Berry, Berry Good

I've had a long-standing love affair with berries since I was a kid growing up in New Hampshire. It began when I discovered that those berries I loved on my cereal, on a shortcake or on top of vanilla ice cream could actually make me money. When you're 12 and you live in a small town, the opportunities to make a little money are extremely scarce and I'd already given the paper route thing a try,  although I did save up enough money for a nice telescope before deciding that maybe I wasn't cut out to deliver the daily news  (how ironic considering what I ended up doing for  part of my life). My mother suggested that I could go pick berries and sell them door to door. Living in New Hampshire, berries of all kinds are just around the corner and I found good patches of blueberries, strawberries and raspberries hiding on old Mr. Stone's field and he graciously gave me permission to pick them.
Now, if you've ever spent even a brief amount of time picking berries, you know that it is literally backbreaking work - not to mention the scratches, bee stings and bug bites that also go hand in hand with berry picking. In fact, I almost gave up on my berry enterprise the day that my mother and Nana took me to a commercial blueberry field filled with low bush blueberries and I ended up accidentally sitting down on top of a yellow jacket nest. Forget about African killer bees. Angry yellowjackets have nothing on them and I was stung more than 30 times all over my body. My mom and Nana panicked and rushed me up to the home of the people who owned the field and after one look at my rapidly swelling face, hands and legs, the woman of the house promptly filled a tub with baking soda, stripped off my clothes and plopped me into it. I was so humiliated that I wished the bees had killed me. After all, being naked at 12 in front of your mother is bad enough, but a total stranger?! I still haven't forgotten that experience to this day.
Fortunately I wasn't allergic to bee stings and I survived the experience and was able to get back into the berry patches a week or so later. My little berry business was very successful and I had a "route" of customers that I would keep supplied in berries on a weekly basis, all for the outrageous sum of $1 per quart. When I see the little pints of raspberries and blueberries going for well over $3 in the local grocery  store, I just have to smile to think how I was sitting on a little gold mine and didn't even know it.
Now that the berries have dropped down to an almost reasonable price, I find myself picking up a variety every time I go to the store. One day, I think I went a little crazy and ended up with way too many berries for us to eat in a reasonable amount of time, so I made one of Abby's favorite desserts, the Fruit Pizza. This recipe, from Bon Appetit's "Fast, Easy, Fresh" cookbook is super simple and relatively quick (except for some of the tedious fruit slicing) and looks like you really spent a lot of time putting it together.
Fruit and Cookie Crust Pizza
(8 servings)
Ingredients
1 16.5 oz roll refrigerated sugar cookie dough
1 8 oz package of cream cheese (I used low-fat just to cut down on the calorie/fat content)
1 7 oz jar of marshmallow creme (sadly, there's no low-fat version of this)
Sliced fruits such as strawberries, peeled kiwi, blueberries, raspberries, bananas, pineapple)
1 jar of caramel ice cream topping
1. Preheat oven to 350. Butter and flour a 12-inch pizza pan (I didn't have one so I ended up using my Pampered Chef pizza stone and it worked just fine).Cut cookie dough roll crosswise into 1/3" slices. Arrange on prepared pan. Using wet fingers, press dough evenly into pan to form pizza crust.
2. Bake crust until deep golden brown, about 15 minutes. transfer to rack. Using edge of metal spatula, press in crust edges to form even round. Cool completely.
3. Beat cream cheese in medium bowl until smooth. Beat in marshmallow creme. Spread filling evenly over crust, leaving 1/2" plain border.
4. To with fruit as desired. Drizzle with warmed caramel sauce.