I heart my new grill (and grilled pizzas)

I'd like to think I'm not materialistic, but I love our new grill. LOVE it. Andy and I got it for anniversary #5. It is a Weber gas grill, E-320 Genesis. This box had a shipping weight of 275 pounds. It's all cast iron and stainless steel parts, so we unpacked it at the front door, carried it piece by piece to the back deck, and assembled it out there.


We've cooked on it each night since it arrived, including a big dinner with Lisa, Tin, Thai, and Elliot the first night, after two or three hours of putting it together. We've mostly been grilling veggies, sausages, and burgers, but on Saturday we grilled some pizzas. The benefit to grilling pizzas as opposed to cooking them on a stone in the oven is 1) you don't heat up the kitchen with a 450-500 degree oven, 2) it's fun, 3) you get cool grill marks on a nice, crispy crust.

There's a lot of recipes and discussion out there for grilling pizzas, including a nice detailed writeup on 101cookbooks and Bitten. So I won't go into detail, except to say that I made the dough I always make for pizza, which is the recipe from our Cuisinart manual (but with half whole wheat flour and half bread flour), and topped them with garlicky olive oil, leftovers, and parmesan (would have been better with more cheese but we were out). Mine was leftover grilled mushrooms and sauteed collard greens with raisins, pine nuts, and garlic. Andy's was leftover grilled red pepper, summer squash, mushrooms, and chicken sausage.

It was dead easy, but the most important thing is to make sure your dough is not to sticky. I put on some extra oil and cornmeal to prevent disaster. They were a little burnt on the bottom cause I'm still getting used to how awesomely hot this grill gets.