Rock On!

Social media is amazing (remarkable talent for recognizing the obvious).  After publishing my little diatribe ("Rock the Grill") on the foibles of trying to use the Rockwood for the first time, a comment appeared from “Rockwood Charcoal”.   It was a very nice note, and I think I “published” it so you can scroll down and read it.  How in the world they found me is probably much beyond my comprehension.  At any rate it was much appreciated.  Will probably keep me using that brand (if you Rockwood folk are seeing this again!)

Anyway as with most things, the first step in solving a problem is to throw money at it.  In this case it was in the form of obtaining the suggested charcoal chimney.  I had failed to purchase same when we were in Annapolis and got the Rockwood fuel.  Well, I thought, I’ll just pop into Lowes and pick one up.  The new look Lowes with friendly employees helped me look and eventually we found an empty shelf where they should have been.  There was some knock off brand available (at a lower posted price) but of course not good enough for the Feeder, have to have a genuine Weber.  Okay, no real problem, I’ll stop by Wal-Mart on the way home - surely they'll have one. (Insert Shirley joke here) However, I had the same empty shelf experience there, sans any help from their employees who seemed to be enthralled with checking their shoes or condition of the floor.

Last ditch, I even went into the K-Mart (first time in YEARS) and found another knock off cheapy.  Crestfallen I returned home.  So next day I ventured out to Ace Hardware in Leonardtown and was asked if I needed help within steps of entering, and was guided to a very complete display of Weber products which included not one, but two sizes of the chimney.  The smaller one seemed to me to be too small so I got the same model I denied in Annapolis.  After that was my experience introducing the McKay's deli folk to Mortadella.

So the next day we decided to put it to the test with some Bruce Aidell’s famous Chicken and Apple Sausages (the history of which would make an interesting feeder column by itself).  So I assembled all the gear

Cubes, chimney, charcoal and newspaper (suggestion from FOJTY), and of course the trusty grill. So wadded up paper, set chimney on top, a little layer of charcoal, couple of the cubes, more charcoal, and we’re ready to go

So applied flame to the paper, and off we go

And unlike my previous experience (thank you “Rockwood Charcoal” note) we had a very nice fire in pretty short time

Only little hitch was dumping it out onto the grate, which resulted in kind of an untidy pile.

Room for improvement there.... Anyway, it produced a very nice grilled sausage.  Since this is about the heat source, I didn’t bother to take a picture of the finished product.  It is left to the imagination of the reader to envision a nicely brown sausage.  Plus, we were hungry.

One little concluding note however, as you might notice in the top picture the label is still on the chimney (for clarity).  Well, when I took it off and unwrapped it, the inside looked like below.  I don’t expect you to be able to read them, but what are all those paragraphs?  Recipes? Instructions?

  Nope! all twenty one of them are warnings in twenty one languages 

I'm sure the attorneys are involved in generating gems like: “do not use starter in high winds”, and “keep away from children and pets”.   Darn, i hoped to teach my parakeet to start the fire...

Anyway, with this new gear and knowledge I think we’re on our way to losing Mr. Briquette!  However we still will be

DFD