The perfect BBQ for those people who don’t like to BBQ….

Until recently, we’ve not really been BBQ people.

That’s kind of a lie as we LOVE a good old BBQ – at someone else’s house where we don’t have to worry about what direction the wind is going to blow the smoke or whether we’re going to poison any visitors (or indeed ourselves) with half cooked meat.

Because of this, we’ve never really had a good BBQ and have usually just relied on the cheap disposable ones because they’re cheaper when you consider how few BBQs we have and also, they don’t need cleaning afterwards.

But this year, our garden is looking nicer than it has for a long time and we’ve had such good weather that we really wanted to get something that would be good for us.

So let’s recap on the things that we don’t like about BBQs:

• The smoke
• The uneven heat that makes us worry about killing people with undercooked food.
• The cleaning
• The faffy setting up
• The need to have charcoal/gas
• We absolutely did not want to have to build one or even put one together really.

So, you can imagine how difficult it was for us to find a BBQ that was ideal for us.

In fact, after wandering around B&Q’s outdoor section aimlessly for half an hour we gave up and headed to our local B&M to get some bits and bobs that are cheaper in there than anywhere else.

As we stood by the checkouts in the super-long queue (they only ever seem to have 1 checkout open in our local one), we spied the George Foreman indoor-outdoor grill for £59.99.

We’ve had an indoor George Foreman grill in the past before we got our air fryer and loved how easy it was to use and more importantly, to clean so this outdoor one looked like it could be the answer to all of our BBQ prayers!

We read the blurb on the box that told us that it was a ‘versatile barbecue that works just as well indoors as outdoors’ and almost made an impulse buy but we resisted popping it in our trolley right away as we’re trying to be good with things like this and really didn’t want to add a gadget to our collection that would just gather dust as soon as the initial novelty wore off.

We went home and headed to Amazon where we read about a million reviews and looked at all the questions asked and answered and on the whole, it looked ideal for us and considering it was almost double the price on Amazon we like it even more! 😉  We did have a few concerns about the stability of the stand though as a few reviews did say that the stand was a bit wonky and not as sturdy as it should be.

The stand thing put us off for a day or so but in the end, we decided to go with the majority of the reviews who seemed to love it and didn’t mention the stand at all.  We went back and bought it a couple of days later and Mr Frugal put it together in about two minutes.  Don’t get me wrong, the stand isn’t the steadiest thing in the world but it’s definitely not a deal breaker and we’ve never had an issue.

To BBQ (really it’s grilling not BBQing), you just need to plug it in and wait for the surface to heat up which doesn’t take long at all.  We have an extension lead so we can plug it in through our kitchen window which makes it really easy.

Once the grill is heated up, you just pop your food on and it cooks evenly and quickly without the usual BBQ faffing and because it has a non-stick grill surface with a slight slope that drains any fat into a tray below the surface, it’s healthy too.

Cleaning is brilliant too as you just remove the hot plates and give them a clean – not that I’d know about this as I always make Mr Frugal do the cleaning up.

So, back to the points we don’t like about BBQs…

• The smoke No smoke at all thanks to the fact it’s electric!
• The uneven heat that makes us worry about killing people with undercooked food.  The grill plates cook evenly so no danger of food not cooking through other than the usual dangers when Mr Frugal is cooking!
• The cleaning Super easy to clean as you can just wash it with a soapy cloth.
• The faffy setting up Literally just needs plugging in!
• The need to have charcoal/gas Only electricity needed!
• We absolutely did not want to have to build one or even put one together really. Built in no time at all – it’s just a case of attaching the stand and legs.

The only thing missing is the smoky BBQ flavour and you know what, I was never a huge fan of that anyway!

It’s the perfect BBQ for us!

Just to be clear, we chose and paid for the BBQ ourselves. 😉

Don’t miss out on future posts like this – receive updates directly to your inbox by email by adding your email address here and hitting subscribe. You can also follow me on Twitter, BlogLovin or Networked Blogs and I’d love to see you over on my Facebook page and on Instagram. You can find out more about me here.