Coping with a glut of courgettes

The garden is continuing to produce at an alarming rate and we are struggling to keep up with production – we certainly can’t eat it all and so where possible we are trying to freeze or can the overspill.  Our courgettes seem to have eased up and that was helped by packing our recent chums off with 2 oversized round courgettes as they left to drive back to the Isle of Man however this didn’t really appropriately offset the 3 large courgettes and 3 even larger once courgettes now marrows that our neighbours gave us the other day and so I’ve been making courgette soup, courgette loaf cake and courgette bread and am about to make a courgette lasagna (using courgettes instead of pasta) as recommended by my brother and then finally, I shall grate and freeze some courgettes for future use.  I’ve also made extra courgette loaf cakes and will be making deliveries around the neighbourhood later today!  Photo below of Tony with the last batch of marrows the neighbours gave us!  Also recipe below of the courgette loaf cake which hopefully will be well received by our neighbours,

Courgette Loaf Cake

Ingredients

1.    1 Egg

2.    200g castor or granulated sugar

3.    100g melted butter (I use salted)

4.    ½ tsp vanilla essence

5.    300g courgette or marrow coarsely grated

6.    300g self raising flour

7.    50g raisins or sultanas or cranberries (or a mix of any or all)

8.    50g walnuts or pecans (or a mix)

9.    1 tsp cinnamon

1.    1 tsp baking powder (I’ve made with and without and both work well)

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F.  

Grease a 2lb loaf tin (or any size you wish – I use 3 smaller loaf tins – I think that size makes a nice gift).

Mix the first 5 ingredients in a bowl – sift the flour, cinnamon and baking powder (if using) into another, larger bowl.  

Add the fruit and nuts (mixing them in the flour first helps them not to sink to the bottom of the cake).  

Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture – pour into the loaf pan(s) and bake for 45mins -1 hour or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Sadly we’ve had to uproot all our tomato plants as they were riddled with ‘la maladie’ – a blight that seems to only affect the tomato plants or certainly only our tomato plants – we didn’t spray them with the copper sulphate that is used to stop mold and fungus growing after wet weather.  All but one of our neighbours use this copper sulphate a few times a year on their vegetables however one of our neighbours proudly declares his vegetable patch entirely ‘bio’ (= organic) and so we have chosen to emulate his methods – he does say that on occasion he’ll lose an entire crop due to sticking to his organic ways but he also says that it is rare this happens and interestingly he hasn’t lost any tomatoes this year but he has given us some tips as to how we can protect ours next year without spraying so we shall look forward to trying again next year, in the meantime we have literally had to discard a couple of hundred tomatoes with the plants we’ve uprooted – the ones we’ve managed to save, I’ve peeled and they’re bubbling away on the stove as I type so that I can at least have some jars of tomato sauce for future use (perhaps in the chorizo stuffed marrow recipe I’ve just stumbled across!).

We had a wonderful discovery in the garden yesterday – I’d thought our melon plants had stopped production of the green beans and so hadn’t been checking on the beans until yesterday when I went simply to check on the melons (we have a couple of dozen of the large dark green melons – we’re very much looking forward to trying those in a couple of weeks) and discovered 2 very productive plants and managed to harvest a large bowl of beans so I shall be topping and tailing later today in order to blanche them before freezing them – we did of course have them for dinner last night, steamed with a little salt, pepper and butter – they were absolutely delicious.  Photos below of our beans, the tomatoes we've salvaged, aubergines, carrots popping out of the ground, 2nd batch of strawberries and some more yellow courgettes on the go!

The other exciting development in the garden is that we’ve got our first few ears of corn growing (photos below) and so it may only be a few weeks until we are eating fresh corn – this is a first for both of us and we are understandably excited about it!

Not wishing to end on a sad note, I do have to report that we have had our first death in the house….a field mouse that we’ve have living with us for the past month or so finally left us….we had a mouse trap that we’d rigged as plan B and plan A was a humane trap that Tony had researched and meticulously set up in order to trap him alive so we could relocate him as far away from the house as possible – sadly he chose the trap (to make it as fair as possible, both had peanut butter on them to lure him so there was a 50/50 chance he could have chosen relocation over death!) – it was when I spotted him on my kitchen counter that I knew his days were numbered and so as cute as he was, I’ve reclaimed my counters and hopefully don’t have to bleach them twice a day anymore! (photo below of the mouse that was).

We’ve had a couple of visits from chums, one family who came in their camper van which is just as well as we don’t have room to house people very comfortably since we took out the second bathroom and all the other bedrooms in order ot start some proper renovations – we did think we’d be a bit further ahead this summer but the garden has been all comsuing – this is good as we’ve learnt an awful lot and will be so much better equipped for next year.  In the meantime, we’re just doing what we can to keep up with what’s being produced and have had some very interesting meals made up entirely of chard, kale, bok choy, courgettes and aubergines……in order not to waste what we have this will be our dinner fare for some time – hopefully the healthy food will offset the rather lovely and yet inexpensive local wine we’ve also been enjoying fairly liberally!  I shall close with a few photos below of our recent guests – good times in La Belle France!