Stevie Parle's perfect courgettes

At this time of year courgettes provide many a meal. Picked small and firm they are so delicious that you can slice them thinly, dress them with oil and lemon and eat them raw. When they get a little larger you can cook them in a fantastic variety of ways. Chopped up and slowly cooked with olive oil garlic mint and basil they make a lovely mush on toast. Boiled whole, drained chopped up and marinated is great also. You can even roast a courgette like an autumn squash.

Courgette flowers provide the cook with yet another pretty ingredient. Deep fried in batter in the Italian style is delicious. It is traditional to use the male flowers (the ones that will not develop courgettes) sometimes stuffed with cheese but best sprinkled with salt and eaten quickly. You could also deep fry them in the Japanese way, just like the seakale tempura of a few months ago.

Well watered and fed courgette plants can become enormous. It is sometimes necessary to cut them back to give the rest of your plot a chance. You can even eat these leaves you prune. They are in fact really good. In Italy I think they call it cime di zucca.

Shoots and leaves soup.
This is a recipe mentioned in passing by a friend with Sicilian roots, I'm not sure this is how his nonna made it but it tasted great.

This soup is nice in lots of different styles, lots of leaves with a few courgettes, lots of courgettes with a few leaves. A lot of pasta or a little. It's important that the garlic and chilli are in sufficient quantity to give the rest a bit of a punch..

A whole pile of courgette leaves – only use the tender tips and smaller leaves.
A few courgettes
A few courgette flowers
Some pasta broken into small pieces
A tomato or two quartered
Garlic
A potato
Dried chilli
Fresh oregano

Chop up a couple of cloves of garlic small.
Chop up the washed leaves of the courgettes. Dice the courgettes and potato pretty small.

Heat up a good amount of olive oil in a pan that will accommodate all of your ingredients comfortably. Fry the garlic until it is just turning brown.

Add the crushed dry chilli followed by the leaves, shoots, courgettes tomato and potato salt and pepper. Fry everything together briefly and then add water to just cover. Add a handful of broken pasta. Boil altogether rapidly until the pasta is cooked. Add the fresh oregano and check the seasoning.

Eat with a piece of toast rubbed with a cove of garlic and doused in good olive oil.

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