Welcome to my website. My name is Emer and the recipes you’ll find here have been created and collected over my last 20 years as a vegetarian. Let me tell you a bit about my background.
Aged 16, vegetarianism changed my life. Don’t worry. You’re not about to get a lecture about not eating animals. Although a love of animals and a desire to protect their rights did lead me to vegetarianism as a teenager, what really happened then is that I discovered food. For the first time in my life, I thought about the food I was eating, where it came from and the effect it had on my body.
Growing up in Ireland in the eighties, dinner in most households almost invariably involved a chunk of meat, potatoes and some overcooked vegetables (peas or carrots usually). I was lucky. My mother was a good cook and very supportive of my decision to stop eating meat. She even learned to cook some veggie food but I knew that if I was going to take this step, I would also have to take more responsibility for feeding myself.
Back then, vegetarian food felt very exciting and new to me. Suddenly by choosing to exclude a handful of foods from my diet (meat, chicken, fish) I seemed to be opened up to a whole world of new ingredients and tastes. Vegetarian cooking has always gathered influences from across international ingredients and cooking traditions. And because as a vegetarian, I couldn’t just slap that chunk of meat on my plate, I was forced to be a little bit more creative, something which I found thoroughly liberating.
And so began a love of cooking. When I was a teenager, I loved spending my Sundays experimenting with outlandish dishes for my bemused family - just for fun. In my twenties, my little rented house was the place my friends always gathered to eat and drink. These were not proper, grown up dinner parties of course. Just relaxed evenings with friends where the conversation and the wine more often than not took centre stage. But there was always lots of good food.
And somewhere along the line, I was lucky enough to meet Joe who just happened to be a brilliant vegetarian chef. Many of our early dates were spent in the kitchen cooking together. How could I not marry him?? (I did, of course)
Later, we began teaching vegetarian cookery classes together and also did our years at farmers’ markets, selling vegetarian food. In fact, most of the recipes you’ll find here are OUR recipes rather than mine.
It does seem that as life moves on, there is less and less time for recreational cooking. But I still love good food. And I love cooking. So I just couldn’t live on ready meals and frozen pizza. I find the idea depressing. Food is too important to me for that. These days I want easy, healthy food that is quick to prepare, doesn’t cost the earth and above of all, tastes great – everyday food.
I really hope you enjoy these vegetarian recipes. As a personal collection, I like to think they stand out from many internet compilations of random recipes. If you have any questions or comments, I would love to hear from you. Just click on my Contact Me page to get in touch.
