Bistro pizza week–margarita

I’m keeping it simple and fun this week by passing along a few mini-meal ideas we’ve been trying out–welcome to bistro pizza week! Now you can definitely make your own pizza dough, but to keep this meal fast I buy pre-made dough from an Italian grocery store near our home. With dough at $1 per bag, I pick up three and make four mini pizzas with each.

It’s fun to play around with the small sizes and experiment with the flavors. But to start off, I’m passing along a classic–Margarita pizza, topped with only three fresh ingredients: mozzarella cheese slices, roma tomatoes and basil. Named after an Italian queen whose visit to Naples inspired the idea, I find the simple ingredients are appealing to picky eaters. Maybe it’s that the ingredients are so easy to identify, or that every part of the pizza is fresh, but this is the most requested pizza at my house. We even picked up yellow tomatoes to make it again this week–gotta tweak right?

Note: It’s easy to double or triple this recipe and it makes for great leftovers to send in kids’ lunches–or to have for breakfast…

Recipe

Prep time: 15 minutes

Servings: 4 mini-pizzas

Ingredients

1 bag pizza dough

2 roma tomatoes

1 bunch basil

8-12 ounces fresh mozzarella

olive oil

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
2. Divided the dough into four equal pieces using a floured knife.
3. Roll each dough piece out into a 5-6 inch circle, then place on a cookie sheet lined with parchment.
4. Brush each dough piece generously with olive oil.
5. Place tomatoes, mozzarella, and fresh ground pepper on top.
6. Bake for 10 minutes, remove pizza and add basil then cook for an additional 5-10 minutes or until cheese is golden. (You can leave the basil on the whole time if you don’t mind it getting a little crispy. I actually like the basil crisped so I put it on at the beginning of cooking, it’s up to you!)

Coming up later this week:

• Meatball margarita pizza
• Breakfast pizza failure
• Apple gruyere pizza (a new favorite)