How a $13 Pack of Skewers Fixed My Worst Cookout Habit

My name is Curtis Boone. I spent twenty-two years with the fire department before I hung up my turnout gear, and in all that time I never once burned a kitchen down. My backyard grill is a different story. Not fires, thank goodness, just a habit that made me look like I didn't know what I was doing every single time I tried to make kabobs. It took a $13 pack of LANNEY flat skewers from my daughter-in-law Katie to finally break that habit, and I want to tell you how.

Here's the confession. For years I used the same thin round bamboo skewers you find in the grocery store checkout aisle, three bucks for a bag of a hundred. I'd load them up with chicken, peppers, onion, maybe a little pineapple if my wife Donna was feeling fancy, and set them on the grate feeling pretty proud of myself. Then I'd walk away for thirty seconds to check the corn, come back, and every piece of food had spun around to face the wrong direction. The chicken that was supposed to be searing was now sitting there raw-side down, and the peppers that were perfectly charred were now pointing straight up at the sky, untouched by any heat at all.

I used to just laugh it off and blame the wind. Firehouse guys, we razz each other about everything, and I took plenty of grief over "Boone's Roulette Kabobs" at more than one department cookout. But it wasn't the wind. It was the skewer. A round stick has nothing to grip the food with. Every piece just free-spins around it like a rotisserie nobody asked for.

The fix came from, of all places, my daughter-in-law Katie, who does a lot of cooking for big family gatherings and doesn't put up with nonsense in the kitchen. She showed up to a Fourth of July cookout at our place with a pack of LANNEY flat metal skewers, seventeen inches long, stainless steel, flat instead of round. I remember holding one up and thinking, well that's obvious once you see it. A flat blade shape gives the food two sides to grab onto instead of one round surface to spin around.

A round stick has nothing to grip the food with. Every piece just free-spins around it like a rotisserie nobody asked for.

That first night I loaded up chicken thighs, red onion, and bell pepper on the LANNEY skewers right alongside my old bamboo ones, just to see. I turned my back for a solid two minutes this time, refilling drinks, checking on the coleslaw. When I came back, the bamboo skewer kabobs had rotated again, same as always. The LANNEY ones hadn't moved an inch. The chicken sat exactly where I'd put it, searing evenly, grill marks lining up like they were drawn with a ruler.

I'm not going to pretend a piece of stainless steel changed my life. But it changed my cookouts, and for a guy who grills two or three times a week from May through September, that's not nothing. I stopped standing over the grill like a lifeguard watching for trouble. I could actually talk to my guests, flip the corn, refill the cooler, and trust that when I came back the kabobs would look the way I built them.

There's a practical safety piece too, and old habits from the firehouse don't die. The flat design means the skewers sit flatter on the grate, which keeps them from rolling toward the edge and tipping food into the coals. And because they're metal, not wood, I'm not soaking anything in water for thirty minutes beforehand or worrying about a bamboo tip catching fire on a hot grate. I just rinse them, load them, grill, and toss them in the dishwasher after. Seventeen inches is long enough that the handle end stays cool enough to grab even off a hot grill, which matters more than you'd think when you've got a plate in one hand.

Donna noticed the difference before I even said anything. She said the vegetables were finally cooking evenly instead of some pieces coming off raw and others burnt to a crisp. That right there tells you everything. It wasn't my grilling that was the problem all those years. It was the skewer working against me the whole time.

We had a big cookout for the grandkids' end-of-school party a few weeks back, twenty-some people, three different kinds of kabobs going at once. Not one skewer spun. Not one piece of chicken landed raw-side down. I stood at that grill feeling about as relaxed as I've ever felt cooking for a crowd, and I gave Katie the credit right there in front of everybody. She just smiled and said she knew I'd come around eventually.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you asked me straight out whether a thirteen dollar pack of skewers is worth it, here's what I'd say over coffee at my kitchen table. It's not going to make you a better cook. It's not going to fix a grill that runs too hot or too cold. But if you've ever stood there watching your kabobs spin around and wondered why one side is charred and the other's still pink, the LANNEY flat skewers solve that one specific problem, and they solve it completely. I've used the same set for over a year now, they've gone through a hundred wash cycles, and they still lay flat and grip food the same as day one. For what it costs, I don't think there's a smaller fix that makes a bigger difference at a backyard cookout. That's really all I've got for you, no fine print, no fast talk. Just a guy who got tired of spinning kabobs and found the thing that stopped it.