First Barbeque!

My Brother gave us a bag of charcoal to use on the community grill, conveniently located just one floor down directly below are balcony.  We chose this trip to take the plunge and try our hand at charcoal grilling again.  We have owned a gas grill for at least the past 20 years if not longer so this was going to be interesting.

It takes two males of high intelligence and one female of medium intelligence to cook two steaks and four hamburgers to raw to rawer stage.   One male, who shall not be pointed out exactly, towered and lighterfluid-ed the resulting tower to get it started while one male and one female took it upon themselves to add to the verbal observations of how it should be done.

One male and one female remained at the grill once the meat was to go on.  The other male went up to the condo to nuke the yams, potatoes, peas and mixed veggies and to lay out the melon, macaroni salad, lettuce leaves and pickles for buffet style eating.

One female tried to cook two steaks and four burgers on the grill to everyone's rate of done-ness profile.  Results?  The one burger left on grill to be well done for husband/male was determined to be still raw inside.  One steak was also two raw for husband/male and that must have been really bad as on the gas grill at home I've never had him say a steak was too raw for him and I've put out some really really raw meat in the form of a steak for him.  (he likes his steaks seared on the outside rare in the middle and his burgers well done).  the other male was busy observing the steak/burger shuffle on the grill being done by yours truly as I tried to find a place to "sear' the steaks. 

After the first barbeue on a charcoal grill in some 24+ years (yes, we had some years without a grill) and some online research and that day's observations both males and the female agree that it will require a much longer cook time for all meats involved in the future.

Picture below is of the results being served on the bright orange metal plates my dear mother-in-law gave to us when we got the condo.  They made nice sturdy serving platters to transport the meat back up to the condo from the grill.  Ignore the not yet melted cheese on two of the burgers that make them look even less appetizing.

Hope your grilling days are better timed than this one was!

Below are two pictures of sunrise at the condo from our balcony.  The first one the colors are much more true as to what I was viewing.  And the second one is what the camera was automatically doing to it.

Funny thing is that when I take a picture at sunset at the beach, I am usually actually seeing something closer to the lighter-second picture of the sunrise in colors and the camera does an automatic thing that makes it look closer to the first-redder picture of the sunrise below.  Bizarre automatic setting on camera in my opinion.