The Grateful Griller Is More About A Movement Than A Brand!

What's up in all of your smoke and fire filled world's grillers!

Whatever it is I hope it's been bringing you all huge happiness and tasty creations! My world over the last few weeks has been truly inspiring not to mention a tad crazy! As some if not all of you know by now I took delivery of the newest kamado called the Komodo Kamado to add to my "gto" lab last week thanks to my friend Dennis Linkletter in Bali Indonesia who has been producing these 650lbs. fine pieces of technological art for the past seven years or so. It was truly a day to remember as we, my Father-in-Law and I needed the heavy equipment to get it into place unharmed. I refer to the heavy equipment being a big old Hungarian tractor I have recently named "Boris" and without him I don't know how anything could get done on the vast acreage we live on!

All this said, we were able to get the new kamado into place without incident, thank-god, and while we were busy rigging the hoists for this beautiful, precision oriented, mosaic tiled, kamado grilling, inverted pylon of perfection I couldn't help but look back on what has been a truly remarkable and personal journey thus far with the kamado cooker since 2001!

Now, today, as some if not most of you know I now make part of my living by throwing down pretty unique and "out of the box" parties called "The Grateful Griller Experience" whereby, mostly all the food I prepare is grilled and or effected positively by smoke coming from these marvelous earthen vessels while my clients get to look on, be entertained, and hopefully become inspired to the point that they too want to become their own "Grateful Grillers"! Trust me people, its not hard to catch this bug and when you do, the pleasure, the pictures, the parties not to mention the extraordinary food will make fantastic stories and memories for the rest of your lives.

That's just it! The back catalog of memories I hold today of the places I've been and people I've met and parties I've thrown for family, friends and clients alike are to me, PRICELESS! This is why for me, my business today is so enjoyable because its more about inspiring millions of people one day, I hope, on a lifestyle, the "grilled to obsession" lifestyle that has brought me so much joy as opposed to just another unit that needs to be sold for the sake of the sale, and that's coming from the mouth or should I say keyboard of a veteran sales guy, LOL!

As this post title suggests, The Grateful Griller today and forever moving forward will be about creating excitement about the kamado and food and fire and smoke and desire to taste the difference on this side of the fence. For me, its also about the excitement and the movement I am in the midst of creating and  the party and ultimate celebration with those who matter most to you! If this all makes sense to you then you know who to call and hire for your next party!

This last couple of weeks has also felt a bit like a chapter closing out in a favorite book that you can't put down . I still remember the day like it was yesterday when I brought my first kamado cooker home and thought that the Big Green Egg was where this whole experience started and ended, lol! Little did I know then that an entirely new world was about to open up for me and here I am all these years later still learning about these mysterious earthen vessels. Its also been incredibly cool to meet all, (almost all) the interesting people who like me share a passion for all things kamado.

Today a kamado cooker can be purchased anywhere between $500 to $4000 and its fascinating to see and learn all the differences in technology between the various cookers that are available on the market. From the bare bones cheap and cheerful to works of fine art like the Komodo Kamado I look forward to the day that these cookers get the international attention they so deserve for no other reason than the incredible results they produce with any food when they are fired up and its so very easy to learn how! Its also for this very reason that my philosophy about "The Grateful Griller" as a business has changed, even morphed dramatically from merely selling units of one particular brand or another to now, through  "The Grateful Griller Party Experience" articulating a much bigger and louder message about this "grilled to obsession" lifestyle and my kamado turned conduit I call "K" for short.

Don Henley, former Eagle penned the lyric, "yesterday I saw a dead head sticker on a cadilac and the little voice in my head said, don't look back you can never look back". I love these words and they are so true. We can't get the best high school or college days back, or our first real kiss that felt like fire works going off, we can't bring loved ones back from the dead nor can we relive that first stadium rock concert vibe. One things for dam sure however, we can live for the now and dream big for tomorrow and thank the likes of Big Green Egg, Kamado Joe, Primo, GrillDome, Saffire and Komodo Kamado for taking the time and looking back themselves to ancient times and learning, studying, and passionately pursuing the goal of recreating the kamado cooker as we know it today and they are bigger and better than ever friends!

I also know that without the kamado, "The Grateful Griller" in its current form wouldn't even exist so when I get my own sticker you can all have one for free but you have to promise me that as I welcome each and every one of you onto my magic bus we will get grilled, chilled and obsessed together!

Feed those fires and desires to take your grilling games higher! The next few lines were inspired by Billy Corgan and The Smashing Pumpkins who I love dearly and as per my signature style people, the lyrics were altered by yours truly!

