Cucurbits

Last year was a year of abundance for cucumbers and a gap year for courgettes. This year, you’d never guess it, not a single cucumber made it to adulthood but the courgettes are making up for last year.

Below is the biggest courgette plant I have ever seen. It feels a bit like it is in competition with the others on size, flowering, and fruit-bearing. See that misshaped little courgette there? That’s what excessive ambition does, you ends up with wrong-shape fruit.

Unlike Champ Courgette above, the Black Beauties have been taking their sweet time. There are only two of them this year, and one was the sacrificial courgette, so we’re not really expecting anything much from it. But it is trying. This one below has been fruiting slowly and steadily, bless it. It has the right kind of attitude to life. Why rush when you can go nice and slow?

Meanwhile, in another part of the garden, the squash has made us very happy. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we’re not really big squash eaters but growing a squash has been on my to-do list for three years. There is no specific reason. I just really wanted to have a pumpkin in the garden and if I blew through all my pumpkin seeds last year, I’d take any squash. This kind is really popular, it’s called fiddle squash. And we have two of them!

Fun fact: we still have three or four packs of frozen shredded fiddle squash in the freezer from last winter when someone gave one as a present to Cris for some reason or other, maybe just excess crop. Which brings me to the topic of what we do with all those cucurbits.

Well, courgettes are easy — for most people. You can grill them, fry them in batter or batterless, you can stuff them, turn them into soup or dip, or pickle them. Talk about versatile. In the Slav household, however, this versatility is largely lost.

Cris likes them grilled and that’s fine. He’d eat them as a dip (of course he would, the best recipe comes from his mum) but would be caught dead with a stuffed courgette (or any other stuffed vegetable). Cat only eats courgettes one way: en casserole. And me, I’m an all-of-the-above kind of courgette eater. I’d eat a courgette pie if there is one and, yes, I checked, and there are courgette pie recipes. Of course there are.

Left is self-explanatory. Right is a favourite we call courgette boats, featuring minced meat and rice. I didn’t get a chance to take a picture of Cat’s last casserole because she ate it before I thought of making a post about courgettes and she doesn’t want me to make them too often lest she gets fed up with them. I would appreciate some sympathy for having to share nature’s vegetable abundance with such picky eaters. I think I’ll be adding a Recipes section here, seeing as Substack has a convenient recipe template.