I like to cook. I don't cook so much as I want, but I try. And I grill: my grilling season runs from February to December. For years I've done that grilling on a cheap hibachi. I think I paid four dollars for it at a drug store. I had to assemble it: stamped sheet-metal body, grates that looked like recycled engine block, and unfinished, pre-cracked wooden handles. But it worked. It worked for, oh, eight or ten years. I left it out in the rain. I dropped it. I moved it from house to house. Three moves may be as good as a fire, but my hibachi kept working.
But I got upscale. I bought a $100 charcoal grill Cook's Illustrated said was the best of the lot. You can cook a turkey in it -- hell, you can probably cook half a hog. Adjustable fire pan height, temperature gauge in the lid, side tables: this thing has it all.
I think Elie Wiesel said (maybe Joseph Fletcher beat him to it) that the opposite of love is not hate; the opposite of love is indifference. All I know is my hibachi fell apart a few weeks later.
I live by myself. I don't need to fire off five pounds of charcoal and heat up something the size of an oven for my Friday hot-dog-on-a-bun. My new grill is too damn big. Hell, I can put my old hibachi inside it. And there was my idea: I'll buy a new hibachi, keep it inside the cavernous new grill, and keep the hibachi in better shape.
So where are they? I've been all over this town: hardware stores, dollar stores, emporia, even the aforementioned drug store. No cheap hibachis. No hibachis at all. Turns out my friend Reiko has been looking too -- no luck.
At first I thought maybe grilling had become too popular, and no one wanted to pay four dollars for a cheap hibachi: they'd rather spend $40 for a Weber knockoff. Then I found a $4.99 round barbecue grill at the aforementioned drug store. But it's just not the same.
Where are the cheap hibachis?
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