Cleaning your grill

If you're like me, and faced with a seriously funky grill grate at the start of the summer cookout season, you may think your options are limited. You can scour until your arms fall off, with that tiny wire brush, or perhaps you can blast the bejesus out of the thing with oven cleaner. Believe it or not, there is an easier way to get last year's crap off your grill, and it's only going to take newspaper, dish soap, and a garden hose.

Yes. You read that correctly. A few sections of your local newspaper, ordinary dish soap, the kind that is sitting by your sink right now, and the garden hose. (Or a bucket of water)

Go somewhere where there is 1) enough room, 2)nothing that will get messed up by water/newsprint. Lay down a few sections of your newspaper. On top of this, put your grill rack, and squirt the whole shebang down with the dish soap. Pretend you're Jackson Pollack. Make the mark of Zorro! Now, hit it with the hose. Do you have a lot of water on there? Good. Now slap another few sections of newspaper on top, and blast THEM with the hose too. (So you've created a Newspaper & Grill sandwich- the paper's the bread, the soap and grill rack are the fixins.) Let the whole thing sit, unmolested, for about a half hour, forty-five minutes.

When the time is up, go out, and use some more wadded up newspaper, or your trusty scrub brush to get the last of the gunk off, and rinse it really well with the hose. I don't know WHY this works, but it does. When I started out yesterday, there was so much shit on our grill, I didn't even want to use it with tinfoil over the grate, but by the time I was done (with no scrubbing with the wire thing, I might add)the thing looked AWESOME.

Give it a shot. You'll be surprised.