The Easy Tip For Skewering Kebabs (Without Impaling Your Hands)

When barbecue season rolls around it seems like almost anything can (and should) be cooked outside. Pizza? Check. Whole fish? Yes. One of the most fun ways to cook on the grill is by making homemade kabobs, which you can pile up with any combination of protein and vegetables depending on what's in season. Kabobs are also a great way to stretch out a small amount of meat or plant-based protein with a lot of extra veggies to pack a little more fiber and vitamins into dinner. The only problem with kabobs is getting everything expertly skewered onto sticks for grilling. Oftentimes whatever you're handling is either slippery from a marinade or takes a little force to skewer. Unfortunately, your hands are at the other end of those ingredients, and even if you're being super careful, it's easy to go overboard and poke yourself with one of the wood or metal skewers.

The good news is, you don't have to skewer your hands like they're an extra piece of chicken breast. You can use a piece of vegetable as a buffer or backstop for your skewer, and save your hands for flipping and serving the food on the grill.

The trick to using a piece of vegetable as a backstop for your kabobs is to choose a large piece while you're prepping. An onion works nicely when it's sliced in half because it will lay flat on a countertop, and it's dense enough that your skewer won't punch through it too easily. You can also use a potato, sweet potato, or any other similarly-sized piece of vegetable or fruit you're planning to grill — just make sure you can cut one side flat so that it will sit on your work surface without wobbling around. As you're peeling and chopping, just set that one piece to the side until you're ready for skewering. This trick effectively works as a skewer stand and stopper all at once.

Once you have all the components for your kabobs cut up and marinated, place your piece of onion or potato on the work surface (probably a cutting board) in front of you and take the skewer and punch it through the veggie of choice, creating a stand of sorts. Next, take your meat or vegetable and poke it through your skewer, sliding it down to the far end of the stick. No muss, no fuss, right? Go ahead and skewer the rest of your ingredients the same way as the first piece until you fill all your skewers or run out of ingredients. When you're done, you can use the onion and some cooking oil to season your grill grates.

Try using some kind of a backstop the same way any time you need to poke a sharp object through a piece of food for cooking. For example, if you're stabbing a bunch of cherry tomatoes and mozzarella balls for caprese skewers with pesto, cut a larger tomato in half and lay it flat on the cutting board to use it for spiking your cheese, basil, and cherry tomatoes. If you're making s'mores, save your hands from getting spiked and use a piece of fruit, like an apple, as your stopper to skewer the soft marshmallows. This is much safer for kids than waving pointy sticks around unsupervised and gives them a little more control over their hands.

Summertime is the high season for both barbecuing and making food on a stick (aka state fair season), and the only limit to what you can skewer is your imagination. If you want to skip a trip to the doctor's office when you're making a batch of corn dogs, use this easy hack for stabbing the food with the stick instead of holding the food in your hands.