Memorial Day marks the start of the serious grilling season, and there's no better weekend to try your hand at outdoor cooking, or bolster your established grill-master game. Luckily, honing your outdoor culinary skills is a lot more simple than it seems, given the right tools, a little preparation, and a few tips on technique. Here's a look at some pointers on getting the right gear, turning out great meals, and even preparing for uncooperative weather.

Photo by Another Pint Please.

Get the right tools

• Lump charcoal or briquettes?: This is one of those endless, both-sides-are-right-and-wrong debates (kind of like Mac vs. PC), but there is some fairly common ground. As The Virtual Weber Bullet puts it:

  The general consensus is that lump tends to burn hotter than briquettes, but not as long or as consistently. Some lack of consistency is to be expected, given that the content and piece size varies within an individual bag and between bags.

  Personally, I recommend briquettes for anyone just starting out with their grill, as lump can be finicky in lighting. Of course, you can save yourself a lot of effort and frustration by investing in a chimney starter, which you can also use for flash-cooking. Photo by Joshua Thompson via WikiMedia.

• Choosing a gas grill: Ignore the BTUs and heat for the most part—unless you really need to cook a whole bird or roast this weekend, most grills have got your steaks and burgers covered. Consumer Reports' blog recommends bringing a magnet with you to gauge the quality of steel used to contain the heat. If the magnet sticks, it's likely a cheaper grade that will rust more easily. Feel free to give a test model a few shoves and shakes, as an unstable grill is a recipe for serious problems.
• Multi-use utensils: The three-tool grilling sets you see at big-box stores have all you'll need for basic grill work, with long-handled versions of a spatula, tongs, and a carving-type poker. A long-handle brush would be your next purchase, and then a grilling basket and skewers when you start branching out. Make sure your tools feel heavy and firm in your hands, as clumsy handling creates the kind of BBQ stories you don't want repeated. Photo by rick.

Getting ready

• Clean that grill: If there's black crust on the grill bars, you need to get it off to ensure no-stick cooking and easy food flipping. If you're feeling strong, wad up some aluminum foil and go to town on that stuff. For seriously stuck grime, you could also try popping the grill in the oven to bake off the stubborn bits.
• Make your own sauce: Most of the pre-bottled sauces you see on grocery shelves are over-sweetened, and none match the taste of homemade. Making your own isn't that difficult, either. Use one of BBQ Recipe Secret's three sauce bases as a starting point, and build your own flavor ideas into them. It'll give you something to talk about while you're waiting for the ribs to finish. Photo by Jason McArthur.

Hone your technique

• Use a cheat sheet: Experience is the best indicator for knowing the precise moment to yank your food off the rack, but Real Simple offers a super-helpful cheat sheet you can print and bring to this culinary test (original post). Here's a sample that covers the basics of red meat and sausages:

  While you're at it, don't forget about the palm test for determining the doneness of a steak, which we first learned about from Men's Health.

• BBQ chicken: As my fellow editor Adam can attest, eHow's technique for grilling whole or partial chicken results in some juicy bird. The basics: Oil the grill, cook the chicken uncovered slightly off the heat center, and, for Pete's sake, don't put your sauce on until the last few minutes.
• Perfect burgers: Our commenters don't necessarily agree on cooking great burgers, but they do have some common wisdom to share. Use meat that's as close to room temperature as possible for even cooking. Don't press them on the grill, unless you like your meat dry. And the best "secret" to great burgers is buying good meat, preferably ground by a butcher while you watch.
• Seriously salt your steak: Got filet mignon dreams for the weekend, but only a Quarter-Pounder budget? Buy a cheap cut of "choice" meat, then salt, salt, salt the heck out of that thing—for only one hour before grilling, and then pat it dry. By doing so, your salt is breaking in your meat and loosening some of its protein strands, making it hold flavor better and cut like the steakhouse commercials of your dreams (original post).
• Let it rest: You'll be eager to slice open your tender steak or succulent chicken, but you'll lose a lot of juicy flavor if you do so. As the food techies at Cook's Illustrated point out, cutting into your food right off the grill releases a significant amount of juice, which would be re-absorbed for better succulence if you let it sit a few minutes.

