Cooking with Colm O'Gorman: Roast butternut squash and red pepper linguine with walnuts
The first full meal I ever cooked was vegetarian. I was twelve and the rest of my family had gone for a walk and I had opted to stay home and cook lunch for everyone. Mam was vegetarian, she had been for a few years at that point, so it had to be a meat free dish. I ended up making a vegetable pie from a recipe by the legendary vegetarian cookery writer Rose Elliot. It involved making a cheese sauce from scratch, and lots of slicing and dicing of vegetables, blanching them, and finally assembling my pie and roasting it in the oven. I served it with a big green salad. It went down a treat, and I was delighted with myself.
We ate a lot of vegetarian good when I was a child. Mam had gone vegetarian in the late seventies, which was unusual for the time, especially for the wife of an Irish farmer. For Mam, vegetarianism was an ethical and environmental issue. She railed against intensive farming practices, and was convinced, rightly as we now know, that aspects of how we farmed animals would result in serious human health and environmental issues. She was very much ahead of her time. She was also a great cook. I get my love of food and of cookery from her. She believed in using fresh, locally sourced, ethically produced ingredients wherever possible. Essentially, she believed in sustainable food. She was adventurous and creative, but above all, she loved cooking nourishing, satisfying, great tasting food.
