recipe sourced from BBC Food
(Recipes Image)
(My Image)
My neighbour has a large vegetable patch and as a result is always giving us anything and everything that he has grown. This week was 8 courgettes in various shapes, sizes and colours. As always very happy to receive free food but what on earth do you do with 8 courgettes?
The answer google gave? Try Courgette and Parmesan soup. OK google I will. And its quite an easy recipe to be honest, but I didn’t have all the ingredients so I improvised in places…
Ingredients
60ml/2fl oz extra virgin olive oil (seems a lot but makes sense by the end I promise)
1 tbsp chopped garlic (or as I discovered about 3large/4smaller cloves of garlic and I used a crusher, it’s quicker)
handful basil leaves (preferably Italian), chopped (I didn’t have this… so instead I used dry and added it with the oil to give it time to activate)
sea salt and ground white pepper, to taste (I only have black pepper and works just as well but adds a little colour to the dish)
1kg/2¼lb green courgettes, cut lengthways into quarters then into 1cm/½in slices (I cut mine into rounds, much easier and faster but I added an extra 5 mins to cooking time to make sure everything was nice and soft)
750ml/1¼ pint of chicken stock (I’m sure proper stock would taste better but I used a stock cube)
60ml/2fl oz single cream (I had double cream, all I did was half the amount and top up with water)
handful flatleaf parsley, chopped (I didn’t have this)
50g/2oz freshly grated parmesan, plus extra to serve
Preparation method
-
Heat the oil in a heavy-based pan over a medium heat.
-
Cook the garlic, basil, salt and courgette slowly for 10 minutes, or until the courgettes are lightly browned and softened. It may seem like a lot of Garlic and at the beginning it will smell really strong but stick with it, it mellows down and gives a lovely flavour at the end.
-
Add white pepper, to taste, then pour in the stock and simmer for 8 minutes, uncovered. Remove from the heat. I was a bit worried that it was rather oily, as you can see below, but as soon as you blitz and add the cream this oily film disappears.
-
Put three-quarters of the soup mixture into a food processor and blend until smooth. Now I had no idea what they meant by three-quarters but I guess if you want some chunks left in your soup, then do three-quarters of the whole thing but I didn’t really want that so I used a sieving spoon and took out all the courgette and then used a ladle to add some of the stock to the mixer (this will help it blend more smoothly)
-
Return the mixture to the pan and stir in the cream, parsley and parmesan. The picture below is pre-cream but see it looks smooth already.
-
To serve, ladle the soup into a bowl and season, to taste, with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Sprinkle over more parmesan, to taste. Serve with crusty bread and a green salad.
Overall the recipe was quite easy to follow. The soup was full of flavour, which was a surprise as courgette really doesn’t taste of a lot, and the texture was very smooth. All in all a good way to use up any of those home grown courgettes. I suspect that the colour difference between mine and the BBC’s is that I used a mix of Yellow and light green courgettes while they may have used dark green courgettes only.
