Cheese Nut Pate

Mollie says she thinks she has made this pate "more than any other recipe in the book." If so, she and I have quite different ideas of what is a success. This was definitely not something I would make again. It is something one would make and serve for a party. I am glad I didn't do that at any of my many soirees...

For the recipe, I mixed cream cheese, cottage cheese, cheddar cheese, a bit of minced onion, ground almonds and walnuts, lime juice, mustard, a bit of melted butter, dill, salt and pepper, baked it and then the idea was to garnish the whole thing, after extracting it from the loaf pan. Says Mollie, "The pate should emerge in one piece. If it breaks, you can easily mold it back together." I knew right then after reading this that it wouldn't unmold nicely and it didn't.

The garnish base is bland ricotta cheese spread all over the crumbly unstable load, after which one plays with nuts, olives radishes, cucumber slices and parsley to make it decorative (I guess). I admit I didn't do that since I hadn't made it for a group. Perhaps it might have been a bit more festive-looking at least. Mine looked like a salmon loaf, had only a mild, boring taste and it crumbled easily. I finally mixed the ricotta into the whole de-loafed shebang and tried a couple more times trying to convince myself it wasn't too bad. And it wasn't, but it wasn't that good either. I took some to the Wetzels and we never even tried it up there. I eventually threw too much in the garbage. I hate to do this, but....

So it goes when one is cooking one's way through a cookbook.