10 Brilliant Ideas to Use Your Excess Zucchini and Courgettes

hello it's that time of year when we're about to become overrun with these things zucchini courgette summer squashes whatever you call them if you're a home grower you're about to have an awful lot of these and in this video I've teamed up some of my gardening friends to give you some ideas of things that you can do with your blood [Music] there's almost astounding joke amongst people who grow their own vegetables that this is the time of year that we sneak to other people's houses late at night and leave these Beauties on people's doorsteps as a gift or if they've left their cars unlocked you pop them on the car seat I'm going to start by visiting Tanya over at lovely greens zucchini courgette summer squash all names for the same vegetable and if you grow your own you're probably like me in that you really look forward to the first of them but before long you have a mountain of them on your kitchen countertop but I found that if you freeze your glut of courgettes you'll appreciate it so much more later on in the season when they're not growing in your garden and it is super super simple what I do is I grate them up and then for two courgettes about this size I use about a teaspoon of sea salt I mix it all together and then I put it into a sieve over the kitchen sink and let it drain and the salt draws the moisture from the courgette and then it drains out into the sink in a way and then after about an hour of that I pack it into one cup measuring cups and then I upend those over a baking tray and I tend to put some baking paper down as well just to help with lifting it up later on and then I freeze it overnight the next morning what I have are essentially pucks a frozen courgette that I can take off easily put into freezer bags and store for later and then later on in the year I can take however much I need out thaw it out and use it in recipes and this is my go-to way to preserve courgettes for later I know JB is going to share a recipe I haven't heard of before unfortunately I was quite late getting my courgettes into the ground at my allotment so I don't yet have the problem of the courgette glut I've got my first one just starting and I'm so so excited and the first thing I'm going to do is use this courgette recipe that someone told me about and when they told me I was incredulous I rolled my eyes so so hard because they said courgette crisps and I thought oh no that I bet they're slimy and a bit gross but trust me all you have to do it's so so good you take your courgette slice it as thin as humanly possible if you've got mandolin that is perfect you then roll it around in a bit of olive oil some salt and pepper and a seasoning of your choice I quite like to use chili salt or some kind of chili rub but you could use whatever you want then you take your biggest baking sheet possibly your biggest two use two shelves of your oven and you just lay them out flat try not to overlap them because that will kind of make them steam instead of crisp up you just lay them flat cook them in the oven around kind of 200 degree degrees Celsius and how thinly you slice them will determine how long it takes to cook but it can be anywhere between 15 to 30 minutes and you know they're done because they will go a delicious kind of crisp golden color and you can pick one up and it will hold its own weight if it's still flopping around it's not done give it a try and trust me I don't think you'll be disappointed and next we're going to hear from my good friend and partner in mine Erica from Erica's little Welsh Garden one thing that I love to do with my glove courgettes is make courgette wine a little different I know but courgette wine makes a beautifully crisp and well-balanced white wine whether you drink it or use it in cooking it's well worth a go homemade wine is also known as Country Wine and what is brilliant about it is it only takes three ingredients and the recipe ideas are endless using this method you can make wine in as quickly as six weeks however if you have some patience and let it mature properly then you can have some amazing wine in a couple of years my preferred method is to leave it to fully ferment in the Demi John racking it every couple of weeks or a couple of months depending on how much sediment you have at the bottom and then after around about six months I will bottle it and then put it down in my cellar and leave it for another 6 to 12 months before opening it and if you have that much patience I can assure you you are going to have the most beautiful tasting wine the best thing about this recipe though is that excluding the courgettes all of the ingredients to make this wine costs less than 33 Pence a bottle so that's kind of like 11 P of Glass isn't it so definitely worth a go my favorite thing to do with these is to slice them lengthways quite thinly and then I either use them straight away or I freeze them and I use those thin slices in lasagna in place of the pasta and of course if you have a ribbonizer you can put your zucchini through that and then have long ribbons and use it very much like tiger Telly no dig expert home food grower and author Stephanie hafferty shares a recipe that I really can't wait to try every year despite my best intentions to only grow enough courgette plants that are a reasonable amount for my family to eat I always plant too many and then they go Bonkers and it's attack of the courgettes and they end up in absolutely everything possible and one of my favorite recipes for courgettes is kosher muffins and I've just made a plate of them now these are double chocolate crochet muffins yum yum it's cocoa the usual muffin ingredients lots of grated courgette and I like to put chocolate chips in which