I did that, I guess I was lucky. My grill worked fine afterwards, and it was really clean!
I’ve mentioned this before. So has my wife. I am chagrined by the event; she is amused greatly by it. Anyway, point is, this may be familiar, so here’s the condensed version.
Chimney. Briquets. No lighter fluid. Scour the house, find a can of camp fuel: white gas. Shrug, what the heck. Pour some on. Touch the match.
Come to a couple of seconds later lying on the patio a couple of feet away with a throbbing pain in my chest like Jet Li put a roundhouse kick on my sternum, and my wife’s expression of concern fading into an expression of you idiot screwhole.
That is all.
So I am cooking my famous cedar planked, cajun salmon filet with a maple glaze for some friends at one of their houses. There are 7 of us for dinner.
The agreement is that I will supply the cedar plank and the seasoning, the host supplied the salmon filet.
So off I go to Home Depot and buy a cedar fence plank. And then to the supermarket for the seasoning and the maple sryup.
W I get to the host’s house and we cut the plank to fit the grill. We place the plank to soak, and I go season the fish.
When it comes time to place fish on plank, I discover that they have bought the King Kong of salmon. This filet is huge, almost as long as the board, and wider by abut 2.5"
Thinking quickly, I take a knife and trim the one edge off leaving most of the fish on the board. I am left with a piece that is about 2.5" X 16" My host says you can cook that when the big piece is done.
I cook the big piece, comes out perfect.
I add the small piece to the plank and close the cover, after what I think will be about the right amount of time, I go back out and open the lid.
All of the water has evaporated from the plank, and the plank has caught on fire. The piece of fish is as black as black can be. Charcoal.
I am dumbstruck, the hostess sees the debacle and gets that gleem in her eye.
“Plate it” she says.
“What?” Says I
“Plate it and we will present it as a California blackened salmon”, says she with a wicked grin 
So we plate the burnt fish (about 4 pieces 4" long or so)
Inside we all gather and with a great florish the hostess brings in and presents the main dish, 4 4" X 2" pieces of what used to be salmon. The look on the guest’s faces is priceless. A mixture of how is that going to feed all of us, 
to Yuck, that’s burnt. :eek:
This isn’t exactly a “barbeque boner”, because the barbeque itself never happened. Still:
It was autumn of '95 and I was a few months away from my discharge. A bunch of us guys were hanging around base on a Thursday night with absolutely nothing to do, so being guys, we decided to combine the male staples of fire and raw meat and have us a barbeque. We found our “grill” - a small metal box - dug up some charcoals from a previous cookout, and sent someone to the mess to steal some raw materials. Realizing that starting a fire cold would take hours of charcoal-fanning, we decided to acquire something a bit more combustable.
With full knowlege that this would be the most arduous and dangerous part of our mission, we naturally picked the youngest and least experienced man for the job, a personnel clerk whose name eludes me, so I’ll just call him “Danny”. We carefully instructed him to sneak down to the motor pool, find the pumps and bring us an ammo box full of diesel fuel. We, being mature and responsible soldiers, knew that diesel was a relatively safe substance that wouldn’t blow up in our faces. While gasoline has a tendancy to burn big and fast, diesel is a more sedate liquid, slow burning and reliable.
In retrospect, we should have known what would happen.
Danny, after much stumbling around, found his way down to the motor pool and started operating the pumps. It being pitch-dark, and Danny being a 19-year-old clerk without a driver’s licence who’d never filled up gas in his life, managed to spill about a liter of liquid on his pants. Despite this minor setback, he filled his tin and started walking back to camp. Half way there he noticed some shapes moving in the darkness.
Danny froze, then relaxed. It was only Ben (real name forgotten), a wiseguy young NCO, leading a couple of new recruits to some unkwnown nighttime duty. They said hello, and Ben asked:
“Hey, what’cha got there?”
“Just some diesel. We’re having a barbeque behind the girls’s dorms - wanna come?” Danny replied.
