All my life I’ve felt like my father is a force to be reckoned with when he’s grilling, but I also remember a lot of childhood summers spent waiting for the coals to heat up. It sucked, and I always wanted to start sooner than my dad did. The coals were on fire, ostensibly we’d been outside since the beginning of time. Why couldn’t we grill? Well, he wanted the coals at a certain consistency, which means having almost all gray coals before you start putting food on the grate.

It’s been a while since then, and it’s been very rare for me to get behind a grill myself, but recently I thought my girlfriend and I could have a picnic. I could grill up some food and I’d look cool and we’d have a tasty meal. We had a tasty meal (thanks Martha Stewart), but I felt a lot less cool about grilling outside when she’d asked me several times, “Is the grill ready yet?” I had some pride in knowledge of my craft, and some shame for the terrible slowness of it–as I repeatedly answered in the negative. If you don’t have a fancy-shit grill, it can take upwards of half an hour to really get those coals ready.

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