I use by getting a bar of chocolate and I cut them up with a knife so you get really big chunks and it's a good idea to leave the green peel of the courgette on because then if you've got fussy people in your household that don't like eating courgette and they complain oh I don't want courgette in this I'm not going to eat this soup because you've put courgette in it they're not going to eat the chocolate chip muffins either and you get to eat them all so I warmly recommend baking delicious fragrant chocolate chip muffins with courgettes and the recipe is on my website and if you're not familiar with any of these YouTube gardeners I'll leave a link to all of their channels in the video description and please head over and check out their channels sometimes ideas are so simple and so delicious I wonder why shouldn't I think of that here's Saron from so grown cook I like amongst other things to cut them on the diagonal brush them with oil and put a little salt and pepper and put them on the barbecue grill when I'm having a barbecue and cook them lightly on both sides till they get those little black marks little lines from the grill and then put them on a large platter drizzle them with a vinaigrette dressing or any kind of salad dressing that you really like and sprinkle with fresh chopped herbs now things like Dill chop basil parsley cilantro or coriander anything you like um Italian herbs fresh Italian herbs really nice so any any type of herbs that you like and have them as a nice summer salad and they go really well with grilled meats and fish or vegetarian dishes it's really really tasty and the barbecuing just brings out a sort of sweetness and a fuller flavor with the courgette and zucchini so I think you'll like it give it a try over the last couple of months Jane from Jane's growing Garden has been transforming her garden shed and well now now she's even cooking in it what I'm going to do today is use the fantastically round Apple crochet that's relevant for um a relatively new recipe to me which uses of your courgette look like no other and that is it sounds really a bit basic but it's a courgette Fritter I'm going to show you just how quick and easy it is to do but first of all I've got to Grace here and that is the hard work done honestly that it really is such a basic simple recipe okay what I'm going to do now you'll notice that I have um I've been grating it on top of the tea towel which in turn is on top of the chopping board because what I want to do is make sure because as we all know kosher is a very very watery and sometimes not very exciting Harvest so you can see already the water is starting to come out so I'm gonna give that a really good squeeze and I don't know if you can see there there's quite a lot of juice and partly that's because um upgraded it as well so it's a lot of surface area there but that's quite a lot of juice as I've just said we know the courgettes unless you add things to them they're the perfect carrier ingredient for other flavors and Parmesan has just that absolute depth of the flavor real saltiness that we want now you can use and a lot of people do use an egg and we've got no shortage of eggs we've got fresh eggs about 50 yards away in that direction but I was a bit concerned that by using an egg what you're really going to be doing is make it into more of a frittata than a Fritter so what I'm going to do is just add a little bit of flour and that will act as a binding agent and at this point is when you decide if at all you want to add anything else mint goes really really well with Parmesan um because it counteracts that very very salty Savory flavor that the parmesan's got you come in with the freshness and the fragrance of some pressure now it's just gorgeous that is our mixture I'm just going to Stir It Up and while I do I'm going to make sure the heat is off my pan there is now just the right heat all I'm going to do is take a small amount of this lovely courgette mint parmesan you've got to think as well the parmesan will hold it together to an extent because as it melts it will bind the other ingredients and I've just created a very small Patty there and hopefully once that's in there you should start to hear it kind of straight away and there we have what might not look like the most glamorous of dishes but as a side dish or even a snack I think this dish will lead you into a whole new realm experimenting with your summer squash so hope you enjoyed it and Jesse at plot 37 shares some really good ideas of ways to cook your courgettes zucchini or summer squash whatever you call them these are some great ideas so when the courgettes are coming thick and fast in our house one of the main things I like to do with them is stuff them and what would the enormous range of different things you can stuff them with you can actually get a huge array of flavors out of a courgette when your entire family looks like they never want to see another courgette or marrow again stuff it with something different and it tastes totally different which is really needed by like mid to late summer I'm recording this quite early in the year and I don't actually have any of my own courgettes I'm going to hold my hands up to that they're coming they're about this big can't really stuff a courchette that's only that big so I have been to the supermarket and I've bought myself some courgettes these are still pretty Diddy courgettes and actually you really want you know when you've left a courgette and it's got this big I'm going to demonstrate with this size courgette so you might have to use your imagination slightly and Method one the boat first challenge is to find the balance point of your courgette so what you're aiming for is to cut the courgette lengthways so that you