New to the grill? Here is where to start.

Good day. There are probably two dozen ways to cook food on a grill, most of them good, but in the end the question will be whether the fuel is gas or charcoal. TO propane grill It’s a wonderful thing, but I don’t like to use one for anything I want to brown hard; for me, a gas grill never gets hot enough. TO charcoal grill, on the other hand, is excellent for that, but it requires lighting a fire and cooking on it at just the right time. This draws attention.

Either way, I like that the grill has “zones”. I want one side of the grill that is very hot, a middle that is medium, and one side that is completely free of any coals or flames. This allows me to cook over direct or indirect heat, and provides a place to rest for ingredients that may be cooking too quickly or I just want out of the fire scene for a while. My friend Steven Raichlen calls this last area a “safe zone.”

Steven has an excellent primer on these subjects in The Times at the moment, an introduction to The five dishes that everyone should know how to cook on the grill. These are: skirt steak (above), pork chops, upside down cheeseburgers, chicken breasts and salmon. (I’ll add it tofu, asparagus, clams and peaches.)

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Grilled steak

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Perhaps her best advice is to avoid overcrowding. “Leave at least an inch between each piece of food for better heat circulation,” Steven wrote in his article, “and leave at least 25 percent of the grill grate free of food so you have room to maneuver and dodge the flares.

Let’s do it this weekend: on your deck grill, in your backyard, on that little balcony of your rental over the freeway, where you’re glued to the hard grass in the park. Food prepared in the open air, whether over smoldering charcoal or the bubbling flame of blazing propane, is a clear statement of summer purpose, a statement that cooking is a pleasure worth taking beyond the kitchen, to nature.

Other things to grill, once you’re comfortable with your skills: cauliflower steaks, last last chicken, shrimp burgers, pizza. I could set up the charcoal grill for smoking and making pulled pork either smoke-roasted chicken thighs with paprika. And I would absolutely like to put a griddle on the fire to make these burnt oranges with rosemaryso delicious with greek yogurt or vanilla ice cream.

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Now, it’s a fair distance from anything to do with beans or capons, but David Coggins It reminded me recently of one of the great summer reading books: “A jerk at one end”, a 1999 fishing memoir by the late great art critic Robert Hughes. Go ahead and do it if you haven’t already.

Tom Papa has a new book out this week, “We’re all in this together… So make some space.” It’s fun and comforting, and if you’re feeling down, it’ll probably make you feel better.

Here it is Ligaya Mishan in The New York Times Magazinein an abbreviated recipe for chewy Filipino milk sweets known as milk pills.

finally here it is a gift link to one of my favorite newsletters, “The Amplifier” by Lindsay Zoladz, which brings a lot of new and old music into my life, without the need for an algorithm. Register! And I’ll see you on Sunday.