Chicken Walnut Pâté

I had all this leftover chicken meat from making soup stock malingering in my freezer, and it was time to do something with it. Since the remains from stock can be quite a random assortment of bits, I’d heard one the best things you can do is just grind it all up into a pâté.

Most chicken pâtés out there seem to be for chicken liver, but I found one for chicken meat from Cooks.com that I mainly followed, and then also used some ideas from Crinella Winery to spice it up. Also ideas from my own head. Here’s how it went:

– I defrosted the chicken, and then realized I’d accidentally thrown some uncooked chicken parts in with the cooked – oops! I put the uncooked stuff aside, and then I decided to sauté the cooked chicken in a pan with butter in garlic (instead of throwing those in raw as the recipe calls for) to make sure that it was good to go.

– I also threw in some dried orange peel I’d saved from making compote so that that could rehydrate a little. I wish I’d had a fresh orange because after all was said and done, I think the orange was a great and unexpected flavor to add!

– Then I stuck it in my food processor with salt and pepper and made it into pâté!

The recipe doesn’t call for much else, so I decided to add in the following, tasting between each one to see how we were doing:
– Walnuts. The Crinella recipe calls for pistachios which I didn’t have, and I’ve seen other recipes calling for walnuts, so why not?
– Sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil. It seemed like the closest thing I had to orange, and like it might give a nice flavor. It did.
– Paprika. I don’t know what it is, but paprika makes everything taste better. I don’t even have good paprika, but that’s been my experience.

The last step in the Cooks recipe is to make the pâté into logs rolled in parsley. I was originally planning to skip this step, but then my friend Rebecca had a surplus from her CSA and asked me to come take some (yes please!) and one of the things she gave me was beautiful flat-leaf parsley. Ta-dah!

(Rebecca is in the process of creating a website for young adults trying to figure out what to do with their lives. Relevant to many older adults as well I should say. Check out her site: www.theinsiderinterview.com)

I decided to serve the pâté on a bed of sliced heirloom tomato and cucumber, also from Rebecca’s CSA (how decadent!).

I only served it to myself though, because… I may not have been quite careful enough in making sure there were no little bones mixed in with the chicken meat, and so every once in a while you encounter a hard part. So even though it did end up being super delicious and fancy, it’s not exactly company-worthy.