Tag: Courgettes

Broad Bean and Courgette Bruschetta

broad bean bruschetta

Still enjoying our broad beans and concocting new recipes every day. With beans and mint fresh from the garden, this is a perfect summer lunch.

  • 3 cups broad beans, podded
  • 1 small courgette, grated
  • 2 spring onions, chopped
  • 4 sun-dried tomatoes, cut into small pieces
  • 4 tablespoons chopped mint
  • 4 thickish slices of sourdough
  • 1 clove garlic, peeled

Cook beans in microwave with dessert spoonful of water for three minutes. Drain and let cool, then slip off the outer skins.

Using a little olive oil (we used the oil from the jar of sun-dried tomatoes) sauté onions, grated courgette and sun-dried tomatoes for two minutes. Add broad beans and mint, stir together and warm them through.

Brush both sides of the slices of sourdough with olive oil and cook on a ridged griddle pan until toasted on both sides. Rub each piece of toast with the garlic.

Pile on the bean mixture and drizzle with a little balsamic vinegar.

Courgettes and Beetroot

vegetables
Today’s colander from the veg beds: broad beans, dwarf French beans, onions, beetroot (we sometimes use the tops like spinach) and courgettes.

Barbara is using a recipe in the latest, August, edition of Healthy Food Guide, ‘Spicy chicken kebabs with sweet potato wedges’ as a starting point but substituting whatever is available in the garden today, so Maris Bard potato wedges instead of sweet potato and beans instead of cucumber.

recipe

In Friday’s Gardeners’ World, BBC2, Frances Tophill mentioned that she’d been growing sweet potatoes in her greenhouse, so we might try that next year. Sweet potatoes might stand up to us neglecting them for a week when we head off for the Dales better than our cucumber and tomato plants did.

We didn’t plant tomatoes this year after two or three years of them being shrivelled in searing summer heat when we went away but in Healthy Food Guide, Jennifer Irvine suggests that it’s still not too late to grow a few:

“Experienced gardeners reading this are probably rolling their eyes, thinking that if you wanted to plant tomatoes you should have done it months ago. If you’re growing from seed, that’s true. But there is no shame in leap-frogging straight to a young tomato plant at this time of year.”

She suggests begging, bartering or – what we’ll do – buying a plant or two from our local garden centre. They can go on producing fruit until October, so it would be worth giving it a try.

Links

Healthy Food Guide

Jennifer Irvine