Pizza with Oven Roasted Tomatoes, Olive Tapanade, and Goat Cheese

That title is a serious mouthful, I know it.  But I just had to make sure you were aware of all the incredible ingredients I topped this pizza with.

 For starters we oven roasted roasted the tomatoes. To make: take grape tomatoes, cut in half, drizzle with olive oil, throw in salt, pepper, and minced garlic, cook at 250 for 3 hours.

That alone was a delicious accomplishment and were much more palatable than sun dried tomatoes.  I love a good sun dried tomato, but let's do some straight talking here: you can't bite them.

For the sauce portion we chose an olive tapanade and for the cheese we went with a combination of goat cheese and mozzarella.

The result: the most beautiful pizza in the world!  It was cooked on a pizza stone which I have an awesome tip for, if you need it.  The problem with a pizza stone is that it needs to heat in the oven before you can cook the pizza on it.  This means you can't stretch the dough out on it like you would when cooking in a metal pan.  The solution: prepare the pizza on parchment paper on top of an upside down cookie sheet.  Then when the pizza and the stone are all ready for cooking, you can just slide it onto the stone!  This moment of brilliance is all thanks to Lidia Bastianich and it has changed our lives.

The flavor combination on this pizza is so glorious and I highly recommend you try it.  If nothing else, oven roast some tomatoes for yourself.  You'll be glad you did it.