There are times when recipes, just like buses and blog-posts, can be hard to find and then, just when you think you’re in for the long haul, a whole host of them appear from nowhere and flood your every waking moment.  Over the last few weeks, I’ve been desperate to find some more alternatives to plain chicken and rice to tempt M’s taste buds and it is thanks to some canny suggestions from M’s dietitian, a lovely reader and even my hairdresser that this past fortnight has seen me trialling some new inventions of my own.

Today’s recipe is one that might not appeal to everyone, but it has certainly been a huge hit with M:  Chicken Liver pâté.  Both G and M love pâté and when they were little, I found a quick and easy recipe and regularly used to make my own.  I’m not quite sure why it didn’t cross my mind to revisit this recipe in recent months, but thanks to a throwaway comment from our lovely dietitian about the possibility of cooking lamb’s liver and kidneys when M trials lamb, Chicken liver pâté suddenly sprang to mind. I spent a productive hour or so flitting between my computer and my recipe books, searching out traditional recipes as well as some that are dairy-free and quickly came to the conclusion that, with a clever few tweaks and variations of my own, this was definitely something I could cook up for M.

The base ingredients are easy to source: chicken livers, oil, rice flour, rice milk and herbs and seasonings; and I think that the recipe is easy to follow.  In my latest batch, I also added the last remaining drops of the “Rice whip” rice cream I had managed to buy months ago, which gave the pâté a creamier texture, but isn’t necessary to make a spread that everyone can enjoy. The pâté has given M another fab alternative to the monotony of his daily meals and he’s currently loving his pâté “sandwiches” (rice cakes with pâté) for lunch, instead of the dry alternative.

Pâté perfected, it was now time to put my second plan into action and create a M-friendly version of Beef Wellington.  Sadly at the moment for us there can be no pastry, mustard, mushrooms, crepe or indeed beef, but there is chicken, chicken liver pâté, cucumber and rice and that, I decided, was more than enough.  I carefully cut into a chicken breast and created a pocket, which I filled with thin slices of cucumber and lashings of the pâté.  I coated the filled breast with a rice crumb and then oven-baked.  M tucked into it heartily last night and devoured the lot, which was just amazing to see.  So that’s another dish to add to my repertoire, though perhaps the end result was more “Chicken Kiev“, than “Beef Wellington”, a “Chicken Wellington” you might say!