Serves: 4
Time: 1 hour
Price: €5.47 – €1.37 per portion
Before the whole vegan thing, I LOVED pate! Now, for obvious reasons, I don’t consume most pates these days. Pate is great as a starter, or a lunch with crackers, or even as part of a vegan cheese and cracker board. So I set about trying to create the perfect vegan pate for around the festive season, or as a starter for Christmas Dinner. Mushrooms are one of my favourite ingredients so I figured they were a good place to start.
You will need:
- 4 cups chestnut mushrooms, sliced
- 3 red onions, sliced
- 1 large bulb of garlic
- 1 cup silken tofu
- 1 1/2 cups stock (I make mine up with the knorr veg stock pot)
- 1tbsp fresh rosemary
- 2tbsp tamari
- 1tbsp vegan worcester sauce
- 1tbsp dijon mustard
The first step is roasting the garlic. You could definitely just mince the garlic and throw it in with the onions when they are cooking but there’s something magical about roasted garlic. To roast the garlic, cut the top off and remove as much of the excess skin as you can. Drizzle over a little bit of OIL (sidenote – you don’t have to use oil but I was feeling a wee bit extravagant with this one!), bundle up in some tinfoil and roast on a baking tray at 200c(fan) while you sort the rest of the pate.
Next, cook down the onions in half of the stock until soft and the stock had evaporated.
Then add the mushrooms into the pan, along with the tamari, worcester sauce, rosemary and the rest of the stock, return to a medium heat. Stir regularly until the liquid has reduced and the mushrooms are well cooked. Strain off the excess liquid thoroughly and reserve this liquid for tomorrow’s Christmas side – gravy!
Add the strained mushroom mix to a food processor with the tofu, mustard, and the freshly roasted garlic.
Blend until smooth and transfer evenly into four ramekins.
Garnish with a sprig of rosemary and serve with crackers or crusty bread. You can eat them freshly made, but these firm up well and continue to develop flavour if left in the fridge overnight – so you could make this ahead of time and it would only add to the flavour! This starter, I admit, looks pretty bland a mushy – however I promise you they taste incredible and you’ll be making it every time you have guests over!
You’ll notice I mention a post tomorrow – all this week I’ll be adding shorter blog posts between my Christmas courses. These are the sides you can make to go along with my dishes, tomorrow’s is a gravy, made from the leftovers from this recipe so I hope you’ll check back for that one!
Hannah Finds Vegan 
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