Pepperoni

County police are searching for two suspects in the third holdup in less than two weeks of a Brooklyn Park pizza parlor Sunday.The men entered the Pepperoni Post in the 5000 block of Ritchie Highway about 7:40 p.m. and displayed a handgun, police said.The men ordered an employee to lie on the floor before forcing him into the walk-in freezer, police said.The suspects fled in a yellow car with an undetermined amount of money from the cash register.Police are looking for two black males; one suspect is in his 20s, 5 feet 8 inches, 140 pounds, and the other was described as 28 to 30 years old, 6 feet tall, heavyset and wearing a white tank top.They were last seen heading north on Ritchie Highway after the robbery, police said.

B.J. Thompson of St Augustine, Fla., was looking for a recipe she had lost for Italian chili that was made with sausage and pepperoni in place of ground beef. Rosemary Grantly of Knoxville, Tenn., sent in a chili recipe that she thinks may be close to what Thompson is in search of. She says that it is easy to make and a nice departure from the traditional-style chili. She also says that practically every time she makes this chili for others, she is asked for the recipe. I tested her recipe using a jar of spicy tomato and basil sauce which, with the addition of the spices, gave the chili a nice kick.

* Item: Tombstone Half & Half Pizza* What you get: 4 servings* Cost: About $4.59* Preparation time: 14 to 16 minutes in oven* Review: Modeling itself after your neighborhood pizzeria (where you can split your pizza toppings as you see fit), Tombstone has come out with a series of double-flavored pizzas. They may need a little more fine-tuning, however. We tried the Pepperoni/Cheese flavor and found the grease from the pepperoni migrated farther than expected. All of the cheese slices tasted faintly of pepperoni, not just the ones that were next to the pepperoni side.

Nino's Pizza & Subs Fazzini's 578 Cranbrook Road, Cockeysville -- 410-667-6104 Hours --11:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Sundays-Thursdays; 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays Restaurant's estimate --a few minutes Ready in --13 minutes Smaller than the other three, the dome-shaped "Italian Calzone," $6.83, was packed with flavorful pepperoni, provolone, salami and capicolla ham. We'd go back to Fazzini's first. Know of a good carryout place? Let us hear about it. Write to sam.sessa@baltsun.com.

* Item: Lean Cuisine French Bread Pizza* What you get: 1 serving* Cost: About $2.30* Preparation time: About 3 minutes in microwave, about 30 minutes in conventional oven.* Review: This product begs the question, Is it better to have a reduced-calorie slab of pizza or limit one's self to a smidgen of the real thing? I vote for the latter, having found these frozen, diet pizzas offensively bland. Cardboard came to mind as I sawed my way through the cheese pizza. The pepperoni version was marginally better.

Nino's Pizza & Subs Fazzini's 578 Cranbrook Road, Cockeysville -- 410-667-6104 Hours --11:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Sundays-Thursdays; 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays Restaurant's estimate --a few minutes Ready in --13 minutes Smaller than the other three, the dome-shaped "Italian Calzone," $6.83, was packed with flavorful pepperoni, provolone, salami and capicolla ham. We'd go back to Fazzini's first. Know of a good carryout place? Let us hear about it. Write to sam.sessa@baltsun.com.

Italian coal miners used to take a loaf of bread and a pepperoni stick along when they descended into the earth in West Virginia. They knew a thing or two about what makes for tasty, hearty snacking, says Gene Minor, a West Virginia native.Mr. Minor and his friend Don Vail have created their version of the miners' snack -- the "PC Bun," pepperoni and cheese encased in fresh dough -- and will soon sell it in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia and Washington, D.C.The PC Bun is the chief product of DJ's Bakery, which will move at the end of the month into new headquarters in the Forest Hill Airport Industrial Airpark, from the Jarrett Building in Jarrettsville.

AL PACINO CAFE 542 E. Belvedere Ave., in the Belvedere Market. Hours: 11 a.m. 11 p.m. every day. Call 323-7060 If you've had it with extra cheese and pepperoni, you might want to make Al Pacino's Cafe your next stop for pizza. The combinations number at least 30; many of them are exotic -- by most carryouts' standards -- with names to match.Al Pacino's Cafe has three locations, but the newest is just off York Road in Belvedere Square. The cafe is small and friendly, a good place to stop with the kids.

We arrived just in time the other night at Matthew's Pizza. Our enormous order made it into the kitchen a few minutes before the kitchen ran out of large pizza dough. That's not so unusual at Matthew's, one of Baltimore's true culinary treasures. Earlier in the day, customers had deluged the place with even larger orders than ours - 15 pizzas for one, 25 for another. At Matthew's all the dough is made fresh, a process that takes two hours, and there was not enough time to make any more pizza.

