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For many, there is nothing better than the smell of a grill firing up, followed by the taste of any assortment of food straight off the fire. Grilling is synonymous with summertime, barbeques, and delicious meals. There always seems to be “that person” at the party that takes on the title of “grill master.”

Somehow, they remain unfazed by the fire and heat and manage to know exactly how long to cook everything. There is, of course, nothing worse than someone who thinks they are up for the task, and manages to either overcook or undercook everything.

Don’t be that person. If you are ready to be the hero or heroine of every backyard party, read on for The Ultimate Survival Man-ual’s easy tips for how to achieve grilling perfection every time.

Now that it’s summer, I can indulge in my favorite pastime: eating outside! Fire up the grill and get cooking while the sunshine lasts.

By far the simplest outdoor food is the humble hot dog. Just throw it on the grill and wait, right? But little did you know, this classic American favorite can easily become fine cuisine. Haute Dogs takes the traditional cookout to new foodie heights with recipes for dogs, buns, and condiments.

To get started on your summer pursuit for the perfect hot dog, try this recipe from Haute Dogs!

Texas BBQ Dog

Place of Origin: Southern United States  

Other Names: BBQ Dog, Loaded Dog

Consider yourself warned: this hot dog takes all day to make (though technically it is not the dog but the pulled pork topping that is so time consuming). But since you can make it all on the grill, this recipe is the perfect excuse to spend a long summer day outside. As for the precise pedigree of this loaded BBQ dog—who knows? But find me a hole-in-the-wall BBQ joint in the South that doesn’t serve something like this and I’d be surprised. For the style of barbecue, I took a cue from my home state, where the focus is always on the meat and never on the sauce or sides.

Pulled Pork

Texas BBQ Sauce

Baked beans

Classic bun

American beef sausage

Prep: Make pulled pork and Texas barbecue sauce, if using homemade. Make baked beans according to the package instructions and keep warm.

Assembly: Get out a classic bun. Grill an American beef sausage and toast the bun on the grill. Place the sausage in the bun and top with a heaping pile of pulled pork and a pile of baked beans. Serve with barbecue sauce.

Kitchen Notes: Pulled pork takes the better part of a day to cook, so plan ahead. Texas-style barbecue sauce is available at most grocery stores. American beef sausage, sometimes called farmer’s beef sausage, is heavily seasoned and often has a pungent garlic flavor that pairs well with pulled pork and barbecue sauce.

Mind Your Bs and Qs

Texas barbecue is all about the meat. Though Texans love beef, we’re not opposed to throwing in some pork, lamb, and chicken. Unless you’re serving up hot dogs, the sauce is always served on the side, not on the meat.

From Haute Dogs by Russell van Kraayenburg. For more information, check out quirkbooks.com/hautedogs. 

So fashion! Wow. Such style! Very haute! Amaze.

Here at the Quirk HQ, we love the hilarious, grammatical disaster that is the "doge" meme. And by we, I mean myself, editorial assistant Blair Thornburgh, and frequent Quirk blogger Brian Morrell. True story, Brian's favorite doges in literature post is a treasured piece of writing that is referenced weekly via Gchat. 

This April, Quirk is proud to be publishing Haute Dogs by Russell van Kraayyenburg. Full of fancy and appropriately "haute" hot dog recipes, it's just a great cookbook packed with amazing recipes and beautiful food photography. And we'd like to give you a chance to win a copy, in the silliest way possible.

We'd like you to Photoshop your own Haute Doge, and send it over to us here at Quirk! Take the wonderful doge we all know and love, and make that puppy look as fashionable and hip as possible. You can email us your hilarious image (to [email protected]) or tweet it to @QuirkBooks. We'll pick our five favorites on March 10th, post them here on the blog, and send you an early copy of Haute Dogs! 

Note: You can grab the original photo over at Know Your Meme. 

Good luck! Be amaze! 

The Super Bowl may be America’s greatest unofficial holiday. An entire day devoted to eating, drinking, and watching TV with friends and family. Could there be a more American day?

Super Bowl Sunday is the largest food consumption event of the year, trailing only Thanksgiving. It’s so treasured that over 130 million Americans will spend over $55 million dollars on food for the Super Bowl. That’s a lotta chips and guacamole, as in over 15,000 tons of chips and 50 millions pounds of avocadoes.

A good Super Bowl party will have chips and guacamole. A great Super Bowl party will have several chips ‘n dips. One of them should be this Spicy Black Bean Dip. Here’s why: It’s simple to make. It’s vegetarian, which means you can eat more of it while still feeling virtuous. And most importantly, it’s chunky, making it supremely scoop-able with chips.

Happy Thanksgiving from your pals at Quirk Books.

Today is World Vegetarian Day. Like many vegetarians (I suppose), I don’t often think about the fact that I’ve given up eating meat. After a while, what was once a life-altering decision becomes second nature…like anything that you do every day, opting out of meat-eating is just one blip in the background noise of your life. So this day is an opportunity for those of us who are vegetarians to revisit that choice, and reconnect with whatever motivations put us on the path to a meat-free lifestyle.