Grilling Zero's To Grilling Hero's


I feel a deep connection to that reflection I see in the street corner window.
I'm a grilling lover who will cover all your smoky bases and never forget your faces,
while putting me through my paces as we party from dusk till dawn, savoring every single salty prawn,
while chanting this grateful grilling song to anyone who cares to listen.


Your the one for me K,
you're are all I really need, you're the one for me K,
like my daily hit of speed!


Save your prayers and embrace the dares,
wanna go for a kamado grilling ride?
With humble "g" we'll take it in stride and all my grilling secrets in you I will confide,
and on this side of the well you will soon learn why life is so swell when you're not dancing to someone else's ringing bell!


Intoxicated with this grilling madness, I'm in love with the smoky radness!
A cheeky bit of culinary badness cos cleanliness is godliness,
and godliness is grillingness and grillingness is happiness,
and happy is me alongside the rest of this global grilling family tree!


Full to the rim, spilling over the brim with no excess fat to trim, we can all embrace each other and celebrate a new day about to begin.


Feed the fires and all your grilling desires friends...........

The Grateful Griller Is To The Bbq Industry What Punk Rock Is To The Music Scene, Different, Perhaps Even Purple!

What's happening grilling friends and fans!

I'm always so surprised that by the time I get a new story up on the blog about my adventures with "k" four weeks goes by or sometimes six and I find myself saying, where has the time gone and what's taken so long to come up with another ditty from the vault? All that to say things are grand in the "gto" corner here in my favorite village of Wakefield Quebec, Canada!

So!  Lately and for no good reason I have found myself listening to many punk bands of the 70's and 80's from old Ramones to Dead Kennedy's to The Exploited, Iggy, Bauhaus and Pixies, if you want to call them punk, to Sex Pistols, Joy Division, etc, etc.

This got me thinking about my overall passion for grilling, my obsession for the kamado and equal obsession for food, family, friends and you guessed it, music!  It also got me thinking about a great thing that happened to me about eight months ago when I received an unexpected email from a relatively new contact in the bbq industry who happens to live south of the border down in the Atlanta area. The email was short and to the point and read something like this! "Hey, Griller! Did you know that there's a book called "The Purple Cow" and your company/concept is mentioned in it on page 176 and the author of this book is one of America's top rated "marketing guru's"?

At first, I thought, why is someone trying to yank my chain on a Sunday morning about some book I've never heard of, let alone try to convince me that my business has been listed as a "remarkable" idea/concept that anyone reading the book will see in clear black and white! Honestly, I thought, what a load of crap that a little guy like me with the massive dreams I have, not to mention the energy to make them reality and the vision for the amazing kamado cooker would end up in some book by some super star author who's US based, let alone some authority on the topic of marketing. Ok, what's the catch here is what I was thinking at the time! cynical or what? LOL!!!!

Then I found out who the author was, Seth "freaking" Godin! For the record, that's not his middle name! Privately, until now that is, I was, and still am a huge fan and have read and highly recommend a number of his books like The Dip and LinchPin to name but a few. When my new found business friend Bobby down at Kamado Joe in the USA went a step further and took a picture of the caption in the revised version of a book called "The Purple Cow", ( for all you crazy, on the ragged edge, entrepreneurial misfits out there, go buy the book and thank the "griller"and Mr. Godin more importantly later) and sent it to me I was actually speechless for about ten minutes and anyone who knows me well knows that's almost impossible!

All this to say that I was elated but shell shocked at the same time and really, really curious how Seth Godin and his team found out about this small humble guy called "The Grateful Griller" and how my business concept ended up getting approved to get printed in this new revised version of the book. This is where the story gets cool! It started as a call/email to me from thousands of miles away in the USA from a Bobby who was on his couch or in bed on a Sunday morning reading this new book that I believe he purchased for all his employees at his company. I then took this info and within twelve hours purchased the book myself, turned to page 176 and bingo, there's this small paragraph on what makes my concept unique, fantastic I thought! Then I went so far as to email Seth Godin himself thinking to myself at the time, he's never going to get back to me, he's too busy!  Within 30 minutes I get an email back confirming and congratulating me on the caption and it's from the man himself! Perfect I thought, just freaking perfect, you could have knocked me over with a feather!

Yes, the story gets cooler still! It turns out, and I'm hoping I've got my facts straight here that fan's of Seth Godin had the opportunity to submit names of companies who they thought were unique and perhaps even remarkable like a "purple cow" sticking out amongst a pasture of ordinary milking cows. As it turns out, there was such a follower/fan of my blog named Rod who lives no more than a 30 minute drive from my house in Canada's capitol city being Ottawa who was kind enough to submit my companies name into the pool, and what do ya know, it got picked amongst many other unique companies.

