we’ve gone totally crazy for the grill here in our new place. you know that feeling, on the very last day of school, when you know you’re done for the year, and you’ve got a whole summer of doing whatever you want ahead of you? having a grill makes every day feel like that. there’s nothing more relaxing than lounging in the backyard and cooking up hot dogs and hamburgers, or something a bit more sophisticated, like pizza (that’s right, i’m calling pizza sophisticated).

it’s a little nerve racking throwing pizza dough right on the grill for the first time. i was sure it would fall through the grate, but sure enough, it cooked right up perfectly. the charcoal gives the dough a smokiness you don’t get from a conventional oven, plus the perfect combination of a crispy crust with a soft chewy interior.

here’s an extremely rare shot of me actually cooking. and readers, meet the girl. ain’t she sweet? sorry, no pictures of us together – it was just the two of us, so we had to take shots of each other. she’s a amazing cook and i’m an extremely lucky dude to have her.

look at those grill marks. this crust is about to be topped and tossed back on the grill to finish cooking.

here’s the girl adding a bit of sauce with fresh basil.

as you can see, i’m not a master at making a perfectly round pizza. we’ll just call it “rustic.” this one was topped with barbecue chicken, caramelized onions, mozzarella and more fresh basil. if you’ve never grilled pizza before, or even ever made pizza at home before, it’s actually easier than it looks. have all of your friends over, tell them to bring their favorite toppings, and just keep cooking them up until everyone is too full to move.

it doesn’t hurt to have a few glasses of wine to make the meal complete.

here’s the grilled chicken we added to the pizzas. we’ve been in our new place for 3 weeks, and this is the second time we’ve made this chicken. the girl whipped up a really incredible bbq sauce that caramelizes perfectly and makes the chicken tangy and hot.

hmmm…sausage, caramelized onions, local fresh ricotta, and swiss chard. this one got a helping of mozzarella once it hit the grill a second time. these were so much fun to make (and incredibly delicious), i might do it again this week.

one last thing – the kind folks at washingtonian.com were nice enough to do a little interview with me for their “blogger beat” section, which you can read here. it was totally humbling to get to do it, so i hope you enjoy it. i think i successfully came off looking like a total dork (totally my intention all along). big thanks to washingtonian.com and thanks to all of you for continuing to read this blog and just being generally awesome.

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a week and a half in our new place, and this pie is already the third thing we’ve baked. the very first was a batch of chocolate chip cookies (to test out the oven), followed by blueberry muffins. but this past weekend we had a few people over for a bbq and i knew we had to have a pie. peaches are out in full force in dc right now, and peach pie + ice cream = good times.

now that we’re completely moved in and pretty much settled, we can really start enjoying summer. and now that we have a grill (which we plan to use several times a week), it feels more like summer than ever.

peach pie is one of the simplest pies to make, but also one of the most refreshing and delicious. there are few foods that actually taste like summer, but eating a slice of this pie just makes you feel like school’s out and nothing else matters except for taking a nap in the afternoon sun.

the key to this pie is getting good ripe peaches – once you’ve got that, you can just let the fruit do the work. so, you should probably get on making this pie, like immediately. don’t wait for the weekend – get yourself to the store, or better yet, the farmer’s market, and share the peach pie love now.

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in the short history of this blog, i’ve already moved twice. my moves were both in a 3-block radius, but regardless, it’s never an easy thing to do. the girl and i spent the entire weekend moving boxes and bags and furniture and plants into our new place (yes, i said OUR!), and have been too tired to do little more than look at our piles of stuff and imagine what the place will look like once we get enough energy to move anything.

so begins the long journey of figuring out where everything should go. one of the problems we’ve run into already is having doubles of, duh, of kitchen stuff. we were both thoughtful enough to get each other cooking gadgets and pots and pans when we moved into our old places, but now that it’s all combined, there’s just not room for 2 full sets of stainless steel cookware. and what are the odds that we’ll both need to press garlic at the same time? you can see the dilemma.

another issue is that we simply don’t know where everything is yet! not every box is labeled and packing got hastier just before the move, so if i wanted to find, say, a wooden spoon, i’d be hard-pressed to track it down. in lieu of full on cooking (which is actually killing us), we made hot dogs on the bbq (we have a bbq! and a shared backyard!). but enough about the new place. these rhubarb strawberry shortcakes were the very last thing i baked in my old place (the best cookies ever being the last thing i made last time i moved).

everyone is doing things with strawberry and rhubarb this time of year, and i can’t claim that this recipe is anything particularly special, except that it’s really really delicious. it was also my first experience with shortcake. i guess i never saw the point in shortcake before if there was tall cake to be had.

call me a convert, because these little guys are awesome. my only regret was not having whipped cream on hand to make the evening perfect.

i’m going to miss my old place, but i’m excited to fill our new apartment with memories, and more importantly, delicious baked goods. it may be a little while before i’m baking in full swing again, but there’s more to come!

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