People choose vegetarianism for different reasons, of course. I would guess that ethical concerns are the driving factor in most cases. But extricating oneself from a predator/prey relationship with other living things is not the only possible motivation. For some, a desire—or even a necessity—to protect one’s health can is a powerful reason to eliminate meat from the menu. It’s certainly possible to consume high and unhealthy levels of fat, salt, and calories even while maintaining a vegetarian diet, but combining vegetarian food choices with basic healthy eating habits can be a potent means of lowering one’s risk of many chronic health problems.

And an increasing number of people consider vegetarianism as a critical option for reducing the energy drain, carbon footprint, and waste production that industrial-scale animal husbandry impresses upon our increasingly crowded planet. In terms of efficiency, producing plant-based food is a much more practical use of the resources that a rising, energy-hungry global population demands.

However they come to the decision, many people find that transitioning to a vegetarian diet turns out to be an easier experience than they anticipated. Nevertheless, there are challenges. In my own case, the switch was fraught with particular difficulties. Having been raised as a cannibal, I expect that I struggled with more obstacles than most.

I know how that sounds, but referencing my cannibal upbringing isn’t intended as a brag, or some sort of badge of authenticity. To be honest, the current cannibalism revival that’s cropped up in some hipster circles holds no interest for me (in fact, it strikes me as shallow, trendy posturing not likely to result in widespread acceptance). In my family, cannibalism wasn’t some kind of statement about the anonymity of modern culture, or a means of pushing the boundaries of propriety. It was just the way things were. If, say, Sunday dinner happened to include roast mailman foot, or some breaded elbows, that was no more significant to us than the baked potatoes or string beans. (Though it was also no less significant…even all these years later, the though of my mother’s breaded elbows still makes my mouth water.)

At this point, I feel the need to clear up a few misconceptions about cannibalism. Firstly, and contrary to what you may have read on certain blogs, cooked human flesh is delicious. Many vegetarians downplay the appeal of eating meat, but I think in most cases that’s disingenuous. Just because you choose not to eat meat, that doesn’t mean you can’t acknowledge its gustatory appeal. Steak tastes good, hamburgers taste good. And braised abs of office worker, or a plate of fettuccini with fennel and firefighter fingers…man, those taste really good. Of course, a lot of the flavor is in the preparation. And my mom was an old-school home cook, from the era of liberal use of butter, cream, salt, eyelids… She was raised with the idea that it was a mom’s job to fatten up her kids, mostly by feeding them human fat. I cringe when I think of how many calories and how much cholesterol must have been in mom’s lips-hips-cheese-and-noodles casserole.

So many of our early memories are connected to the foods we ate growing up that becoming a vegetarian can sometimes feel like turning one’s back on one’s own history and traditions. It wasn’t easy for me to reject the turkey dinner that’s so closely tied to our Thanksgiving feasts when all my relatives gathered, enjoying each others’ company as much as the meal. Or the appendix stew that my father always insisted on for his birthday dinner (he was a man of simple pleasures). Food connects us to trivial memories, too. I sometimes wish I could taste again the bland but comforting flavor of the baloney sandwiches my mother made for my grade school lunches, or the greasy take-out chicken we brought with us on summer picnics, or the salty texture of my little brother’s arm as we gnawed on each other to work up an appetite before dinner.

Of course, not all food memories are fond ones. To put another myth to rest, being raised on cannibal cuisine doesn’t mean you enjoy every recipe in the cookbook. I was never a big fan of earlobes, and it didn’t help that my mother would boil them until they sagged limply on the plate like morose jellyfish. Fortunately my older sister loved them, so I could always flip a few her way when mom was back at the stove stirring the sauce. (She would return the favor whenever my mother got ambitious and attempted our Grandma’s recipe for Broiled Radio Announcer Tongue. My sister hated it, but I could never get enough. There’s something about the taste of something that has its own taste buds which I still miss to this day.)

Once, when I was struggling the most with giving up the cookery of my youth, something occurred to me: All of us start out as cannibals. It’s the only truly universal cuisine. Because when you’re in the womb, you pretty much have no choice about it. Afterwards, unless you’re put on formula, you continue the practice for a while longer. Yet even when you move on to mushed squash and peas, you can’t help but suck your own thumb when that craving for human meat kicks in. Or occasionally clamp your jaws around somebody’s finger, even if your baby teeth can’t break the skin. Despites such strong instincts, most people stop eating people at a very young age and don’t look back. And I reasoned that if so many could give up what was, to me, the most delicious food source of all, than so could I.

So if you’re struggling with the decision to give up eating animal meat, consider this. You’ve already given up eating your fellow human beings, and most of them are far more flavorful than any animal could ever be. And in many cases, far more deserving of being eaten.