Mushroom and Malbec Pâté or is it a pasta sauce?

I baked a rather tasty loaf of spelt bread this weekend and whilst it was pretty incredible with a slathering of salty butter while still warm (seriously, is there any better taste), I wanted to make the bread the star of our supper.

I had a punnet of mushrooms in the fridge that needed using. My first thought was mushrooms on toast with crumbled Sussex Marble cheese melted atop and quite frankly that would have been incredible. For some reason though I went the unusual route of a pâté, unusual because I am not normally one for eating or indeed making it.

So pleased I ventured outside of my usual cooking repertoire though because this was delicious. I used a recipe from one of my River Cottage books as the base but played about with the quantities to make it more 'mushroomy' and added a good glug of Malbec to enhance the deep earthy flavours. Boy did it work but not just as a pâté, this is a fantastic pasta sauce too. So for the sake of 10 minutes of work, we've had two suppers.

Mushroom and Malbec Pâté
Serves 4-6.

300g portobello mushrooms (or some other flavoursome variety)
30g salted butter
2 garlic cloves
100ml Malbec or another deep flavoured red wine
150g soft cheese

Roughly chop the mushrooms and sweat them down in a frying pan with the butter for 4-5 minutes.

Add in the garlic for a minute or two before sloshing in the red wine.

Let the mushroomy mix simmer away for 5 minutes or so. You want to have cooked off the red wine so there is little in the way of actual liquid left.

Leave to cool.

Place in a food processor with the soft cheese and plenty of seasoning. Whizz until you get the consistency you want. Of course the longer you process the pâté the smoother it will be.

Slather a slice of toast, sit back and smugly enjoy this ridiculously tasty and unbelievably easy to prepare morsel.

Don't miss a recipe, come and follow me on Twitter

@BCTinyKitchen

Or Like Me On Facebook