Customer Reviews

A Man, a Can, a Grill: 50 No-Sweat Meals You Can Fire Up Fast

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This sturdy paperboard cookbook, presented by Men's Health magazine, is geared for guys who are novices at cooking and looking for easy meals to prepare on the grill. These 50 recipes, each of which is enhanced with ingredients out of cans, include beef, chicken, fish, pizza, pork, Spam, turkey, and veggies. Among the recipes are beer-can chicken, red-hot ribs, Dr Pepper-glazed ham, teriyaki turkey, and spuds on a stick.

The main ingredients and the finished product are illustrated with photographs. The book includes nutritional information, tips on the art of grilling, and a generous dollop of humor. Some of these recipes might be a little tricky for the novice cook to prepare, considering the unpredictability of a grill's flames and heat level, but there are still plenty of foolproof meals here beyond basic burgers and chicken that are great for feeding (and impressing) guests.

Eileen Rieback

Let's face it, we all love being a little creative in the kitchen or around the grill every now and then. Who would have thought ordinary canned cola or beer would add great taste to the best meats on the grill? Mix a budweiser with worcestershire sauce, grilling mix, and a small jar of chopped jalapenos and you have a wild barbecue mix making you believe you may be out in the Caribbeans. Or a can of sloppy joe barbecue sauce mixed with jalapenos. There are recipes a plenty guaranteed to fire up your taste buds.

Author David Joachim, who also penned A MAN, A CAN, A PLAN gives many great tips for perfecting your roastings for the grill. This book is a real must for anybody inviting guests over for a summer barbecue. Whether it's steak fajitas doused in beer, a rotisserie chicken grilled with a can of budweiser up the (orifice), or ordinary St. Louis Style Ribs - there are no limits as to what an ordinary can will do to add flavor to your favorite dishes. Highly recommended for any barbecue chef wannabes out there!

Looking through this "cookbook" I was amazed that it would be promoted by Men's Health Magazine. A majority of the ingredients for the recipes require processed and/or canned goods high in both fat and sodium.

Anyone who is motivated enough to read a recipe and follow the instructions can do better than what is offered here. With the thick, kid-book like pages, the book seems geared more to a teen. The draw back, however, is that each recipe requires a trip to the store as the ingredients are not something typically stocked at home.

During the summer and fall of 2011 I made all 50 recipes in the book "A Man, A Can, A Grill" and blogged about it - [...]. It was kind of a man-version of the "Julie and Julia" blog (and movie) where Julie Powell, a fan of Julia Child, made every recipe in her "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" cookbook. I just ripped off the idea, but gave full credit where credit is due.
Of the 50 recipes there were five my wife and I actually LIKED. (1) Big Ball of Shrimp Scampi, (2) Pocketful of Spam (except it would be better with HAM!) (3) Spam Goes Hawaiian (basically Spam Kabobs - make it with HAM!), (4) Buffalo Chicken Pizza (except make it with Boboli bread or some other prepared pizza dough. The pizzas in this book end up looking like autopsies!) and (5) Jah Mon Jerk Pork Chops. The rest left us with questions:

1) What should we eat WITH IT (the book gives little advice about side dishes, and when it does they were not much to OUR liking).
2) Why so much BEER marinade?
3) Must EVERYTHING be marinaded? Why not some basic rubs or why does he not recommend smoking anything?
4) I get that the title says "A Man. a CAN etc." but why use SPAM in a can when ham tastes and grills so much better?
5) Why do so many of the recipes mix tomatoes and fruit?

Toward the end of the adventure, I found myself checking OTHER books. If for example, the recipe was to be Chicken Breasts and Cherries, (YUK!!!) I'd look in the Weber Big Book of Grilling to see what THAT said about chicken and fruit. Often when I did this cross-check the second recipe was vastly better, so I would go with that. Of course, that's not how it was done in Julia and Julia I'm afraid! She followed every recipe to the letter.
The book "A Man A Can A Grill" has some pretty good sandwiches but here again there were problems. In many cases the marinade, which is also used for basting the meat during grilling, is so sloppy it's hard to eat and also it tends to douse the coals so they don't burn right. Also true of meat entrees such as the Red Hot Ribs. I couldn't baste them because the sloppy marinade kept dousing the coals. Consequently, they weren't really red hot!
The recipe for a basic hamburger is another sloppy, hard to eat mess. Here, I recommend adding a binder of some kind: bread crumbs, grinded-up chips or grinded-up soda crackers, but of course anything you add affects not only the texture but also the flavor. My other grilling books all have better recipes for the basic hamburger.
Pork chops on the grill are great, and there are wonderful marinades that can really enhance the flavor and keep them tender. I can't say I'm that fond of ANY of the marinades in this book, including those recommended for tenderloin.
And finally, the recipe for beer can chicken isn't nearly as good as many others I have.
In short, though it has a small number of interesting recipes, I can't recommend this grilling cookbook. In every case if you want to make something on your grill - chicken, burgers, pork chops, fish - I would recommend a DIFFERENT grilling cookbook! Every book I own has a MUCH BETTER version of very recipe in "A Man, A Can, A Grill." For any beginning or advanced griller, I'd recommend spending the extra few bucks and buying the WEBER BIG BOOK OF GRILLING. No, I don't work for Weber. For more info, see my blog [...]

We think this is a very helpful tool to all BBQ'ers. Enjoy We bought the three book set,how fun they all are.

I've had this book for a while and love the recipes! One slight problem though is pictures of cuts of meat are associated with the wrong name, or is it the other way around? For example, it says flank but the picture is top round, that sort of thing. Otherwise, it's great!

My husband loves this book. It is illustrated with very easy to understand instructions.

I got this book for my Dad for fathers day and he loved it. It came super fast, and was just like new. He had no idea amazon.com even existed and now wants to order more books. Thanks!

This book makes it so easy to follow the directions. I got two copies, one for each of my sons. They are enjoying the simple and tasty recipes.

So I bought these cookbooks for my husband on his days to cook (yeah right) and I'm really impressed with them. There are some GREAT recipes in this book series that aren't too bad health wise. I've actually used some of the recipes and they came out really tasty. Hubby even was able to make one and follow the easy recipe no problem. Highly recommended!