This year I planted small tomato varieties of different shapes and colors and despite the drought, the plants are loaded. Even if you don’t garden, the little bursts of color and flavor are at all our local farmers’ markets and at grocery stores right now. I find myself grazing directly off the plants so often that I’ll buy a quart of them to make a pie or even easier, a cobbler.
Buy as many different colors and shapes of small tomatoes as you can because each one has its own characteristics, and together they will be a total flavor bomb, and even after cooking, so pretty.
You don’t need to cook the tomatoes before putting them in the pie. Simply sauté some diced onion until soft, add a little garlic, and scrape it all into the bowl of tomatoes, then add a good amount of chopped or torn basil.
Recently Madeleine and I had a conversation about perfecting the pie crust, but you can make this dish with a store-bought crust or, even easier, by making a cobbler instead of a pie.
After I’d made cherry tomato pie a few times with a cheddar crust, I was eager to come up with something different, so I developed a cheddar-garlic streusel. All you need to do is prepare the tomato filling and put it in a buttered pie pan or baking dish, top with the streusel and bake. It’s delicious at room temperature or even cold, so you can easily make it ahead. But if even making that topping seems like too much work, use canned biscuits as a topping with a bit of grated parmesan or cheddar as a finish.