Vegetable Pâté with Salted Butter served with Daikon Slices and Edible Flowers

In my mind Pâté is something made with leftovers: mince finely and add fat, and voilà le Pâté! But leftovers in this household are very scarce indeed, so for this month MT Challenge I needed to create some!


Obviously my pâté has a vegetable base, Kazuyo gave me some runner beans, and I had some green beans myself, so I cooked them with carrot, onion and celery, and water and salt. That was going to be blended into a creamy soup, but I could use some veggies first. Then in a saucepan I cooked a couple of zucchini with a green and a red capsicum, garlic, salt and olive oil. This ended up on top of a place of potato gnocchi (after keeping a couple of spoons for the pâté). Ok, so these weren't exactly leftovers, I worked in reverse, the main meals were the leftovers from my pâté! 

How much to use? Well, a bit of all of the vegetables (without the stock) to fill a 500ml jag, to start with. Then I blended the veggies. 

And now just look at this butter! Nice, fat, yellow NZ salted butter! Perfect for a pâté. I melted 100g of it and added half of my veggie mixture (250g, the rest went into the soup).

At this point the pâté needs to be whipped, and then stored in the fridge. I looked for a rectangular container, but didn't have any free one so I put it in two jars. Also I wasn't sure how solid it was going to be!

Yes this Pâté tastes good, but ever so fat! If I had bread I could eat an entire baguette with it, but to fill less guilty instead of bread I used crispy slices of Daikon. Just peel and cut the daikon into circles and place into a bowl filled with cold water. Before serving the Pâté drain the daikon, it will be nice and crunchy, ready to use instead of bread or crackers, and healthier too. The Pâté should be taken out of the fridge about 15 minutes before serving (it gets quite firm), spread on the daikon slices and decorate with edible petals and flowers. 

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

With this recipe I take part in the MTChallenge di febbraio 2012