Vegan paté

A couple of weeks back, my Mum sent me a new recipe that she and my Sister Bip had tried out, from Bip's ever growing collection of vegan recipes - a vegan paté which looks and tastes like the real thing. I put the idea forward to Lundulph and he seemed interested as he's always after a new healthy thing to eat and he's not too big a fan of regular paté. This recipe yields quite a lot, but it can be frozen in smaller portions for later use.

Ingredients

2 tbsp vegetable oil
200 g finely chopped onion
5 - 6 cloves of garlic
100 g fresh chopped button or chestnut mushrooms
400 g canned chick peas
120 g chopped walnuts, can be roasted, but not necessary
1 tbsp soy sauce
1.5 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp fresh chopped rosemary
2 tbsp fresh chopped sage
1 tsp ground black pepper
salt to taste

Method

1. Heat up the vegetable oil and fry off the onions and garlic until soft.
2. Add the chopped mushrooms and fry to soften them as well.
3. Remove from the heat and transfer to a deep bowl. Add the remaining ingredients and blend until smooth.
4. Transfer to an air-tight container and chill in the fridge until needed.

The resulting paté has the texture of traditional fine liver paté and tastes similarly. The main flavours are the rosemary and sage and some experimentation may be required - I used too much rosemary and it dominated everything, so I have a lot of it now, frozen in chunks to use with something else. But it was very interesting that the flavour and texture matched a traditional pate so well.