Our new apartment came with a small grill, so Keating happily set up shop in the garden while I went to work cutting tomatoes for the sauce. A few minutes later, I hear muffled obscenities floating in from the garden. Keating dashed into the kitchen, looked around quickly with a flustered look on his face, and ran back out. I don't enjoy cutting vegetables nearly enough to not wander over to see what all the fuss was about. As I nonchalantly rounded the corner, prepared to ask if I could help him with anything, I glanced out the garden door. And froze. The garden was quite clearly on fire, with bright little flames jumping up from the grass. I quickly grabbed a pot of water, but Keating had used his previously unknown (by me) locker-room-style towel whipping to put out the blaze before I could get back. (I lamely pored the water where the fire had been.)
It turns out that Keating had been having trouble getting the charcoal to light. This may seem odd, even disgraceful, for a member of his family, but he had a pretty decent excuse: the charcoal was Mexican-style, or untreated. When he tried to put some more lighter gel on the charcoal (couldn't find lighter fluid at the store and didn't want to siphon gas out of a neighbor's car), the gel lit. The problem was that it wasn't just the gel on the charcoal that went up in flames, but also the gel on/in the container. Keating's attempt to put out the gel fire only ended up spraying flaming gel across the garden and igniting a seat cushion and a large patch of grass.
Needless to say, the sausages were cooked on the stove and we are working on figuring out where to get the vinyl seat cushion reupholstered. On the plus side, dinner came out well and we were able to have a long laugh over it all... after a bottle of wine, anyway!
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