About a month ago, Paulus and I had lunch with some friends at a restaurant in La Jolla that we hadn’t tried before. Their thing is Italian food and amazing ocean views. The restaurant had a number of pizzas on their menus, but I’m always rather wary of ordering fast-food-y things from good restaurants. Not because such restaurants don’t do these types of food well, but because they usually do other types of food even better. So I ended up with a fresh pasta dish. It was good, but as it turned out, Paulus’ Sicilian Mortadella and Pistachio Pizza totally put my choice to shame.

Man, that pizza was good (and yes, I played the baby card in order to have a slice. Paulus isn’t really into meal sharing all that much, more’s the pity..). As far as I can tell, it consisted pretty much of a white base, mortadella, pistachio pesto, and cheese. On paper, I just can’t see that working, but it did, and I think this must be attributed to the pesto. I had never had pistachio pesto before, but it is very worth having.

The pizza was so good that I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards. Over the next days and weeks, I obsessed about whether I could recreate it. Then, when in the course of our bi-weekly shopping trip, I stumbled over mortadella at the store (and here I have to interject how weird it is to be paying for mortadella as f0r a gourmet ingredient, when in Denmark, it is often the cheapest deli meat you can find. That said, the mortadella I got here was clearly a much better quality than what I’m used to…), I knew it was fate. I’ve been craving deli meats for much of this pregnancy, although I think this mostly stems from a sort of rebellion against the recommendation that pregnant women shouldn’t eat deli meat unless it’s heated. But in any case, combining my obsession with the pistachio pizza with doctor-approved consumption of deli meat was too good to pass up.

Consequently, I got all the ingredients and made the pizza. I altered a few things from the restaurant version – added fresh basil and lemon peel, and subtracted burrata. But it was still absolutely amazing!

So hooray for pistachio pesto. I only wonder what other dishes you could improve with it. If you know of anything, please let me know! And if you want to try making this glorious condiment, have a look at my recipe below, or this Saveur Magazine recipe, which was my starting point.