Saturday 8th January 2011

George Foreman, one time boxer, now a multi-quizillionaire thanks to his grill thing.
It's a 'Lean Grilling Machine', apparently. I reckon someone just made the very first one wrong and it was a bit wonky but when they tested it they saw that, because it was wonky, the fat ran out of the corner.

It is said that George Foreman has made around $200m from the grill, considerably more than when he was a boxer, but I wonder how much the inventor, Michael Boehm, has made. I don't know and neither does Wikipedia.

I have been thinking about what could be better than a Boehm/Foreman grill and I think I have the answer. It was staring me in the face the whole time.

Regular readers (ha!) will know that I am a great believer in the art of Slow Cooking, owning (at the last count) nine slow cookers. I have one in the bathroom (for saunas), two in the bedroom (for morning cups of tea and bedwarming), one in the spare bedroom (for visitors) and the remainder in the kitchen. But I don't have a George Foreman grill.

Well I didn't, but I went out and bought one.
It's alright. I mean it works OK. It grills stuff. It drains the fat. It has George Foreman's name on it. It does what it says on the tin (doesn't really come in a tin, well mine didn't anyhoo but you get my drift) but it does not excite me in the way a slow cooker does.

So I sat there looking at it. Just staring and trying to think of a way to make it better. A way give it more appeal to slow cooking lovers out there, of which I know there are many.

Not being able to conjure up any ideas I decided to cook a few bits, so I slapped on a couple of steaks, one meat and one Tuna, and I placed a few kebabs, on skewers not the doner type, on there. I even chucked on a few prawns to see how well it coped.
It grilled them, so not too much wrong there.
It wasn't so good for all the chilli sauce I had marinated everything with cause this all slid off with the fat, but it grilled and it is called a grill after all.

But there was something about it that wasn't quite right, something that made it not to my liking.

It was cooking too fast!!!

So I have invented the slow cooking lean grilling machine.
It is basically the same as George's in appearance, with the exception of a few minor modifications to slow the cooking time down and keep the meat from drying out, with the slow cooking capabilities of a slow cooker.
A fine spray attachment, connected to a pump, keeps the meat moist and also recycles any marinade that has been used thus avoiding waste too.

The recycling facility entitles the machine to be called a Slow Cooking Lean Green Grilling Machine which should generate more sales, but it really does save your chilli sauce.
I have downrated the heating element to such a point that it now has a setting that is quite possibly not as warm as the air from a broken hair-dryer set on a low setting. This means that you can now start to cook an average sized steak on a Tuesday morning and have the perfect staek sandwich on the following Sunday for a nice evening treat, hot and fresh from the grill and as succulent as you like.
Mind you, if you are making your own bread, you will have to plan accordingly if you are baking it in a slow cooker.............