Roasted Cherry Tomato Pizza

You may recall from our Kale Salad Pizza recipe my love of food blog 101 Cookbooks. Or maybe I only mentioned my enthusiasm for Heidi's raw tuscan kale salad and forgot to elaborate on how much I truly enjoy every single recipe she creates. Every. Single. One.

So I anxiously awaited the arrival of her latest cookbook, "Super Natural Every Day," and this summer have been working my way through the many delicious combinations of whole, healthy ingredients. I'm not getting a commission for selling cookbooks or anything, but if you have any foodie bones in your body, you should buy this book. Even if you don't like to cook, the pictures are stunning enough to set it on your coffee table and drool over it on a regular basis.

This pizza recipe emerged after flipping to a page describing how to make oven-roasted cherry tomatoes. We already enjoy cherry tomatoes on pizza for their juicy, punchy bite of tomato-ness, so intensifying and sweetening that flavor sounded exciting. Fortunately, we had several tubs of golden cherry tomatoes already on hand from our CSA.

OVEN-ROASTED CHERRY TOMATOES (from Super Natural Every Day):

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F with the rack in the top third of the oven.
2. Wash and remove all stems from 1 pint of cherry tomatoes. Slice them in half and place them in a large baking dish.
3. In a small bowl, whisk together 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, 1 tablespoon maple syrup and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Pour over the tomatoes and toss to coat.
4. Arrange the tomatoes with the cut side up so that the juices don't run out and roast them for 45 to 60 minutes, until the tomatoes shrink and start to caramelize around the edges.
5. You can use them right away, or let them cool and store them in a glass jar along with any leftover olive oil. Top off the jar with additional olive oil to help preserve the tomatoes. They will keep for about 1 week in the fridge.

Cut-side up in the baking dish

Roasted, with more olive oil than the recipe calls for

Stored for later

TOPPINGS (layered in this order):

1. Whole wheat crust, par-baked
2. An entire batch of oven-roasted cherry tomatoes, thinly spread over the crust, with any remaining olive oil. If you want an extra tomato-y pizza, consider using two batches.
3. Several handfuls of fresh basil, torn into large chunks
4. A chopped garlic scape or 2 minced garlic cloves
5. Grated mozzarella
6. Grated Parmesan

Bake at 450 degrees for 7 minutes. Top with another sprinkle of Parmesan and a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil if it looks dry.

We had friends over for dinner that night and made both this pizza and our go-to-for-impressing-guests Potato-Leek Pizza and it was a toss-up which one people liked more.