A couple of recipes

With so much bounty from the allotment I now scan my cookbooks, magazines  and the net  for the right kind of recipes. By the right kind I mean ones that will use up a good amount of our produce. No matter how delicate and delicious a dish may sound if it doesn’t use a decent number of beetroot, beans etc to reduce my veggie stockpile it gets short shrift. But I have found there are some real gaps in my library of cookbooks …for instance what do you do with those tiddlers you find at the bottom of the potato bucket – often smaller than a pea  they are too numerous to throw away but dissolve into a mulch if you boil them with their bigger compatriots. …I’d recently offered to bring a dish of party fare to a friend’s summer gathering and suddenly I thought these baby potatoes would make ideal morsels to accompany a glass of wine. So I boiled them up for a few minutes in salted water until tender and then allowed them to cool. I then tipped a carton of soured cream into a pretty bowl and mixed in some chopped dill (you could use other summer herbs if you are growing those). You could also add a couple of drops of truffle oil to the cream for a rich flavour. I then threaded the tiny potatoes onto cocktail sticks and arranged them on a plate around the bowl of soured cream - ready for dipping … They proved a real success at the party and as I handed them around I felt I was the Nigella Lawson de jour  (sadly though without the lustrous good looks).

As for courgettes, it’s so important to find new ways to cook them to keep your interest going. Having boiled them, roasted them, made them into soup I decided to try griddling them and ended up concocting this recipe from store cupboard ingredients. This is 

Courgettes with Beans and Sun-dried Tomatoes

You need a 400 g tin of flageolet beans (you can use other beans if you prefer).

90 g (3 ½ oz) of sundried tomatoes

3- 4 courgettes

2 heaped teaspoons pesto

about 90 ml (3 fl oz) of vinaigrette made with olive oil and wine vinegar

Rinse and drain the flageolet beans and put them into a large bowl. Chop the sun-dried tomatoes and add them. Mix the pesto into the vinaigrette and stir into the beans. Heat your griddle. Slice the courgettes lengthways and then brush the slices with olive oil. Griddle the courgettes until they are tender and attractively striped. Allow them to cool slightly and add to the bean mix. Check the seasoning before serving.