Pesto Tomato Pizza

In the summertime we start craving these sandwiches made from French bread, pesto, tomato, and slices of mozzarella cheese.   Sometimes, however, you just have to be a little creative in the kitchen.  I was out of French bread, but I knew I could mix up some pizza dough in a hurry.

Normally I would make my own fresh pesto using basil I grew in my herb garden.  The fresh basil just explodes with flavor.  Why was I too lazy to stick a basil plant in the dirt a couple months ago?  I'm paying for that now.  Happily, I discovered store-bought pesto actually worked really well.  I was a little surprised at the intensity of the flavor.  The fact that it had big chunks of garlic didn't hurt, for sure.

Four of us pretty much killed this at lunch yesterday.  There were two slices left, so technically, it could feed five of us if it had to.  This made a very generous 15" pizza.

Mix up a batch of pizza dough.

I park mine, covered, on the table outside for an hour or so.

Have I told you how much I love this gadget?  

It makes quick work of rolling pizza dough.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees then bake the crust for about five minutes.

Top the pre-baked crust with about half of an 8 ounce jar of pesto, 

or preferably, use homemade pesto.

Slice about three very ripe Roma tomatoes.  Romas are denser and have less water content than most tomatoes.  Any tomato will do, but you'll want to lay the slices on paper towels to remove some moisture first if you don't use Romas.

Top all that with about 1/2 pound of sliced mozzarella cheese.  

Yes, you can use grated mozzarella, but sliced has a better flavor in my opinion, 

and looks more, you know....

Italian.

I just realized I wrote "about a half a jar", "about three tomatoes", "about 1/2 pound of sliced mozzarella."  That's the beauty of this type of recipe; you don't have to be exact for it to be delicious!

Now bake it an additional 10 minutes or so.  Just keep your eye on it.  Honestly, your nose will let you know when it's ready.  It will be about the time you're ready to yank the door off the oven anyway.

Mangiare felice!

Love,