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The best part about summer ending is not having to grill another meat patty until next year.
This week, you probably started to get depressed that summer is ending. But if you remembered to look on the bright side, you realized it would be almost a whole year before you’d have to grill another fucking burger. You spent the rest of the day praising the lord.
You aren’t some kind of hippie like Cousin Colin. You have nothing against burgers. In fact, you believe an Animal Style cheeseburger from In-N-Out is one of life’s greatest pleasures. It pisses you off when people bitch about their french fries. Calm down. They’re fine. They’re certainly not Nathan's crinkle cut, but they’ll do.
But you know that as wonderful as burgers are in the fast food setting, they actually kind of suck when grilled at somebody’s house.
Reasons:
If you’re going to your Uncle Jerry’s barbecue, he’s leaving those things over the flame of the gas Weber for a good ten minutes per side. After several perilous flare-ups scorch the unseasoned 90/10 chuck, he’s finally ready to serve it when it’s fully gray and the cheese has basically evaporated. This is not good.
“Hey Jerry,” you say proactively, “pull mine off a little early, would ya?” But this backfires as now Jerry starts telling you all about his perfect system for determining a burger’s doneness. He demonstrates how you have to press on the patty with your thumb and see how fast it springs back into place. So now your well done burger also has Uncle Jerry’s grubby fingerprint on it. Amazing!
And even if you’re the one hosting, and have committed to grilling your patty to a nice even medium, you don’t have a flat top griddle. Smash burgers aren’t happening in this setting, so you end up with more of a meatball situation as your ground beef hits the grill grates and contracts into a weird rotund mess.
Before you even get to that point, you have to buy like four thousand other fucking things at the Whole Foods for this operation. Obviously you get your cheese. Then multiple condiments. You buy a burger sauce, but since your mother-in-law thinks it’s too spicy, you also grab the mayo and ketchup separately. Some of the monsters you invited have even asked for mustard. So you throw that in the cart and make a mental note to never invite those people into your backyard again.
You move into the produce section where you’ll stock up on some tomatoes and onions. Then of course you need to grab a bag of shredded iceberg lettuce that you’ll use about a third of and then it will turn as brown as a dog turd in the back of your crisper drawer as the summer unfolds.
From there, you get your pickles and buns. That’s eleven ingredients if you count the beef. Which you do, because you’re spiteful. It’s too fucking much. You haven’t even accounted for sides yet and this thing is already a pain in the ass.
You somehow escape the Whole Foods parking lot without running into any clueless pedestrians, you unload the metric fuckton of groceries onto the counter while your kids scream at you for not buying any Pirates Booty, and then you race around your kitchen prepping all the side dishes and condiments while the grill preheats.
Your favorite part of this process is slicing up the tomatoes and onions, which you toss on a big plate alongside some pickle chips and shredded lettuce. Exactly ten seconds later, your serving dish is a puddle of pickle brine and tomato sweat. Your lettuce has already begun to wilt. It looks great. So you put it out in the hot sun to hang for a bit while you grill. Yum!
The burgers actually come out pretty good all things considered, because you’re fairly decent at this and are familiar with the concept of salt and pepper. You successfully navigated the perilous process of toasting the buns and dodged Uncle Jerry’s persistent offers to help man the grill. But you’re stone cold sober because he wandered off and drank the entire bottle of Pét-Nat you had chilling in the cooler.
Everything is finally on the table and a dozen people at once are trying to assemble their own burger. It is a carnivorous disaster. Your ovular patties don’t accommodate the stacking of toppings. Slimy tomatoes are sliding off buns, ketchup is exploding all over the place, pickle juice is running down the front of your white shirt, and iceberg confetti is now littering the backyard. Several colonies of bees have come to investigate, which freaks your wife out and she won’t just relax, sit down, and eat. Your dad knocks over your second bottle of Pét-Nat while trying to kill the bees with his bare hands, and they get angrier and angrier. And so do you.
“Can you pass the mustard?” asks your ex-communicated cousin.
You get up from the table, ignore your family, and drive to Shake Shack.
Goodbye summer, you’ll be missed!