Ben nodded, then noticed something: “Spill some on your pants?”
Then, without waiting for a reply, Ben did something that, in retrospect, wasn’t very smart.
It fact, retrospective wasn’t really needed.
“Is it flammable?” he asked, grinning, and reached into his pocket, pulled out his Zippo, flicked it open and pressed it to Danny’s leg, which immediatley burst into flame. Because, of course, Danny had not filled up his ammo tin with diesel as he mistakenly believed. He had filled up his ammo tin with gasoline.
Sometimes, a little juvenile humor can be a dangerous thing.
I wasn’t there to witness this, but I understand that for an unknown number of seconds, time seemed to stop. Ben, realizing he had just set a fellow soldier on fire, froze. Danny, realizing that he had huge flames crawling close to areas of his body he could ill afford to lose, froze as well. The two new recruits, who had only been in the army for a month and were unsure about moving without orders, didn’t move a muscle.
Suddenly, the night erupted. A huge dark shape burst out of the shadows, tackled Danny to the ground and started rolling him in the dirt. Shocked and disoriented by this strange turn of events, following so closely after the previous strange turn of events, he started to thank his mysterious rescuer, and then paled. As the dark man picked him up, hoisted him onto his shoulders in a freman’s carry, and started to jog towards the infirmary, awareness broke on Danny that having his testicles singed was not the worse thing that was going to happen to him - or to Ben - that night. Full colonels have very little tolerance for juvenile humor; Brigade XOs aren’t crazy about people stealing their gasoline.
Danny and Ben each spent a month in the brig, and we never had our barbeque.
I don’t really have any barbecue boners to recount, but someday I want to light my barbecue with 3 gallons of liquid oxygen, just like this guy did.
From a Thread started a few years ago by the late, lamented Wallym7.
I wasn’t even going to bring this up, but a certain rank newbie recently make a snide remark about me not being permitted to light the barbecue. The explanation is simple.
A couple of weeks ago, I was having trouble lighting the barbecue, and my next door neighbour saw me struggling and said that the sparky thingmabob is weak. He suggested that I open the propane and keep the lid closed for a couple of seconds and then press the sparky. That way even a weak spark would ignite the propane.
Okay, so maybe I left the lid down too long, and when I pressed the button, there was sort of an explosion and it kind of blew the lid right off into the air. If you wanted to get into the unimportant little details, you could say that the grill rack wound up sort of warped, and I guess the lava rocks got rearranged.
Which worked out just great, because I bought a new barbecue. It’s a beauty.
When I was about 10 or so, my Dad was barbecuing for company. He had a big pan of sauce next to the grill.
Did I mention that I was a tomboy back then? And that I liked to play with snakes and frogs and toads and stuff? In the backyard. Where the barbecue was.
I had a toad. It jumped. Straight into the barbecue sauce. I ran to save the poor thing, but not before Dad saw it. No one else saw the sauce-covered toad but Dad and me.
I rescued the toad. We all ate toad-flavored BBQ sauce. No one was the wiser! It was very good, as a matter of fact.
Another time. Dad was barbecuing. He started the charcoal, and was cleaning the grill with a rag. It caught on fire on one end, and accidently dropped on the dog! Poor thing was running around howling, and eventually ended up under the couch. When we finally got her out, she had a two inch long burn on her back. She recovered, but always had a scar there. Poor baby. Her name was Dinky.
We had this great big webber kettle-style grill when I was a kid. I wanted to help, so my mom handed me the lid to hold onto.
The webber had been going for maybe an hour, nice and hot. Coals were perfect, white, and everything was going great. Until she realized my little arms (I was about 7) weren’t long enough to hold the lid away from my stomach and I didn’t realize I could hold it vertically away from me…
I still have a scar, about 4 inches long and 1/8 inch wide, across my abdomen where I held that lid to my own stomach. To my credit, and my mom’s total shock, I never even cried until she asked me how much I was hurt! 