REAL PIZZA CARRYOUT, 8841 Belair Road, Perry Hall. Open Monday-Thursday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Phone: 256-0220.Don't let the name mislead you; this little carryout tucked into a tiny strip of shops has more than real pizza to go. There are real soups and salads, real pastas, real Italian baked specialties, real hoagies in three sizes (6-inch, 9-inch and 12-inch) and some real tasty side dishes.We had a variety of appetites in tow the night we dropped in, so we tasted a little bit of everything.

I LIKE THE cell phone thing at the racetrack. In the old days, you might have been arrested for taking bets over the phone. Now a guy like Dave Miller, the auto mechanic ("I'm a technician," he says), can lean over the hot dog counter in the grandstand, cell phone to his ear, taking bets on the 130th Preakness from his father-in-law, Lawrence, and his brother, Teddy. He can include the whole family in Baltimore's great day at the track. Nice. Anyone with any track sense would recognize Miller as a hard-core horse player and slide up next to the guy. For me, it was almost unavoidable.

We arrived just in time the other night at Matthew's Pizza. Our enormous order made it into the kitchen a few minutes before the kitchen ran out of large pizza dough. That's not so unusual at Matthew's, one of Baltimore's true culinary treasures. Earlier in the day, customers had deluged the place with even larger orders than ours - 15 pizzas for one, 25 for another. At Matthew's all the dough is made fresh, a process that takes two hours, and there was not enough time to make any more pizza.

OK, MR. PIZZA Delivery Man, I'm coming out. With my hands up. I saw you cruising by yesterday - real slow - and I knew it wouldn't be long before you came back. Not with a pizza. With a warrant. My mother told me I'd end up no good, but I didn't believe her. All this thinking about religion and faith and what other people do inside their mosques and temples and churches. That God stuff is bad stuff. I can't say I really have any excuses for myself. I'm just a curious guy. But what about you?

Item: Vennari's Homemade Pepperoni Rolls What you get: 2 rolls Cost: About $2 Nutritional content: 284 calories, 10 grams fat, 5 grams saturated fat, 28 milligrams sodium, 45 grams carbohydrate, 1 gram sugars Preparation time: 20 to 25 seconds in microwave, 4 to 5 minutes in oven or let thaw and eat at room temperature Review: In the 1970s and 1980s, Dave Vennari operated a popular chain of pizza places in Columbia. A byproduct of that business was Vennari's Homemade Pepperoni Roll, a staple snack sold at Vennari's as well as area racetracks and Memorial Stadium, Mars Supermarkets and a number of independently owned delicatessens.

* Item: Tombstone Half & Half Pizza* What you get: 4 servings* Cost: About $4.59* Preparation time: 14 to 16 minutes in oven* Review: Modeling itself after your neighborhood pizzeria (where you can split your pizza toppings as you see fit), Tombstone has come out with a series of double-flavored pizzas. They may need a little more fine-tuning, however. We tried the Pepperoni/Cheese flavor and found the grease from the pepperoni migrated farther than expected. All of the cheese slices tasted faintly of pepperoni, not just the ones that were next to the pepperoni side.

* Item: Lean Cuisine French Bread Pizza* What you get: 1 serving* Cost: About $2.30* Preparation time: About 3 minutes in microwave, about 30 minutes in conventional oven.* Review: This product begs the question, Is it better to have a reduced-calorie slab of pizza or limit one's self to a smidgen of the real thing? I vote for the latter, having found these frozen, diet pizzas offensively bland. Cardboard came to mind as I sawed my way through the cheese pizza. The pepperoni version was marginally better.

Connor's Classic PizzaMount Vernon Market Center, 816 Guilford Ave., Baltimore. Hours: 11 a.m to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday; 11 a.m to 9 p.m. Saturday; noon to 8 p.m. Sunday. Delivers during lunch and dinner hours. 727-4755.A Good pizza is hot, cheesy, with clean flavors and crisp crust. Connor's Classic Pizza meets all these requirements. Moreover, the pizza maker, Mary Alice Connor, looks authentic.At the end of a busy dough-making day, she will often be covered with flour. That's a good sign.

IF YOU ARE white living among white neighbors and a pizza delivery man says he won't deliver to your street because he feels it's unsafe, you have to figure he really feels that way. The thought that he doesn't want to bring you a pizza because you're white never enters your head. But if you're black, you're never quite sure. So it's not surprising that in Annapolis, where most pizza delivery services say certain predominantly black neighborhoods are too dangerous to send employees, some African-Americans can't help wonder if more sinister forces are at work.

Dr. Enrico Mercanti is a NASA satellite expert who believes that explaining space physics can be as easy as ordering a pepperoni pizza.A veteran of three decades of interstellar investigation, Dr. Mercanti recently retired as deputy to the chief of the Goddard Space Flight Center's Advanced Missions Analysis Office to concentrate on writing books that combine science fact with a dollop of science fiction.For those who struggled through high school algebra, talking to a real-life rocket scientist can be an intimidating endeavor.