Quick Cherry Tomato & Basil Pizza

I have to admit that I'm not a huge fan of the standard American style pizza, covered in tons of cheese and heavy sauce. I love me some thin crust, wood oven, Italian pizza with a few fresh toppings and just a little bit of fresh mozzarella cheese. Just for the record, I don't like meat on pizza, either. Yes, I'm a weirdo as well as a food snob. It's not like this will surprise anyone.

So, anyway, I got some really fragrant basil and yellow cherry tomatoes in my produce box today. Yey, summer! It is the first week for tomatoes, so I'm allowed to get excited, I think. I immediately started plotting what I could do with them, and thought of pizza. Probably because I've been craving Pizzeria Delfina, but that is another story. A quick trip to Trader Joe's for mozzarella cheese and whole wheat pizza dough (ok, I'm inspired but lazy) and I was ready to go. I was originally planning on using burrata cheese, but I didn't want to make the trip to the cheese shop for it, so I setttled for plain mozerella. I don't think the final product suffered for it.

I let the pizza dough sit out for about a half hour while the oven was heating up to 450 degrees, with a baking pan preheating in it. I cut about a dozen of the yellow cherry tomatoes in half, sliced a tiny yellow zucchini into super-thin slices, julienned a generous handful of basil leaves, and grated about a teaspoon of lemon zest. I also chopped up 6 balls of Ciliegine mozzarella (the smallest size).

All that done and the oven ready to go, I stretched out the pizza dough to fit the hot baking pan (pizza stone is in storage, somewhere). It wasn't round - as I said, I'm feeling lazy. I grabbed the pan out of the oven and tossed on a little cornmeal, then placed the pizza dough on it, drizzled it with about a tablespoon of olive oil and a generous sprinkle of fine sea salt, then layered on the mozzarella, tomatoes (cut side up), squash, and basil, with a couple grinds of fresh black pepper over the top. In the oven for 20 minutes, and done!

It was delish. The tomatoes were amazingly sweet and tasty. My only regret is that I should have used more - they were so good! The whole house smells like mouth-watering roasted tomatoes and basil. Mmm.