12:06 - 13 September 2010
Isn’t it funny how you sometimes can’t even give away gluts of summer vegetables? Take the humble courgette (or zucchini if you live across the pond). It’s a fantastic plant that crops abundantly providing generous amounts of delicate, succulent fruits that can be eaten raw, stir fried or chopped up into almost any dish with pasta, any salad, coleslaw rosti or practically any other kitchen concoction. Not only that but it can be used to bulk out sweet dishes such as cakes and puddings. But if you’ve grown too many it’s amazing how many people turn their noses up when offered free, organic, fresh, home-grown courgettes.
If you have a few courgette plants in the garden, by august you may well be buried in sausage shaped fruits. If you don’t pick them then your plants think they have made the necessary seed for the season and stop producing, not only that, but in a matter of a few days, your courgettes are the size of marrows and no-one wants to eat them. And of course when you do pick them, they quickly form new fruits to replace the ones that have been harvested and you end up with masses of courgettes to feed the family.
Cook’s delight
How many gardeners have resorted to finely chopping, grating and slicing up courgettes to disguise them in recipes before they are fed to the family? What a shame, as these versatile vegetables are delicious cooked in oil and cumin, roasted with potatoes and garlic, or mixed with other seasonal veg such as tomatoes, aubergines and onions and transformed into ratatouille. Grate them into bread dough and bake it in the oven. Use them in quiches and summer bakes.
We should be shouting about a plant that produces pounds and pounds of delicious fruits all summer long, that starts to fruit as early as May if we sow the seed in the greenhouse with protection and goes on fruiting right up to the first frosts if we treat it right. You can eat the fruits as soon as they form with their unopened flower bud an extra delight.
Slice a fresh courgette into chunks and thread them onto a wooden skewer, alternated with lumps of Halloumi cheese, drizzle lightly with olive oil and place over a hot barbecue. Delicious. Don’t waste a single fruit, every one is a precious addition the diet, and as long as they aren’t damaged they will last a week or so in the fridge or stored in a cool, dry storage area. And if you can’t think of anything else to do with them, then make them into a fresh summers soup.
Easy to grow
Courgettes plants are pretty resilient to pests and disease. Seed germinates without any problems and plants are available that produce fruits in pretty yellow forms, with weird spaceship shaped fruits and attractive stripy fruits too. You can pickle courgettes, add it to chutney, piccalilli or stuff with mince meat, rice, herbs and vegetables to create an interesting summer meal. What more do we want?
Even the flowers are edible. You can pick the huge and beautiful yellow blooms, tear them up and add them to salads, or dip them in batter and deep-fry them for an interesting side dish.
If only all plants were as easy to grow and as productive. So next time you are deciding what to grow or choosing your veg seed for next year, don’t dismiss the humble courgette. It may be the one vegetable that performs well for you next season and you might just be grateful for the glut of fruits it produces.
Instead of undervaluing your bumper harvest, enjoy it, look for creative ways to use up every last fruit and don’t be too hasty to give them away, the chances are they may simply be left to rot on someone else’s compost heap and that would be a terrible waste.
