Glazed Pork Chops & The Perfect Gazebo

From Boy Gets Grill (page 234) this is Pork Chops with Worcestershire-Honey Glaze and Grilled Sweet Onions. The Pork Chops were grilled with only a brushing of canola oil, kosher salt and ground pepper. The glaze was made separately with Worcestershire sauce, red pepper flakes, olive oil, salt, pepper and honey. The sweet onions were sliced across, brushed with canola oil with salt and pepper and placed right on the grill. After the chops turned, I brushed on the Worcestershire-Honey glaze, and I kept brushing until the meat was done. Everything came off the grill at once and I stacked one grilled onion on a chop for the photo. We added red and yellow tomatoes and wild rice to complete the meal. We also used the extra Worcestershire-Honey glaze as a dipping sauce along side the dish - terrific!

You can get Boy Gets Grill and the other Bobby Flay books that contain the recipes for Bobby Flay Everyday through this blog. The Bobby Flay Everyday blog is now an Amazon Associate! You can get the exact recipes from the books and get a discount by going through this blog! So follow along and pick up some of these great Bobby Flay books!

The Grill Light. With the change to Daylight Savings Time last week, I have been grilling more in the daylight - a welcome change. But that means that I won't need my trusty Grill Light as much. You may have seen the light on my last video.

                       

The Grill Light was a gift from Dorothy, but the fact that I even needed a grill light was because my gazebo builder refused to permanently install one. We once had one of those stand-alone, canvas covered gazebos. We tried to anchor it down with some left over house bricks, but the thing almost took off anyway in a thunderstorm once, so we decided to get a permanent gazebo that couldn't blow away. That led us to Andy Englehart. Andy is a carpenter, a designer, an architect, a craftsman and a perfectionist. We told him our idea, but within a week, he changed it. He brought over some magazines and photos of a "real" bungalow style gazebo. Pretty soon it was his project not mine. He saw in his head what I couldn't - the best thing I did was just trust him. I did and the results were incredible.

This is the home of Bobby Flay Everyday! Sometimes I just sit and look at the craftsmanship that Andy and his co-worker Jeff, put into the project. I know that I don't have the skills and the patience and the vision to have designed and constructed something so perfect.

             

         

Andy used California Red Cedar and bought a special saw blade just to make the precise cuts. Buying that blade probably used up all his profits, but Andy cared more about perfection than dollars - quite an unusual guy in these times!

          

After the cuts were made in his workshop, Jeff brought the beams over on his flat bed truck and they assembled the pieces like a giant lincoln-log set. Just look at all those complex angles, curves and joints that he cut. They all fit together with the precision of a surgeon. I feel so guilty that I sit and admire Andy's gazebo everyday without him there; that I don't tell him every day how grateful I am for his passion. And its more than a gazebo - its the idea of the gazebo. Its the idea that skill and craftmanship still exist. There are still people who can sign their work with pride and know that it is the best it could possibly be. There are still people who really care about craftsmanship. I remember all this while I am on the grill. Because you can't fail to give it your best when you are standing under perfection. It was because of this perfection that Andy refused to install a light hanging off his gazebo that would shine down on my grill. When I asked him to do this, he acted as if I had asked him to paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa. He refused, so Dorothy got me the Grill Light.

Coach Lombardi said, "perfection may not be attainable, but if we strive for perfection, we might catch excellence." There are very few examples of perfection in the world - but I have one in my courtyard. Paul