Here at MarnCo Labs, a wholly owned subsidiary of MarnCo, the ruthless multinational behind The Big Adventure, we are always conducting research in the hopes that we can enrich the lives of you, our Three Loyal Readers.

Our latest thrilling discovery:

YES, YOU CAN BARBECUE PIZZA!

I know. I'm all tingly, too. Isn't science wonderful?

Like most of the great scientific discoveries, there was a bit of happenstance involved in this. See, about seven months of the year I do my cooking on an air tight wood cookstove, but when summer comes it just heats the house up too much to use it.

I have a counter top range for conventional cooking and whenever I feel the need for baked goodness during warmer times of the year, I have been using either a toaster oven or a small convection oven. Sadly, after many years of use, my convection oven died on me this spring. Since we're not completely sure what my office reno is going to run us, we decided to put off replacing the convection oven.

Well, you can make many things in a toaster oven, but you can't make pizza for two and I had a pizza craving. My eye fell upon the BBQ. I proposed baking pizza in the BBQ. The spousal unit was more than a little dubious.

Warm, supportive woman that I am, I mocked his lack of courage and adventure with the classic "buck, buck, buck" chicken sound (oh, be so very, very grateful that you are not married to me) and immediately set about *insert echo chamber effect here* The Great Pizza BBQ Adventure.

No guts, no glory.

Herewith, My Top Secret Recipe For BBQing Pizza. (Shhhhhhhh. Don't tell a soul, 'kay?)

Step 1, preheat the beejeebus out of the BBQ, get it hot. (I have fire bricks in my gas powered BBQ, by the way. If you don't, that might affect your results.)

Step 2, turn heat way down, quickly put foil on the grill, shiny side down. Only cover the left side of the grill, the side your pizza pan will be on.

Step 3, put pizza on left side of BBQ, on top of foil, and turn flame off under that side.

Step 4, turn flame down as low as possible on right side of BBQ

Step 5, close lid.

Now, here comes the point where art meets science. You have to do this by smell because if you keep opening the lid of the BBQ, your heat will escape and the toppings will not cook, nor will your cheese melt.

None of us ever wants to experience THAT kind of horror, right?

Basically, what you want to do is check it when you smell that freshly baked bread smell. Quickly open the lid, survey your toppings and gently lift the crust. If the bottom of the crust is golden brown, your toppings lightly bubbling, and the cheese melted then you, my friend, have successfully barbecued pizza.

However, leave your pizza on too long, and I can see that you would end up with the bottom of the crust charred. As it is, this method does tend to leave you with a crunchy French-bread type crust on the outside of the bottom of your pizza, so if that is not to your liking, then you shouldn't barbecue pizza.

Actually, maybe no one should barbecue pizza beyond the trained experts here at MarnCo Labs. After all, this IS the cutting edge of science, and, well, who's to say that our results could be duplicated in your lab? Maybe you should wait until we complete our research and our paper is published in "Nature".

Let's see, what else? Well, there was a consensus here at MarnCo that the flavour was very good. There are suspicions that the shiny coat of ancient BBQ sauce and grease o' charred dead things which has accumulated on the inside of my BBQ over several years of use may help account for the added pizzazz.

Mmmmmm, you just can't beat that ancient grease o' charred dead things for pizzazz, eh?

Our crack team of highly trained technicians ... well, actually, we are basically talking about uh, me, so maybe I should rephrase that to say "A 52-year-old woman who has lived in the woods far, far too long" wants to stress that this, of course, is simply a preliminary research report. Pizza will definitely be barbecued again. Current thinking is that if something can be found to prop the pizza pan up off the foil so more air circulates under it, crunchiness of the crust may be reduced.

You can well imagine how a-twitter I am about that.

Oh (and remember, you read it here first) at some future date, when I've sufficiently recovered from the excitement of barbecuing pizza, I'm also going to try barbecuing nachos because, well, here at MarnCo Labs we're all about The Cutting Edge of Science.

There will be further research bulletins, of course, as events progress.

--Marn

Mileage on the Marnometer: 326.52 miles (525.5 kilometers)
Goal for 2003: 500 miles - 804.5 kilometers