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.
Over the next month, as part of the Irish Examiners sustainability campaign, I will feature recipes with a focus on sustainability. I will use a different approach to sustainability each week; from locally produced meats to sustainably sourced fish, to vegetarian and vegan dishes.
This week, I am bringing you a vegan recipe. Eating more of a plant-based diet is something we can all do to play our part in addressing the climate crisis. For a meat lover like me, going fully plant-based is frankly a bit of a stretch, but swapping plant-based dishes for meat-based dishes a few times a week can make a real difference and is very achievable. For me, that means going back to the approach I learnt from Mam, using great ingredients and fresh, whole foods wherever possible. I dislike highly produced meat or dairy alternatives. I am not a fan of ‘vegan cheese’ for example. I prefer instead to come up with a vegan alternative that achieves the same purpose or flavour profile as cheese without trying to ape its texture or appearance. This week’s pasta dish is a good example of this. Instead of using a ‘vegan cheese’, I use a mix of sesame seeds, flaky sea salt and nutritional yeast. This gives the dish a gorgeous sprinkling of nutty, umami, salty flavour, the same flavour profile of parmesan cheese, but it is most definitely not cheese or even cheese like. Great vegan food in my view is not about aping meat or dairy based foods, but instead about providing real vegan wholefood alternatives.
I served this with my Pull Apart Garlic Bread. Space does not allow me to share the recipe for that here, but you will find it, including a vegan alternative, on my Instagram page.
CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB
- 4 red peppers
- 1 small butternut squash
- A large handful of walnuts
- 2 shallots
- 3 cloves of garlic
- ½ tsp chilli flakes
- Olive oil
- 1 tbsp tomato purée
- 250g baby plum tomatoes
- Juice of half a lemon
- Salt & black pepper
- 400g of dried linguine.
Warm oven to 190 Celsius. Put the peppers on a roasting tray and roast until the lightly charred, about thirty minutes. Peel & dice the squash into one-centimetre chunks. Pop I them onto another roasting tray, mix with some olive oil, sprinkle with flaky sea salt, fresh ground black pepper and the chilli flakes. Roast until soft and tender, about twenty minutes.
Finely chop the shallots and mince the garlic. Cut the tomatoes into quarters. Heat two tablespoons of olive oil in a saucepan over a medium heat. Add the shallots and sauté until soft, about five minutes. Add the garlic and cook for another minute. Next, add the tomatoes and tomato purée. Cover and allow to cook until tomatoes begin to break down. If they start to dry out too much, add a little water.
When the peppers are roasted, pop them whole into a bowl. Cover the bowl with some cling film, or better yet given the sustainability concern, a silicone lid, and allow them to cool for about thirty minutes. Set the roasted squash to one side. Toast the walnuts in the oven for about eight minutes.
Bring a large pan of salted water to a boil for your pasta. Add your pasta to the boiling water and cook to your own taste. I like my pasta a little al dente, slightly firm, so I usually cook it for eight to ten minutes.
Remove the stalks, seeds, and skin from the now slightly cooled peppers. Blitz the flesh of the peppers in a blender with the cooked tomato mixture until smooth. Return to the pan. Add the lemon juice. Taste and then season as required.
Drain the pasta. Return it to the pan and add the sauce. Add half of the squash.
Now plate up. A mound of pasta, topped with more of the squash and some toasted walnuts.
To make the topping, toast and roughly grind some sesame seeds. Mix equal parts of the sesame seeds and nutritional yeast flakes with some flaky sea salt. Sprinkle it over the dish and serve up.
