While we’re literally baking in Mother Nature’s furnace during the dog days of summer, there are still many more weeks to enjoy the outdoor grilling season – and that’s reason enough to brave the late summer inferno.

When it comes to outdoor grilling, I can’t imagine anything more suited to wood and fire than seafood-succulent shellfish basted with glossy ribbons of melted butter or fresh-caught rainbow trout wrapped in bacon and fried in a beat-up black, cast-iron pan on top of the campfire. Or the scent that comes from wisps of smoke created when those butter and bacon drippings melt onto the white-hot coals of natural alderwood. Ahh, this is what my senses dream of when I think of seafood grilled on the barbecue. 0r, as our Aussie grill mates would say, “Shrimp on the barby.”

But before we char some crustaceans on the grill, we first need to define what it means when we talk about cooking seafood on a barbecue. This is an important point, because I am a purist when it comes to the lexicon of cookery, and I hate it when chefs misuse words when defining a recipe.

I suppose it depends on whom you argue with, but in my opinion, it’s important to be specific when you talk about cooking methods.

A barbecue (noun), is a piece of equipment used for cooking food outdoors; everything from a chrome-plated, 20,000 BTU, gas-charged, custom-made in the backyard behemoth, to a rusted and crusted empty 50-gallon oil barrel converted to a cooker.

To Barbecue (verb) is a cooking term used to define food cooked in a certain manner. Barbecue can be food cooked outdoors on a barbecue, or it could be food cooked indoors on your basic GE electric stovetop and then coated in barbecue sauce.

Taking my argument a bit further regarding the misuse of defining seafood cooked on a barbecue, we again turn to Chef Emeril Lagasse and one of his signature Cajun recipes-“Barbecued Shrimp with a Rosemary Biscuit and Homemade Worcestershire Sauce.” Emeril’s shellfish creation appeared in his widely popular cookbook, “Emeril’s New Orleans Cooking,” in the pre-Food Network “Bam” days and well before he hawked spice mixes and bottled marinades.

While I’ve prepared this dish at home and enjoyed the spicy little critters at chef Lagasse’s eponymous Las Vegas temple, Emerils’ New Orleans Fish House at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, one can’t view this shellfish dish as true shrimp on the barby. Why? Well, the shrimp aren’t cooked on a barbecue, and the cookbook instructs you to sauté the shrimp over a stovetop.

Now I wasn’t invited into the restaurant’s kitchen, so I can’t accurately report on whether wood or gas powered the grill, but I venture to speculate it was the latter. Although the shrimp were grilled indoors, if they had been grilled over natural wood rather than a gas flame at least I could have slipped them by under the guise of “indoor barbecued shrimp.”

But I just couldn’t do it. Emeril minced words, using the term “barbecue” to describe his thick, syrupy homemade barbecue sauce, which lends a smoky hint of the outdoors to the sauce. I suppose you could stretch the outdoor cooking theme and say that the fragrance of the rosemary in the biscuit was reminiscent of the scent of a pine forest. Sort of.

I can’t even close my eyes and imagine that Emeril’s dish is real shrimp on the barby, it just isn’t. Real shrimp on the barby is pretty simple and doesn’t take hours reducing shells, stock and lemon juice into a thick and spicy sauce, passing it off as “barbecued”. So let’s just strip away the pretensions and get down to cooking some simple seafood on the barby.

We’re going to look to our mates in Australia for inspiration for some shrimp. Then we’ll take a lesson from my family on how to best prepare a whole fish for the barbecue, and we’ll finish with an ancient method from Southeast Asia and Mexico for wrapping fish in leaves before placing them on the fire.

When you select shrimp for cooking on the barbecue, you should choose the biggest raw shrimp you can afford. Why choose big? Is big always better? No, not exactly.

I like to choose raw shrimp with the tails and shells still on. I choose shrimp in the 8-10 per pound class, what they used to call “Jumbo Shrimp” in continental restaurants in the 1970’s. That way my shrimp won’t fall through the grates of the barbecue and turn into a funeral pyre, and I want the shells still on to trap moisture in the shrimp meat while they grill. If you place shelled shrimp meat on a hot barbecue the shrimp will turn into tough shoe leather in about a minute.