end up with two even halves of a courgette that sit flatly then you want to employ 1970s teaspoon melon balling technique stick the tip of the spoon in and twist it round and you're just removing the center CD section of the courgette doing with a spoon like this is really helpful in not piercing straight through the courgette because if you try and do it with a knife often you're just going to slip straight through what you're aiming for is a totally even wall thickness of courgette bottom and sides method two the Zeppelin again you want to find your balance point but then instead of cutting straight down the center of the courgette you're just going to take the little bit that makes it Rock off so a little sliver down its back side so that it sits nicely on your baking tray once you've got it sitting nicely a small incision along the top edge of the courgette and then cutting around the edges so you're taking a piece out of the top run your knife around on the inside just being careful not to go too deep remembering that you've taken the bottom edge of this off so it is shallower than it feels and then get your spoon back in there and scoop it around this is obviously a lot easier to scoop out the inners when you've got a huge courgette rather than a small one but the small ones work really nicely not necessary to be so precise with the evenness of your walls in this one you just want to get enough Center out that you can get some stuffing in effort three the bowl or in this case use your imagination a little bit because normally you would do this with a whopping great overgrown courgette if you want to slice them into nice big chunks so they're about the same height as they are width and then again with your little spoon scoop out the innards remembering that the Flesh of the courgette is more delicate than the skin and so you do need to leave a fair thickness on the bottom of these cups so that when it's cooking it doesn't just disintegrate at the bottom now you'll notice all of these are for you know long courgettes like classic courgettes obviously round courgettes are much easier to stuff because you do them like a pumpkin just take the top off scoot the innards and you've got your perfect Bowl who needs the easy and it's always these bog standard long courgettes that I end up with a wild excess of so onto fillings with these cup shaped ones you can really get away with quite a liquid filling that would just fall out of the other two styles of stuffing in this case this is a spiced lamb mince like a moussaka mince just put them straight on a baking tray in this case I'm pouring over some cheese bechamel sauce but you could do this almost like a lasagna I'm stuffing this one with a mixture of tuna red pepper ricotta cheese and red onion with the zeppelins you want a filling which is fine enough that you can really jam it inside the courgette but firm enough that it will hold its own shape and not leak out the sides the ratio of courgette wool to filling kind of denounce how salty it needs to be in this case the courgette is really quite thick so I've put a fair amount of salt and that just goes on the baking tray next to the cups and finally with the open boats you can get away with something really quite chunky because they're so shallow you really want something that you can kind of Stack up and it's not going to disintegrate during cooking in this case I've got a mixture of prawns chorizo red pepper chili and paprika it's quite coarsely chopped and I can just pile it all on top all of these are going to take about the same amount of cooking time so I'm just going to put them all on the baking tray together a little bit of cheese on top of the open boats and a bit of nutmeg on top of my moussaka mix cooking time will depend entirely on the size of your courgettes in this case because mine are so tiny all of my fillings apart from the prawns are pre-cooked which means that 20 minutes in the oven will be easily enough and while they're cooking courgettes are cut through the fat end of your courgette it's cooked and here we have a very bizarre mix obviously normally nobody would ever serve prawns chorizo tuna and lamb mints together on one plate but that is what happens when you are doing a demo and my poor mum has eaten much weirder lunches than this in the past hahaha so I hope something in there is useful when we've all got courgette dread in a couple of months time and if you really do find yourself over run with them some of the other things you can do is give them to your neighbors and Friends find out if your local food bank or food ladder can take them sometimes soup kitchens and other places would be very happy to take them and you can always take them straight from the plant to feed chickens or pigs and if you don't have any of those and there are no other options then they will also go very nicely into your compost heap but really putting these in the compost should be the very last resort next time we'll be touring the veg Garden having a look at everything that's growing here among the flowers and in the meantime if you're wondering what else you can be getting on with in your garden in July I've made a video and I'll leave a link on screen and also in the video description

Channel: Liz Zorab - Byther Farm

Views: 68,468

Keywords: liz zorab, 10 Brilliant Ideas to Use Your Excess Zucchini and Courgettes, homesteading, byther farm, what to do with the glut of zucchini, permaculture, self sufficiency, self sufficient, gardening, how to grow, no dig gardening, no till gardening, food forest, gardening - topic, organic gardening, homesteading channel, home grown food, Zucchini recipe

Id: -G46k0r8WNk

Length: 19min 23sec (1163 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 18 2023