The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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I prefer charcoal. Mostly because of cost: I buy a $50ish charcoal grill every five years or so, and when it rusts out I scrap it and buy a new one. Where good gas grills are hundreds or thousands, and I'm not sure they last all that long anyway.
Consider using different kinds of charcoal. Most stores carry regular briquettes, but also lump charcoal and various hardwood flavor charcoals. You can get really interesting flavors, and sometimes just blending a little bit of expensive stuff in with your briquettes can get you the flavor. Lump charcoal is often a little harder to manage than briquettes, and it's important to make sure you get an even burn, but it can add a lot to the process.
On that note: get a small metal fan to blow on the charcoal, along with good fireplace. This will help you manage heat, get everything hot quickly, keep it even across the grill. You have to be careful to make sure you don't have a hot spot at one end where the burgers burn and a cold spot at the other where they're raw. A certain degree of unevenness is probably inevitable, and you want to rotate things to make sure all of them get heated evenly.
Grill everything. Vegetable, fish, sausages, burnt ends, fruit. Have fun with it!
If you're grilling at least a couple times a month, the price of the grill ends up being negligible compared to the price of the stuff you're cooking on it. My bottom-of-the-barrel gas grill from home-depot has lasted 5 years so far and still works great and looks like new, and I find that the fine-grained temperature control I get with a gas grill is helpful when I want to cook a bunch of stuff and have it all finish on the grill at the same time.
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$50 grill, are you buying used? About the only new thing I see in that price is a Weber Smokey Joe, which is probably not most people's ideal grill for most things. What model you got?
Two-zone grilling follows a philosophy of having a hot spot and a cold spot so that you have indirect cooking and direct cooking. Sear and then move over. You don't do that?
I have no idea. It's red, it's from home depot's clearance sale in the fall three years ago, and it's got a picture of a Kangaroo somewhere in the logo. Tbf, the price quoted is based on having purchased them A) years ago and B) on Clearance in the fall. The thing about Charcoal grills is that the cheap ones work just fine. Unless you're getting something like a big green egg or a pizza oven, all you need is a piece of tin that holds the charcoal and the rest is details.
There's a difference between intentionally having evenly burning areas at different temperatures, and unintentionally having cold spots where you don't want them. If you're trying to have different areas of the grill at different temps, you need to be even more careful to make sure you have each "zone" burning evenly.
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An old hairdryer will also do
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