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Courgette glut

courgettes, sweet peas and eggs“Is this from the same plant as that one.”
Danny held up the small courgette and its older brother that I had overlooked and was travelling rapidly towards becoming a marrow. He weighed the two in his hands and glanced at me.
“I think that we are on the brink of a glut.”
The trug had never been weighed down with courgettes before. So initially tiny hands clapped with glee.

The chicken poo enriched compost had worked like a dream.

Yesterday I was wondering what we could do with them all. They lay in a long tranche in the coolest part the kitchen. Green, crisp and delicious and willing us to eat them.

Home grown courgettes, like cucumbers, taste delicious. They’re completely different to the commercially grown ones. In fact they taste so different that you might think that they were a new super veg. We don’t like woolly, commercially grown courgettes normally but we love eating ours and growing them can be fun too.

There’s a tempting recipe on Joanna’s food for a raw courgette lemony salad with pine nuts that I spotted last year. We couldn’t try it as the stems of our courgette plants rotted in last summer’s rain. Now I’m tempted to make Joanna’s recipe with the smaller ultra fresh courgettes from one of our giant specimens.

“We can stuff the bigger courgettes. Like the ones that we loved in Italy. Nothing will go to waste. You never know, we might be able to make courgette wine.”

I ventured onto the popular allotment forum looking for a wine recipe. Suddenly we don’t have a glut anymore. And there were also loads of good ideas for non wine drinking courgette glut victims.


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19 Comments

  1. If you google “zucchini cake” you will find lots of recipes, they are really yummy. I agree with Rachel, its even better than carrot cale and yet so few people know of it. It looks likely its origins may be in the USA hence the use of zucchini, possibly? Try it, its easy to make.

  2. and if all this healthy veg stuff gets too much you could always try courgette cake – like carrot cake only even more delicious

  3. casalba

    You can make a pasta sauce: chopped onions, courgettes, carrots and celery fried until soft in olive oil. Add chopped tomatoes (tinned ones are fine also) and a good vegetable stock. Simmer for much longer than you think. I make this in very large batches then freeze in portions.

    Or, one of my favourites – if you are getting them to nearly marrow size: Cut in half lengthways. Scoop out the fleshy seedy part. Fill as you wish. I like a little tomato sauce (as above) with mince meat and rice. Put the filled two halves together, wrap in foil and bake in the oven until the skin is soft. Serve in slices.

  4. Also worth trying http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/content/recipes/ and typing in courgette, you’ll be amazed!

  5. Thanks for the link, Fiona … that salad is definitely best with homegrown courgettes, although I’ve made it with veg box ones and supermarket ones too. Lovely to have a glut … if our plants survive the two-week neglect that is our summer holiday, I’ll be back here to see how your stuffing ideas are going

    Joanna

  6. Natasha

    Yes, I am beginning to sense a glut too! My courgettes this year are yellow and delicious, trying all sorts of recipes to use them – tonight I’m making courgette lasagne, if it is nice I’ll post the recipe.

  7. Stephanie in AR

    My parents used their’s to make relish – if that is what we call a zuchini. We could never grow enough cucumbers for both pickles & relish but had no problem with over sized zuchini. 🙂

  8. Danny Carey

    Hi Pamela,

    The link seems to work fine for me.

    Here is the URL:

    http://joannasfood.blogspot.com/2007/07/lemony-courgette-salad.html

  9. I’ve tried desperately to link to the lemony courgette salad recipe but cannot open it from anywhere. I have been asked to make a salad for a barbecue I’m going to this evening and thought this sounded delicious. Could you post the recipe? I’m sure you won’t be back here before I go out but I’d like the recipe anyway. My friend in Canada used to freeze grated courgette for use later in muffins and sauces. I grated pounds of them one summer when I was staying with her.

  10. FactoBrunt

    What about courgette cake?

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