A well-spent $6
One of the first things we bought when we bought our house was a Weber kettle grill; we had visions of steaks and burgers and skewers of vegetables on hot summer evenings, with cool beer to wash everything down.
After a while, we got more ambitious: let’s grill a leg of lamb! Let’s make the entire meal, including dessert, on the grill! (Note: that last turns out to be a bad idea, in general.)
And then: let’s make a whole chicken on the grill! For Nat’s birthday!
Of course, none of our cookbooks had a grilled chicken recipe in them, and the ones I found on the web made me frown. So off I went to the closest bookstore to my old workplace: Caliban.
It’s a used bookstore; I’m fond of it because it tends to have a lot of old newspapers and magazines as well as interesting books. It also has the usual used-bookstore cruft, of course, but I almost always find a gem wandering through its shelves. Luck was with me, because there on the shelf, in like-new condition, was a slim glossy volume: Chicken on the Grill. Inside the cover, in soft pencil, was written $6-. I flipped through it; it contained a lot of advice about the best way to grill various types of poultry, tips & tricks, and shiny recipes with shiny pictures.
It came home with me, and that weekend, we made Nat his birthday chicken. Since that weekend, years ago now, we’ve made a number of recipes from the book, and never once, not once, had them go wrong. It’s become one of my very favorite cookbooks; if you enjoy grilled chicken (or turkey or duck or Cornish hens), you could do worse than snap up a copy.