First, let me start with what I was supposed to make for dinner tonight.  I saw a recipe for ham steak with citrus sauce at weber.com that looked really good. I said to myself, “that looks like something that I could easily adapt for just one person.”

Now let me give a little background that will explain what I ended up with…

As some of you readers know, I have taken a job 500 miles from home because the company I work for has moved their corporate office. For personal reasons, my wife and I do not want to move from the city in which we currently reside. Because I am not prepared to be without a job, I decided to accept a transfer and am living in an apartment by myself. I am diligently looking for a job back home, but there is not a lot going on in my field, so I could be stuck here a while. I go home to see my family about every other weekend, but while I am by myself I pass the time by writing about my efforts to adapt my grilling for just one person.

One of the things I have learned while essentially living by myself for the first time in 20 years is that I am not nearly as organized as my beautiful wife. She does a remarkable job organizing the household. One example of this is she creates a menu for the upcoming week and then from this makes her shopping list for the grocery store. This has two major benefits. The first is we always have what we need. The second is we don’t waste a lot of money on impulse purchases.

This brings me back to the grilled ham steaks with citrus sauce. As noted above, I saw this link on weber.com and thought is looked great. (You can click on the link to see the full recipe and decide for yourself, but it made my mouth water when I read it.).  So, following my wife’s example, I wrote it on the calendar and then proceeded to add the ingredients to my grocery list.  The only problem is that I am not as good at this as my wife is.  You see, when she makes her list, she doesn’t just assume that she already has something.  If there is any doubt, she gets up and checks the pantry to make sure we already have it.  I on the other hand saw that the recipe called for olive oil and thought I already had some so did not add it to the list.  I failed to remember that I finished off the bottle I had two weeks ago when I was making grilled hearts of romaine.

I came home from work this evening looking forward to grilled ham steak with citrus sauce.  It turns out that olive oil is a key ingredient in the citrus sauce. A key ingredient that I discovered I was missing only after I placed the ham steak on my Weber Smokey Joe Gold.  I did have the orange marmalade, orange juice and balsamic vinegar to baste the ham steak.  As it turns out, my dinner was actually very good even without the citrus sauce.  The marmalade/orange juice/vinegar gave the ham steak a really good flavor.  In fact, if I hadn’t been looking forward to the citrus sauce, I wouldn’t have missed it and I would have no complaints.  I liked this well enough to want to have it again, this time with the sauce.

Also, one of the many other things my wife is better than me at…she would have remembered to take pictures.