Have you ever thought about abandoning your use of charcoal briquets?  I've been seeing little bits of information here and there about what those perfectly formed black briquets actually contain and it aint just charred wood.  How about coal, oil, limestone, starch, sawdust or petroleum products?  Don't those sound like they taste good added to your meat?  Canada now actually restricts charcoal as a hazardous product.  Of course, here we also often add lighter fluid to our charcoal!  For the life of me, I have never understood this one as I can taste that petroleum all throughout the food cooked on it.

So, here are some new ideas for you.  First of all, if you must buy a product to grill on spend a tiny bit more and get lump charcoal which is just hardwood and nothing else.  Then spend an extra 10 bucks to get a chimney starter (see photo below) which will start your coals with 1 piece of newspaper perfectly, no lighter fluid required.  But if you really want to get radical and I mean radically cheap and self-reliant try this:  when you pick up those sticks around the yard that normally get thrown away, break them up and put them right into your grill! 

This takes a bit of tinkering as you will need some small sticks for starting with newspaper and then a few larger ones to keep the fire going, but take a look at my salmon over there!  I didn't spend even 1 cent on anything to cook those lovelies.  Sticks make a great fire especially for a quick-cooking meat like fish.  It's fun to construct the fire, keep it going just right and then get your free meal.  By the way, I'm a big salmon eater and people always ask me what I do to prepare it.  I do like spices on it when I'm out, but really, if I'm cooking it on the grill where it will get that nice crust on it from the good fat in it, I don't need anything else.  I just rub olive oil on it, slap it into the grill pan, give it about 3 minutes per side and I'm done.  This works well even on frigid winter days but maybe a few more minutes per side is the only change to the procedure.

From lighting the sticks to eating is maybe a total of 10 minutes so it's really even easier and faster than using charcoal.  Give it a try you might be surprised at the great results you can get for free!

Make your salad first because the

salmon cooks up in a flash!

These are some of the first greens

from the garden

(kale which came back from last year!)