Dumb Grilling Questions

We just bought our first ever sizeable outdoor grill (read: not one purchased for $29.95 and powered by a bag of charcoal) with our tax refund. A big four-burner Kenmore propane grill. My family back home in Virginia didn't do a lot of grilling when I was a kid, though we did have the kind with lava rocks, and I was never allowed near the damn thing, so I have to admit, you could fill a book with what I don't know about proper grilling technique.

I stopped eating meat myself a while ago to get my cholesterol down and for vaguely moral reasons, but my wife made it clear that she wanted no part of that madness, so when we fired the new grill up for the first time yesterday we made her a salmon steak, a top sirloin, and some snausages while I made some grilled portabello mushroom caps and grilled tofu steaks for me. Yeah, laugh it up.

We used one of those super-duper intelligent grilling forks with the temperature probe built in to measure the internal temp of her steak and fish and everything came out perfectly. I'll have to take her word on the meat being excellent; I eyed her gobbling as I gnawed idly on my tofu and fungus. But that being said, I still have some dumb questions.

1) Are you supposed to grill with the top of the grill down or not? The instructions said to preheat it that way but we weren't sure what to do during the actual cooking process.

2) Do you spray Pam or something on your steaks and fish before putting them on the grill? We did, but .. are you SUPPOSED TO? We don't want to break any grilling codes and get scolded by the American Beef Council.

3) Is it wrong to use your grill out on a wooden deck, or are the repeated admonitions in the manual about not doing that just CYA on the part of the manufacturer? If we watch the thing while we're using it, it seems like it's unlikely to burn the house down, but we weren't sure if everyone else alive out there had their grill stationed on a concrete back yard pad or driveway or what.

Dumb Grilling Questions

We just bought our first ever sizeable outdoor grill (read: not one purchased for $29.95 and powered by a bag of charcoal) with our tax refund. A big four-burner Kenmore propane grill. My family back home in Virginia didn't do a lot of grilling when I was a kid, though we did have the kind with lava rocks, and I was never allowed near the damn thing, so I have to admit, you could fill a book with what I don't know about proper grilling technique.

I stopped eating meat myself a while ago to get my cholesterol down and for vaguely moral reasons, but my wife made it clear that she wanted no part of that madness, so when we fired the new grill up for the first time yesterday we made her a salmon steak, a top sirloin, and some snausages while I made some grilled portabello mushroom caps and grilled tofu steaks for me. Yeah, laugh it up.

We used one of those super-duper intelligent grilling forks with the temperature probe built in to measure the internal temp of her steak and fish and everything came out perfectly. I'll have to take her word on the meat being excellent; I eyed her gobbling as I gnawed idly on my tofu and fungus. But that being said, I still have some dumb questions.

1) Are you supposed to grill with the top of the grill down or not? The instructions said to preheat it that way but we weren't sure what to do during the actual cooking process.

2) Do you spray Pam or something on your steaks and fish before putting them on the grill? We did, but .. are you SUPPOSED TO? We don't want to break any grilling codes and get scolded by the American Beef Council.

3) Is it wrong to use your grill out on a wooden deck, or are the repeated admonitions in the manual about not doing that just CYA on the part of the manufacturer? If we watch the thing while we're using it, it seems like it's unlikely to burn the house down, but we weren't sure if everyone else alive out there had their grill stationed on a concrete back yard pad or driveway or what.