When I want a quick and easy dinner during harvest season, I often fire up the grill. With an abundance of fresh vegetables at hand, the grill does double duty: lightly cooking while adding flavor to vegetables I want to save for winter and getting off the evening meal before the coals die out.

We might making an entire vegetarian meal from the homegrown produce that comes off the grill on a given night, but shrimp tends to be my go-to protein when I want some skewers on the plate. You can make the recipe I share this week in my Twice as Tasty column for the Flathead Beacon with fresh tomatoes, onion, and garlic—or grill these first, whip up the marinade while grilling the next rounds of vegetables, and fire the shrimp last.

Learn more about marinating and grilling shrimp and get the complete recipe for Chipotle Grilled Shrimp in my column.

Make it, share it.
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Choosing Charcoal Grill Starters

My summer grilling was aided this year by a variety of charcoal grill starters, which I tested for The Spruce Eats. I’ve long grilled on a 1998 Weber kettle grill that was handed down through a series friends before it landed in my yard. I quickly learned the value of a charcoal chimney, which remains my favorite tool for getting briquettes going quickly and cleanly. I’d always stuffed old newspaper pages below the charcoal to set the tower ablaze, but my newsprint supply became limited when the Flathead Beacon went fully online.

My new favorite grill-starting solution pairs a fire starter with the charcoal chimney. Placing just one starter on the grill grate, lighting it, and setting the chimney above it sends flames up into the charcoal for several minutes, plenty of time to set it alight. There’s no risk of newspaper flakes flying around and no need to repack paper into the chimney, because the fire starter catches and burns so readily.

I also found fire starters handy for lighting just a short batch of coals. If you’re making this week’s recipe without bonus storage grilling, you won’t need a full chimney of charcoal to fire off quick-cooking shrimp and a vegetable side. Starting a small batch of coals with paper was always finicky, even with a chimney. That changed when I tucked a fire starter or two into a small pyramid of charcoal or piled the charcoal to one edge of the chimney with a fire starter beneath it.

The smaller fire starters also came in handy when lighting a smoke tube to turn a charcoal or gas grill into a smoker. I tested smoke tubes this summer too; I’ll share more about that next week.

Learn more about my favorite charcoal starters in this product roundup. You can find grilling recipes in the recipe index and more of my work off the blog here.

Want more Twice as Tasty recipes? Get my books! Click here to order a personally signed, packaged, and shipped copy of The Complete Guide to Pickling directly from me. I also share tasty ways to use pickles in The Pickled Picnic; it’s only available here.