Simply grilled shrimp on the barbecue don’t need a lot of fancy sauce or frilly garnishes. Remember, we’re trying to duplicate the tastes and textures of cooking seafood in a very old-fashioned way, and in ancient times man didn’t use plastic squeeze bottles to squirt shrimp reduction sauce on a porcelain plate.

If you are feeling a bit creative and want something more than melted butter or cocktail sauce for your barbecued shrimp, think in terms of other seasonal ingredients that will accent both the flavor and texture of the shrimp, but still allow the briny, seafood scent to permeate your taste buds.

For example, I just can’t get enough sweet yellow corn on the cob this time of year. And smoked bacon is wrapped around shrimp that go on the barbecue, so how about we roast some corn on the grill, shave it off the cob, puree it and add some smoked bacon? The sweet corn adds body and texture to the sauce, and the sweetness accents the sweet shrimp. We’ll add some trendy height to the dish with a salad of finely shredded, cool and crisp iceberg lettuce with peppery cilantro. Delicious.

Please don’t make the mistake my Father used to when it came to cooking a whole fish on the barbecue. To this day Dad sees himself as a barbecue aficionado and so I don’t want to rain on his coals.

He would go down to “Fitt’s Seafood” in Salem, Oregon and spend a lot of money for a whole, fresh-caught king salmon just off the boat in Depoe Bay over on the coast. Dad would cook this monster just once every summer during an annual picnic for friends and family.

He placed slices of lemon and maybe some fresh dill and parsley in the cavity of the salmon. Then following the tried and true methods perpetuated on the cooking pages of old issues of Sunset and Better Homes and Gardens magazines; my Father would tightly wrap the salmon in aluminum foil. This basically created a metal coffin with no holes for the smoke from the barbecue to creep into. No way for the salmon to pick up the scent of the barbecue.

Ever wonder why Native Americans butterfly salmon and stake them to wood spikes splayed in front of an Alderwood fire? Now that’s real fish on the barby.

Please, don’t wrap your salmon or fish in foil. While it is perfectly o.k. to place the fish on a sheet of foil. If you wrap the whole fish with foil it will basically steam over heat and you won’t have any true barbecued, smoky flavor.

Trust me, wild Pacific salmon is good regardless of how it is cooked, but steaming it in foil just doesn’t seem to do justice to a fish so naturally oily and delicious. Cooking salmon over an open fire on the barbecue is the way to go.

Not that wrapping fish for the barbecue is always bad. Wrapping fish in natural fiber wrappings is an ancient method that keeps the fish moist, yet allows the steam to naturally escape during cooking. This keeps the fish from steaming like it would if it were wrapped in choking layers of metal foil.

And depending on the type of natural wrapping, it will impart a delicate hint of its own flavor to the fish. Banana leaves are available both fresh and frozen at your local Asian or Mexican grocery store. If you live in a community without an ethnic market, you can order frozen banana leaves online.

When I wrapped some halibut filets in banana leaves I was worried that they would be scorched and charred when I placed the banana leaf packets on the barbecue. So I pushed the hot coals to one side and placed the banana wrapped halibut in the other corner of the barbecue.

About 20 minutes later dinner was ready. The banana leaf packets were a bit dried and had a few black marks, but incredibly, they weren’t burned beyond recognition. And what a stunner on the plate. I felt like I was dining in a Tiki lodge overlooking the blue lagoon on Bora Bora.

I place the entire package on a plate – a great presentation as the packet was opened. Sort of like unwrapping of a gift from Mother Nature.

As I unwrapped the banana leaf, the scent of a tropical forest wafted upwards. The halibut was incredibly moist and flaky, but not overdone. I spooned a spicy red Thai curry sauce with creamy coconut milk over the halibut.

This, my friends, is an exotic and sensuous dish. It was smoky and seductive with the unique flavors of the tropics.