People who have chosen to live in the Robson Valley, do have a strong sense of place. Nancy and Loretta, decided to mark the fact that they had lived in the Valley for fifty years, so they organized a community picnic at the Dunster Picnic Grounds to celebrate the occasion. Unique to the picnic was the first public tryout of the Dunster Pizza Oven. Guests were told to bring a frozen pizza along to cook in the wood burning pizza oven, and I was curious to see how well it worked.
I was skeptical about everyone bringing a pizza to cook, thinking it would take too long, because I figured that the oven would not be that big and it would take forever to cook so many pizzas, so instead of a pizza, we brought Mexican bean dip and tortilla chips. That was a good move, because even after hours of burning wood, the oven never did reach the really high temperatures needed to properly cook a pizza.
The waiting around for that to happen was alright, because it gave everyone a chance to socialize, visit, and catch up on things, and the picnic tables were laden with a lot of other food (like our bean dip) to snack on.
As everyone socialized and waited for the oven, we did experience a couple of light rain showers but they didn’t cause much commotion, and by the time we had gotten our jackets on, the showers were over and the sun was shining again.
The pizza oven never did get hot enough to properly cook the pizzas. I think it required different firewood, like dry pine or cedar kindling, to get the temperature up, but eventually the oven did get to the point where the cheese on top of the pizza was melted and the crust had browned. By that time people were pretty tired of waiting, and they ate the pizza they brought.
Despite the problems with the pizza oven, everyone had a good time.
Good clean fun!!!
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