Alight in August?

If smoke gets in your eyes, it's because you're grilling – and all's right with the world.

By Paul Reidinger

WHEN I WAS a small boy, the summertime air always seemed to be full of ... gnats, of course. And mosquitoes, and breathless humidity building toward thunderstorms, and those ominous, bulbous green clouds, like some kind of evil spawn of the heavens, that meant conditions were "ripe" (as the shellac-head TV weather forecasters liked to say) for the formation of tornadoes. Once or twice every summer the civil defense sirens would wail, and we would drop whatever we were doing and flee to the damp basement.

Often what we were doing was grilling dinner on the patio, for summertime – that achingly brief season of warmth in subarctic lands – was the time to do everything outdoors. For when the summertime air was not full of menace and nuisance, it was full of warm white stars, and the perfume of charcoal smoke (mingled with the scents of sizzling meat and sausage) wafting toward them, and the after-dinner prospect of toasting marshmallows over the sullen embers.

The red Weber kettle on our patio reposed under my father's absolute fief. Men of his generation had no dealings with food other than eating it – and, in summer, presiding over the barbecue. Hence the perfect dominance of meat on those summertime menus: steaks, burgers, bratwurst (simmered first in beer and onions). Occasionally, we caught the odd rumor that some other father (no doubt some professorial type) had grilled a chicken on his barbecue, but such talk was unconfirmed – and, to us, irrelevant, since our father heartily disliked chicken, and professors. Sometimes, through my mother's sly agency, a quartet of baked potatoes wrapped in aluminum foil would find their way into the bed of coals, but her interpolations were rare and of limited scale, like a guerrilla raid. And we were only permitted to roast our marshmallows once the manly task of grilling and eating the meat had been completed.

I was well into my 20s before it occurred to me, having come across recipes in Bon Appétit and the New York Times, that the barbecue could be perhaps a more subtle instrument in a chef's hands than I had grown up believing. I had acquired, from the proceeds of my first actual job, one of those tiny, rectangular, gas-fired Weber grills that worked well on our series of tiny city decks. At first I stuck to the tried and true: burgers, skirt steaks rubbed with chili powder and garlic, brats imported from Milwaukee. These forays were satisfactory, and yet somehow we were left slightly unsatisfied, yearning for something else, something new.

An experiment with Yucatecan-style chicken breasts, marinated in citrus juice and chili powder (from a Marlena Spieler cookbook I still use after nearly 20 years, though its stained pages are falling away like autumn leaves), turned out well. Moreover, it was fast and easy – and easy to clean up after. Salmon steaks marinated in orange juice and basil turned out equally well and became part of the repertoire, as did grilled halibut steaks sauced with a ginger-cilantro potion I could make in five minutes in a saucepan on the stove inside.

It was not long before fish became the principal occasion for our grilling. Of course, it was tricky business: fish (with a few splendid exceptions like swordfish) tends to be delicate, falls apart easily, and is unforgivingly susceptible to being overcooked. But it accepts, like a lonely heart, that little kiss of extra flavor the grill imparts.

It was not long after becoming a confirmed fish-griller that I retired the little gas-fired Weber in favor of a full-size charcoal kettle – the kind my father always used, in fact; the kind that, by midwinter in my frosty homeland, was reduced to a snow-clad lump behind the house, like the remains of some luckless animal. The trade inevitably meant a loss of convenience, since the baby grill was incomparably convenient; it could be ignited by pushing the button on the built-in sparker, and it was hot enough to use in three or four minutes. That near-instantaneousness was important to someone coming home from work, sweaty and irritable after the adventure of mass transit, who needed to have food on the table in a half hour.

But I had discovered, through occasional use of a neighbor's grill, that charcoal gave a taste to food no gas grill could ever match, and the inconvenience was less than I'd feared. Charcoal mostly means time; once you light the coals in your little chimney, you must busy yourself somewhere else for 20 or 30 minutes until the coals are hot enough to spread for cooking.

Of course, summer in this city – or the season we city dwellers rather winkingly refer to as summer – does not in fact offer the most gracious weather for the charcoal griller. This town was made for gas grills, with their high-tech electronic ignition, their invulnerability to gusts of moist wind, fog, drizzle, and other such climatological banes of your basic charcoal fire. (On the other hand, owing to a lack of arctic blasts, you can easily grill here year-round. I've done Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas Eve rib roasts on the barbecue; I've even managed to get the thing lit in January rainstorms, though somehow those sorts of heroics no longer seems worth the bother. If you can grill it, you can probably roast it in the oven, in the dry, cozy comfort of your kitchen.)

Beyond the question of gas or charcoal and the always galling matter of summertime weather lies the reality that you can grill – I want to say "practically any food," but that's going too far – a great many foods, with great success. Steaks, yes; turkey cutlets, chicken sausages, butterflied pork tenderloins; fish, of course (steaks hold up better than fillets, but you can manage fillets if you pay careful attention and have a good spatula for quick flipping and removal and a clean, well-oiled grate that will release the fish without sticking) – but also a wide selection of fruits and vegetables. Even pizza.

I've sometimes used portobello mushrooms, with their wide, flat caps, as stand-ins for pizza crusts. Remove the stems (freezing them for stock), rub the caps all over with olive oil, top with daubs of goat cheese, some chopped tomato, and sprinklings of salt and thyme, and onto the grill they go for five or so minutes. If pizza doesn't appeal, remember that portobello mushroom caps, rubbed with olive oil, garlic, and salt and grilled a few minutes per side, make a fabulous vegetarian substitute for steak.

You can also do a standard, yeast-dough pizza on the grill, though it's tricky and you need a grill-worthy pan. Don't, for god's sake, put your pizza stone on the barbecue; it will crack. (Please do not ask me how I know this.) The implement that will work is a perforated, stainless-steel pan. I acquired mine years ago for $5 at (Simpsons-esque tableau here) an Indiana outlet mall bracketed by a freeway and a nuclear reactor; it – the pan, not the reactor – was supposed to create a crisp crust in a standard oven, which it failed to do. But it does withstand the heat of the grill. Tip: you must use the indirect-grilling, convection method – coals heaped on the edges of the kettle, not directly under the pan – or else you'll burn your crust.

Zucchini and eggplant are, of course, grill friendly. All they need is to be split lengthwise, rubbed with olive oil, seasoned, and plopped down for a few minutes until they start to turn soft and golden. Corn shows its finest face after a turn on the grill. I strip the ears of corn of their husks, rub the kernels with canola or peanut oil, put them directly over the fire (rotating them occasionally so they turn golden all over), and serve them with a stick of butter to roll them in and a dish of chipotle-garlic salt to sprinkle over them. (The recipe for the salt can be found in Reed Hearon's La Parrilla: The Mexican Grill; it's basically kosher salt, garlic, oregano, dried chiles, and a bit of oil ground up together. Keeps forever.) But you can also grill corn in its husk, which results, essentially, in a smoky steam bath and is probably better suited to more conservative palates.

Fruits: Tomatoes, of course, especially if they're going into salsa. But the stone fruits, too – peaches, nectarines, apricots – all take to the grill with aplomb. You sometimes see grilled peaches or nectarines, with a scoop or two of vanilla ice cream, on summertime dessert plates, but grilled stone fruit can also be diced and tossed with garlic, olive oil, chopped scallions, maybe a jalapeño, some cilantro, and some lime, until it becomes a fruit salsa beautifully suited to dress some grilled fish – or chicken, or turkey.