Oh Noooo, It’s Mr. Grill

Y’all, back before every food conversation moved to Instagram and TikTok, there was a forum. A real one, with threads and post counts and little green “Site Supporter” badges. It was a bunch of us who were all a little too obsessed with our kamado grills, and it was one of the best corners of the internet I ever belonged to. It doesn’t exist anymore, which is its own small grief for another day. But I’ve been going through old photos, and I found the week I hosted Mr. Grill.

Here’s the deal. Somebody on the board had one of those rubber Mr. Bill figures (yes, the “Oh nooooo” guy from the old Saturday Night Live sketches), and somebody else had the genius, slightly unhinged idea that we should mail him around the country. We renamed him Mr. Grill. Each member got him for a week, had to feature him in a cook on their kamado, and then packed him into a flat-rate box and shipped him on to the next person on the list. A traveling gnome, but make it barbecue.

Most folks did one nice cook and called it a day. I, as is my way, went completely overboard. Mr. Grill landed right in the middle of my 30 days of kamado grilling, and I made that poor rubber man earn his keep.

He supervised. Lord, did he supervise. He helped with maintenance, too, which is a generous word for “stood next to the tools looking concerned while I did the actual work.” He was there for the gasket replacement and for sorting a bag of lump into the good big pieces and the dusty little bits. He needed a bath after that one.

Then we cooked. We roasted tomatoes and jalapeños right on the grate for a smoky salsa that actually turned out great (which, around here, is not a given). We also had a spectacular failure, which I documented for the board in real time under the honest headline “eking success from the jaws of failure.” The plan was a long, slow tomato sauce out of odds and ends from the fridge. The sauce did not happen. What happened instead was that I scraped the salvageable bits onto a pizza and called it a rescue.

There were fajitas, done properly: peppers and onions blistered in the cast iron, chicken and flank sliced thin, all the fixings laid out. There were sausages he reached for and did not get. There were thick-cut pork chops with grilled peaches and a cast iron pan of asparagus, plus a cold Shiner because it was that kind of evening.

And there was the peach pie. Oh, the peach pie. It looked so promising going in. It came out as peach soup wearing a very handsome crust. Redeemed disaster it was not; it was just a disaster. But Mr. Grill stood by me anyway, which is more than the crust did.

Not every moment was a cook. Phoebe, my grumpy old lady cat and the true supervisor of the household at the time (Callie is her spirit child), gave him a thorough inspection and found him wanting. We got out of the house, too. He came to the Alpharetta farmers market, posed with the town seal like he paid property taxes there, and joined us at Five Guys for a burger (strictly for research; a girl has to scout the non-kamado competition). And because I’m from Texas but I’ve been in Georgia long enough to know what’s what, he had exactly one onion ring from the Varsity. What’ll ya have, Mr. Grill?

He also had a dram of the good Balvenie, which I’d argue he earned. (That was the start of a longer friendship between this blog and brown liquor, but that’s a story for another road trip.)

And then, like all good houseguests, he left. Into the flat-rate box, tape gun deployed, off to the next kitchen on the list.

I don’t know where that rubber man is now. The forum’s gone, a lot of those folks I’ve lost track of, and Phoebe left us in 2023. But for one week in 2014, a traveling Mr. Bill made my grilling a whole lot funnier, and I’m glad I kept the pictures.

Oh nooooo, indeed.

P.S. Yes, that’s my actual face and my actual post from nearly ten years ago on that forum screenshot. I picked one of my own posts on purpose; those threads belonged to a lot of people, and their names aren’t mine to publish.

P.P.S. If you’re new here and wondering why there’s a rubber man standing in a bag of charcoal on a food blog: welcome. This is pretty much the whole vibe.

P.P.P.S. The salsa really was good. The pie we do not speak of again.