Can we just take a moment of silence for the George Foreman
Grill?
Can we just appreciate that the GFG (as I refer to it on a
regular basis) revolutionized our view on cooking (I’m speaking to my fellow
Generation Yers), only to be abandoned by us ten years later? By
“revolutionized” I mean that for about three years in the first decade of the
new millennium I actually thought I could cook because I owned not one, but two
GFG!
How many of us received this gem on our way to college? Red,
blue, white, black- George Foreman said no to grill-color boundaries. We can
make them pink! Pink, I say!
I remember fondly Monday hamburgers with my neighbors in
college where everyone brought over their GFG to create a very smoky kitchen
and fatless hamburger every week. Which
brings me to my next very crucial point, which is that the GFG could really
only make three things: grilled chicken, hamburgers, and grilled cheese
sandwiches. You know what else can do this? A skillet.
But that didn’t stop us. Somehow the GFG was better. I mean,
why we needed fatless grilled chicken is beyond me. I don’t know that grilled
chicken needs to lose any fat. Hamburgers: a no-brainer, but I maintain to this
day that the actual preparation of a hamburger takes place long before it
touches heat, and the only seasonings that could be found in my house was salt
and pepper… and some very questionable cumin which probably came with my
apartment. My hamburgers were always lacking in the taste department, since
they had no fat AND no seasoning. No one ever wanted any of the hamburgers made
on my GFG.
The grilled cheese had me fooled for about 18 months until I
finally saw someone make it in a skillet. That was the end of my love affair
with George.
The breaking point probably wasn’t the grilled-cheese
revelation. The cleanup was also rather cumbersome. Here is an appliance with
an electric cord that by all logic should stay away from water. However,
cleaning this contraption became laughable. You could try to clean it on the counter
with a sponge, but you had to wait for it to cool completely (some of us bent
this rule) and you could not reuse this sponge (some of us broke this rule).
So, you would get this thing soapy and brown (brown and soapy), and then,
because of the SUPER!, AMAZING!, UNPARALLELED FAT DRAINER! (also known as
gravity), your brown and soapy concoction would begin to sliiiiiidde down. So,
you had to have cat-like reflexes to then lift this Grill to the sink where it
would flap and spit back hot grease while you tried to wash it under the sink,
keeping the cord free from water.
*I want to be clear: the GFG was not the contraption that
made the turnovers/grilled cheese sandwiches/ waffles. That was some other
contraption… although I did enjoy debating this with friends at brunch this
weekend.*
George Foreman, who has five or six children all named
George. George Foreman, who was given the chance to endorse the grill after Hulk Hogan
turned it down (information provided to me this past Sunday over many Bloody
Marys by my friend Sarah) and became a billionaire (with a B). So, kudos,
George Foreman. You convinced both my parents and I that I would eat well in
college (which I did) and become a decent cook with the help of your alleged
“versatile” contraption (which I did not), and I feel confident that I am not
alone in this boat.
Every time I pass by a garage sale and see a GFG being sold,
it makes me a bit sad. The Grill did not get it’s proper place in history for
all it accomplished, and that is tragic. I think George Foreman was famous for
something else before the GFG, but there is no debating that my generation will
always remember him as the man who toughened our chicken and gave the skillet a
run for its money for about a decade. Bravo, George.
