of the stuff I’m eating if I had access to a grill. Of course, I’m sure I’d have to overcome the whole “is it worth firing up the grill just to make two or three hotdogs” inertia, especially because I got so used to preparing those in my toaster oven back before it died on me and it’s difficult to beat the efficiency and ease of a small toaster oven, but I think the concept of grilling, along with not needing to deal with the smell of burning hot dog grease inside my apartment for days afterwards would make it worth the time to actually go outside to cook.

So far, my one attempt to participate in a grill out has been thwarted by the wild weather we’ve been having lately. It’s difficult to confidently plan a cookout when the predicted weather more than twelve hours out has proven to be unreliable, what with all the storms we’ve had that suddenly changed directions, blowing directly across us or arcing away from us at the last minute so we’re stuck with the humidity they would have broken for an untold number of days until another storms breaks it or it slowly fades on its own. The other major barrier has been social awkwardness and my unwillingness to invite myself over to my friends’ house to get a cookout started by sheer willpower. I feel bad asking people to host me and, by implication if nothing else, cook for me (since one of my two friends who lives nearby is a chef and usually kindly but insistently takes over any food preparation happening near him), so I try to avoid it outside of situations where I’m suggesting possible weekend plans when we’ve already agreed to hang out. I’m a bit less hesitant to directly ask for it around my birthday, since I’m usually splurging on really nice food for everyone, taking advantage of my birthday almost always being around Labor Day, and am still not one to go to restaurants. My friends understand this and understand that, since they’ve got a house and a yard, it is a lot easier to gather at their place for the end-of-the-summer cookout that I usually try to make out of my birthday. It’s the one thing my birthday is still good for these days. An excuse to grill some food, eat some cake, and enjoy the slowly dwindling summer.