A Paradiso Year: Autumn and Winter Cooking by Denis Cotter

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A truly innovative cookbook

Cork University Press, €19.99

Denis Cotter's 'A Paradiso Year: Autumn and Winter Cooking' is a cook's celebration of seasonal cooking, crammed full of useful recipes and inspirational ideas for warming stews and soups, rich relaxed braises and roasts - all done without recourse to meat of any kind.

Cotter is, of course, the proprietor of Cork's award-winning Café Paradiso restaurant. Like the restaurant, his book is vegetarian but not specifically orientated towards vegetarians, and dishes like Roasted Butternut Squash with Chickpeas and Cumin or Thai Cabbage and Onion Soup with Coconut, Lime and Coriander will tempt even the most faithful meat-eater.

Divided into three chapters - Autumn, Winter and Early Spring - Cotter balances the impatience and bounty of summer with more solid cold-weather crops of vegetables. Pumpkins and leeks are what he calls the bedrock of his cooking but there is also plenty of attention paid to clementines, roots, cauliflower and, as the weather starts to brighten up, spring greens and purple sprouting broccoli.

Many of the recipes have several sections and seem to be very restaurant orientated but Cotter, refreshingly, points out that they are as much reference points as definite instructions. Risotto of Leeks, Butternut Squash and Sage with Pumpkinseed Oil and Braised Lentils is a case in point but it's easy to break dishes like this down to the constituent, and more manageable, parts. 

A truly innovative cookbook, 'Autumn and Winter Cooking' is a companion piece to Cotter's 'Spring and Summer Cooking'. Both books draw their recipes from his 'Paradiso Seasons', the winner of the Best Vegetarian Book in the World Award for 2003. On the strength of this, it's time to invest in a few more Denis Cotter cookbooks.

Caroline Hennessy