Grill time every day of the week

Many people approach grilling as a weekend activity. They mix and form burgers in the morning and start the coals at the end of a day of yard work, or give chicken a daylong soak in an herby brine and ignite the gas burners upon returning from a baseball game. They pour a cool drink, kick back in a deck chair and let the flames lap gently at racks of ribs, relaxing as the grill takes its sweet time.

That's all well and good, but grilling guru Jamie Purviance wants everyone to know that grilling doesn't have to be a complicated, time-consuming labor of love.

Grilling can be a fast way to get dinner on the table seven days a week, he says, and he shows us how in his latest cookbook, “Weber's Time to Grill.”

“Some people have this idea in their minds of lazy, unhurried weekends with the grill smoking in the yard,” says Purviance, who has written eight cookbooks with the Palatine-based grill manufacturer. “Dinner goes quicker when you cook on the grill; you're not pulling out all sorts of pots and pans, preheating an oven.”

Purviance has found ways to combine ingredients and techniques to infuse foods with deep flavors without long prep or cooking times.

The more than 200 recipes are divided into easy and adventurous pairings; those designated easy have prep time of 15 minutes, while prep for adventurous recipes hovers around 30 minutes.

“This book appeals to both worlds; we've made the easy even easier,” he said.

For example: the easy ground lamb recipe, Green Chile Lamb Burgers, clocks in with 10 minutes of prep and 8-10 minutes on the grill, while its adventurous counterpart, Lamb and Chorizo Burgers, calls for 30 minutes of prep (to cook the chorizo and make a zesty mayo) and 14-18 minutes on the grill. Pictures accompanying every recipe illustrate how the dish should look when it's done.

Purviance knows that proper techniques keep the prep time in check, so to help people work within the time estimates he concentrates the first chunk of the book on the basics.

“Most of the time people spend, or waste, is at the chopping block,” he says. With step-by-step photos, Purviance covers everything from seeding a bell pepper to butterflying a whole chicken and then gets into ways to check the doneness of steaks, seafood and ribs (if you bend the rack backward, the meat should tear off the bone).

When it comes to cooking times, even whole chicken and ribs can be started when you get home from work and enjoyed before the sun sets.

The general rule with ribs is the lower and slower the better, but Purviance's ribs cook in just over an hour. His trick is heavy duty foil. He wraps the seasoned racks in foil and cooks them over direct heat.

“The fat melts and the juices flow; you're in fact steaming the ribs,” he said. Remove the ribs from the foil and put them on the grate for 10-12 minutes to pick up seared-smoky notes.