The evening we finally cooked outside
All spring the smell came over the fence. Somebody down the lane grills on Saturday evenings, and it would drift into our garden right around the time I was standing at the hob stirring something sensible. Thành would open the back door, breathe in like a cartoon character, and look at me. Neither of us said anything for weeks. That is how most things begin in this house.
We cleared the garden last month, so for the first time there was actually somewhere to put a grill. Not a big brick thing. I did not want a monument. I wanted something we could wheel out on a good evening and put away when the weather remembered where it was, which here is never far from your mind.
We settled on the Coleman RoadTrip 285, the stand-up one with the folding legs and the wheels. The first evening Thành cooked chicken skewers and halves of corn while I carried plates out, and the smell that had been taunting me over the fence all spring was finally coming from our side of it.
The practical part
It runs on the small propane cylinders, the squat camping kind, which you buy separately. Have one waiting or your first evening will be a sad one. The legs fold and it rolls like a little suitcase, so it lives in the shed and comes out when the sky cooperates. There are three burners with their own knobs, and after one uneven first attempt Thành worked out that the edges run cooler than the middle, which is less a flaw and more a fact of grills this size.
The lid has a thermometer built in, and the push-button ignition means nobody is hunched over it with matches in the wind. Underneath sits a water pan that catches the grease. Somebody who has used theirs for six years wrote that a splash of water in that pan before cooking makes the cleaning afterwards almost nothing, and they were right. We do it every time now.
The honest bit. It is heavy. Moving it through a narrow side gate is a two-person job the first time, and a few buyers have had theirs arrive with a dented lid, so open the box and check before you file the packaging away.
People keep these for years. Reading through the reviews, it holds four and a half stars across several thousand of them, and the ones I trusted most were not the excited first-week reviews but the tired, fond ones. Three years of steady use. Six years and still going. One person said it replaced their full-size grill entirely, which I did not expect for something with wheels.
Last night Kẹo ate his dinner on the back step because he wanted to sit near the grill while it cooled, the way you might sit near a fire. The garden smelled like the good kind of Saturday. I washed one pan instead of four, and the kitchen stayed cool, and I understood the neighbour down the lane a little better than I used to.
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