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 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.

How to make Rose Turkish Delights (Lokum), and Sweet New Zealand

Rose Turkish Delights (Lokum) Before I start I would like to say that I don't have a sugar thermometer, essential if you are really into confectionery, and that I didn't use much sugar for these Turkish delights. Many recipes use much more sugar, and it is not that I wanted to make a low sugar treat here (it is still pretty sweet), it is just that making it at home really makes me realize how much sugar there is already in my diet, and if I can have something with a little less... well, why not! This method is 'home friendly' i.e. these can be made at home with very little effort and equipment, and the recipe comes from my book Sweet As... where I also have the recipe for lavender and orange blossom Turkish Delights. Ingredients 1 l water 300 g sugar 2 tbsp lemon juice 100 g cornflour 1 tbsp frozen raspberries 1 tbsp rose water icing sugar (very little) and cornflour (lots) to dust. In a pot put hal...

Mezze Maniche with Mushroom Cream Sauce

Since I had some left over mushroom sauce from yesterday's dish , today I made some pasta. I heard from other bloggers about the Garofalo pasta brand, in NZ I could only find it in one shop, and it was too expensive even to consider, so I thought that I should try it while I am in Italy. I choose mezze maniche for this dish. Mezze maniche with mushrooms I cooked the mezze maniche al dente. In the meantime I warmed up the pan with the left-over mushrooms and added 250 ml of cream. Then I added some freshly chopped Italian parsley and some freshly ground pepper. I drained the mezze maniche and passed them in the pan with the mushroom and cream sauce. They tasted great! Photos by Alessandra Zecchini©

Paccheri with tomato, parsley and garlic.

Paccheri are hollow pasta tubes that look like rigatoni or tortiglioni, but with a difference: the paccheri tubes flatten once they are cooked. Usually the have very rich sauces, but I am one for 'less is more' these days, and so here I just warmed up a ready made Italian tomato passata ( a good one ). Once the passata was hot I added some salt, extra virgin olive oil and finely chopped Italian parsley with garlic. These days I am chopping a lot of parsley and garlic together, it is too early for basil, and parsley taste really good in Italy! Also, I like the idea of having a cooked sauce but with raw herbs and garlic in it: the taste changes completely. Simple but really effective!!! If you are not vegan you can add some ricotta to this. Photos by Alessandra Zecchini©

Only Recipes, by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Search This Blog