I swear I must’ve been
Dracula in another life because today I am craving blood. I would like nothing more than a rare-red,
juicy slab of filet mignon and a glass of dark red wine, perhaps a merlot or a malbec
that has been breathing for about a day.
I know child #3 needs to
leave for work almost the exact second that I get home, so stopping to buy
steak tips or some other yummy chunk of beef is not an option, but I do know
that I have hamburger in the fridge and gas in the grill.
I race home and start
playing Beat the Clock.
“Have you eaten lunch yet?”
I ask, fully expecting the standard, “Yes, I wolfed down a sandwich ten minutes
ago” answer. Instead, I get a response I
hope for but do not anticipate: He hasn’t eaten yet. Next question: “When do you have to leave for work?” Answer: Forty minutes.
I start madly creating
giant burgers and do a quick check of the weather radar. Yup, some rain is on the way, but no thunder
storms. I fire up the grill without a
second thought.
Halfway through the
searing of the meat, it starts to rain a little bit. I don’t mind.
It reminds me of camping in Vermont, where it rains constantly no matter
what the forecast, unless I book a hotel, in which case it doesn’t rain a
drop. Set up a tarp and a tent and a
grill in the mountains of Vermont, though, and it’s like teasing Mother Nature
to piss all over the place. I run
inside, grab an umbrella, and continue manning the grill like a boss.
My kid strolls out the
front door, possibly to assist the grilling but more probably to laugh at me
with my purple umbrella, battling the flames to expedite the dining process. We slap cheese on the mega-burgers, add them
to plates with heaps of canned corn I threw into a pot on the stove in the
midst of this mania, and …
Voila! Dinner!
It may not satisfy my
Dracula yearnings quite perfectly, but the grilled hamburgers are outstanding,
mouth-watering, and beefy. I skip the
dark red wine but opt later for a glass (or several) of pinot noir rose
recommended by some guy I was talking up at a recent wine tasting. It’s not the filet mignon dinner of my
daydreams, but it’s not every day that I leave work and have an impromptu and
successful barbecue just for the hell of it.
Kiddo gets off to work on
time, and I have the grill cleaned and re-covered just as the spritzing rain
stops. One hour after getting home, it’s
like we never even made a mess of the kitchen and patio. The neighbors will never know we had our own
mini-party save for the wafting burger aroma permeating the entire
neighborhood.
Go ahead, people; be
jealous. You should be – It is totally
and completely worth the breakneck effort.