Talk about going round the world and back, ok, the continent, I've been known to exaggerate at times but this is what's so amazing about our universe today my grilling friends! You can be located in Canada, America, India, Indonesia or perhaps even Australia and for the record and thanks to the internet I've got great relationships with people in all these places as it relates to my passion and my business and its the internet that I need to thank for it.

I also need to thank guys like Rod and anyone else for reading my content and hopefully enjoying what I have to say about something I am so passionate about, the kamado cooker. For the record, Rod and I have never met in person, ( that's about to change because there's beer involved, lol!) as of yet, although we communicate via email regularly, its his brother ironically whom I had the pleasure of working with at a local television station about a year ago to cut my teeth with television work for the first time on a grilling segment I did for his show on a monthly basis here in Ottawa.

At the end of the day what this entire story and experience has taught me is to keep it real and exciting and raw and edgy and unedited and delicious and most of all, keep it coming from the heart! I've learned thanks to people like Rod and author's like Seth Godin and all my other wonderful clients and family and friends that we have no time to waste on this journey of ours by faking it! As my late Uncle Joe used to say to me, Michael, life is not a dress rehearsal!

  The kamado cooker and all its ingenuity has turned into an incredible vehicle and a great friend of sorts for me over the years and I'm as excited today as I was ten years ago to introduce it to anyone who cares to listen. I used to rely on it for income, solely based on how many units I could sell but now I have found a unique way to introduce it and the lifestyle that comes with it to people everywhere via my"gto" party experience and its far less about units sold and much more about great times had with fire and smoke and ceramics and the extraordinary results that are attained when you combine the three and get your deck rockin! At the end of all this fun and if my client wants to purchase a kamado they just have to give me a call and I'll take care of the rest!

Today in my role as "The Grateful Griller" I strive to be as unique and different and out of the box as I possibly can, always trying to stretch the envelope with tastes and foods and the various ways they are  presented in order to blow my clients and their taste buds away but also keeping it simple so anyone wanting to venture down this path and cook like I do can accomplish it with ease over time.

Thank-you Iggy, Johnny, Black Francis, Joey, Peter Murphy, Jello, Ian Curtis, Rod and Mr. Godin for giving me the courage to carry on with my journey with my friend I call "K"! It's books like "The Purple Cow" that give me hope that people everywhere will sit up and take notice of tiny concepts like mine or more importantly start their own movement's with their own passion. I get such a rush when I get hired for gigs because I know I'm going to make a positive impact in my client's world as well as their guest's and friends by bringing them far more than a simple catered event and I do it in the form of food dancing with fire and taste's that come together that they have never experienced or desired before!

For your next unique party experience, you might want to consider "The Grateful Griller" for the occasion, unless you want to settle for the norm served to you on a white doily by a guy or gal in a tux or tuxette with white gloves who's simply punching the clock or you can request the "purple cow" dancing in the corner  to his own tune for now and evermore.......

The next few lines were inspired by the group P.I.L. and their song Rise and altered by yours truly!

Rise Purple Cow Punk, RISE!!!!!!!!!

I could be wrong, I could be right "K"
I could be black or I could be white.
One thing's for sure, we're gonna to grill today, we're  gonna to grill tonight.
We're gonna demolish these foodie walls cos we've got the balls to take this message all the way!
The time has come to dawn my second skin!
A self propelled vault onto the catapault and another peak on our journey thus far together.
After all "K", we know the valley's all too well, hey! what's that smell?
Your sweet smoke, its no joke, it wraps me like a cloak and gives me strength to carry on singing this kamado song!


I could be right, I could be wrong "K".
I could be white, I could be black, just look at those chips stacked and packed like a wild game of grilling poker with you and me playin the jokers and smokin our way to the stars "K"!
Grilling is an energy!
Grilling is an ENERGY, and the synergy between you and me is forever!
Together we will bare our grilling souls for all to see and savor, all those exotic flavor's born and cured in your belly fire will eventually inspire the masses to follow suit.


Todays kamado secrets will be tomorrow's hottest trend, so let's bend the rules of engagement and pursue that deal we're gonna seal in good time!
Kamado grilling is an energy!
It's a passion!
It's an addiction!
It's a force and with every delectable course you produce, we thank-you for the fruitful abundance we are given!
You are my obsession and my one possession and my confession for my feelings about you "K" are now going global!




feed those fires friends..........


GG