Recover from a rain-out

All that planning, cleaning, and purchasing, and Mother Nature calls an audible on your perfect grill day? You're not finished yet. As the New York Times' food guru and cookbook author Mark Bittman points out, your oven broiler can sub in for your grill with a little prep-work, with results almost as satisfying. Brown your meat in the pan, roast or braise it slowly, then use the broiler to give it that grill-like finish. Check out his oven-based pork ribs or brisket recipes if you need convincing.

Document your success

When you've put all this effort into creating a great fire-cooked feast, you'll want more than just compliments to remember it by. Break out your digital camera (or pass it off to a trusted friend) and try the following tips to take some great grilling shots. (Photo by ctaloi):

• Tell a story: A BBQ-friendly shooter named Nika notes that a lot of grilled food might look good to the human eye, but smoky crusts and perfect charring can look like unappealing dark nothingness without good framing. Try to capture moments of "drama," such as when the meat's being pulled, or focus on the tools used to make the meal to get shots you'll remember.
• Get in close: At the same time, Flickr user Another Pint Please..., also known as Mike and who shot the steak picture you saw at the top of this post, recommends being brave and getting up-close and personal with your heat source—while being safe with your lens, of course. You'll have time to take wider-angle shots when the cooking's done, but those sudden flare-ups and perfect glistening angles only happen once.

Got some great resources for first-timers or experienced grill gurus? Planning on trying a new technique this weekend? Let's hear about great food, and solid tips, in the comments.

Memorial Day weekend is coming up and it's time to break out the grill. Stake is a clever multi-tool that can help you get a perfect hot dog, burger, or whatever single-handedly. It looks like a standard spatula that you can use for flipping, but it's also capable of grabbing anything on the grill like tongs or piercing it like a fork.

There are a lot of tools used in prepping, cooking, and serving barbecue. It can be frustrating to keep them all around and ready, plus multiple tools means more cleaning work when you're done. Stake combines everything you'll need so you only have to use one utensil for the entire process. It's a clever way to handle whatever you've got on the grill so you're not constantly switching tools. And, when you're done, you have a little less to clean, too.

Stake ($30) | Quirky

Looking to up your culinary skills? Perhaps you've gotten into a cooking rut and want to spice up your dinners? According to neuroscientist and nutrition and food blogger Dr. Darya Pino, one way to improve your cooking skills is to try new things, and one great way to get inspired to try new cuisines and dishes is to read more fiction—specifically fiction that transports you to different worlds and cultures.

At her blog, Summer Tomato, Pino explains something that those of us who love to read already know: that reading about a place can often inform you about the location and its culture in ways visiting may not, and inspire you to learn more. A good book can stick with you for weeks or months. Take that impact and use it to inspire you in the kitchen. She says:

For instance, it's impossible for me to read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, which I've done several times, without craving Spanish tapas and red wine for the better part of a month (this is also why Spanish food is one of my absolute favorite cuisines). The Last Chinese Chef had me exploring obscure alleyways in Chinatown in search of the best dumplings and peking duck, and before reading it I would have said Chinese food wasn't really my jam.

Pino makes a few other book recommendations in the full post at the link below. What do you think? Have you ever been inspired to try a new dish or cuisine by a book you read? Let us know in the comments.

How Reading Fiction Can Make You a Better Cook | Summer Tomato

Photo by Zitona.

Web/iPhone/Android: Previously featured ZipList has expanded its grocery list and recipe shopping tool to include a simple, yet powerful meal planner. Now you can save recipes to your queue and schedule them over the week or month to solve worrying about what's for dinner.

ZipList's meal planner has some really useful features. Add meals to your shopping list to quickly generate a weekly shopping list. Sync your meal plan with your calendar (Google Calendar, iCal, or other) and then, if you want, share that calendar with your significant other.

As before, you can share your weekly shopping list with family and friends, access a database of stores to tap into coupons, search hundreds of thousands of recipes, and clip recipes to ZipList from the web. ZipList has just about every feature you might want to plan your cooking and shopping.

And it's free. An iPhone app and Android app make your shopping lists and recipe box mobile.

ZipList