Making this pizza was so exhausting that it drained all my energy and I didn't have enough left after dinner to write it up. What a pain in the ass. Its only redeeming quality (and, I suppose, the most important one) was that it did taste incredible. Juicy grilled pineapple, sweet caramelized onions, crisp and salty pancetta, finished off with spots of buttery-soft Camembert cheese.

I figured that cooking the pizza on the grill would be better than heating up the house by baking it in the oven, but after wrestling with the dough over the hot grill I decided I was wrong. I would have gladly taken a hot kitchen over the nearly-disastrous juggling act that took place on the patio.

The source of this recipe is probably the last place I would go for cooking tips. Let's just say it's from a certain magazine that some men claim to "read" just for the articles. Um. Right. It was given to me by one of my regular bar guests after I had told him about my last pizza-grilling mishap (if anyone else had offered up a magazine clipping with a scantily-clad woman on one side I would have been thoroughly weirded out, but I'm used to this guy and quite frankly, I wouldn't expect any less from him).

The fact that this recipe originally came from an actual cookbook convinced me that it might be worth a try. The technique is nothing new. Grill the dough on one side, flip it over, add toppings, then grill the other side. Sounds simple enough, right? The reason I never tried this method before is that I was afraid that the toppings wouldn't stay put (I prefer when the toppings bake into the dough, becoming one with the pizza, if you will). Little did I know this would be the least of my worries. In fact, getting the finished pizza off the grill in (almost) one piece felt like a remarkable feat.

This experience would have benefited from better planning, for one, and a lot more prep area outside. The pineapple should have been sliced thinner also. Half inch slices, like the recipe states, are way too thick for this thin pizza, although thin slices would have been more difficult to grill without falling apart. The best solution would have been to chop up all the toppings so the pizza would be easier to eat. Less photogenic, but sometimes that's the price you have to pay.