We Should Cocoa: Mushroom and Stilton Tatin with Chocolate & Port Sauce

This month's We Should Cocoa is hosted by Choclette at Chocolate Log Blog. Last month's incredibly healthy round up by Chele at Chocolate Teapot can be found here.

Choclette has challenged us to create something savoury that includes chocolate. And then raised the gambit by stating that it had to be vegetarian. Only around 50% of our meals contain meat but pairing most of the vegetarian meals I have cooked in the past with chocolate... Well... They just wouldn't work.

I looked around for savoury recipes involving chocolate and I got wave upon wave of roasted venison loins, slow cooked meaty chillis and bacon. Bacon dipped in chocolate. The true earthy nature of chocolate seemed to lend itself to those meaty, rich flavours. Pairing chocolate with celery or cucumber wasn't going to work for what I had planned. Pairing it with strong blue cheese and meaty nutty mushrooms and rich port, however did.

Ingredients
1 large onion
250gr chestnut mushroom
100ml port (or red wine)
20gr dark chocolate
200gr Stilton
1 sheet of ready rolled puff pastry (you won't need all of this)

Method
1, Preheat your oven to 200o/c.
2, Slice the onions (See N.B) and cook in 1tbsp of olive oil and a small pinch of sea salt over a medium low heat until they just loose their rigidity. Crank up the heat and stir in the mushrooms and cook them until they are just cooked and starting to go golden.
3, Pour in the port and grate in the chocolate and simmer until the sauce has thickened so it just coats the onions and mushrooms.
4, Crumble half the stilton into a pie dish, trying to keep it chunky and add the cooked onion and mushrooms. Leave this too cool a little or we'll be heading for soggy pastry.
5, Unroll and trim your puff pastry to fit the pie dish and snuggle the edges down the sides. Bake for 10 minutes until the pastry is golden and puffed up.
6, Invert onto a plate, crumble on the rest of the Stilton, cut and serve.

N.B - I'm lucky I got this one out. If you lose the guard on your mandolin, don't use it. I currently am missing a couple millimetres off the tip (and a portion of my nail bed) thanks to my own stupidity. It didn't hurt as much as I thought it would but it bled. Heavily. (Luckily, I'm assured by the triage nurse that it'll grow back! I'm like a starfish!) Be careful you beautiful bunch!

Thanks to Jim who did the rest of the cutting for this dish after our little trip to A&E. And for the Twix. He's bloody brilliant. ('Scuse the pun...)