Selfsufficientish.com

How many ways do you know to cook a glut of courgettes? Soup, cake, walnut and hazelnut bake, spiralised, a spicy marrow bake I use with courgettes instead of marrows, grilled, stuffed, pizza .....

And that's after giving them away.

I've recently made Courgette Butter. Great in sandwiches, or just melting on top of your cooked veg (or on a steak). It's a very easy recipe - grate, salt and drain your courgettes, then squeeze out as much juice as possible. Fry a couple of cloves of garlic in a good amount of butter (I suppose you could use oil but then it wouldn't be a butter ). Chuck in the courgettes with a thinly sliced onion and a couple of handfuls of fresh herbs of your choice. Cook down gently until it's almost jam consistency and season to taste.
It keeps in a jar in the fridge for at least a week - we've never managed to keep it longer!

Courgette wine - (AKA marrow wine - but not the version people tend to think about when they think about "marrow rum" ).
Take at least 2 kilo of marrow, chop 'em up and boil them in 1 gallon of water for 20 minutes to which you add about 1 heavy kilo of table sugar (2.5 lbs) and about 1 inch of ginger root (chopped and bruised). I would also add the juice and rind of a lemon.
Allow this to cool overnight and pitch (add) wine or beer yeast (not bread yeast). Add some tannin (could be a cup of black tea) and some yeast nutrient (could be a tablespoon of bread yeast allowed to proof in a half cup of water and then boiled to kill the yeast).
Continue to ferment about 4 days and strain out the courgettes.
Allow this liquid to continue to ferment until all the sugar has been fermented out and then transfer to a vessel that you can fill right to the top and seal to allow any CO2 to continue to escape but prevent any air to get in. After about three months this will be clear and will taste like a delicious wine. It will NOT taste like courgette. The wine will have about 12% alcohol by volume. It will be dry but If you want this to be sweeter you need to stabilize the wine - and then backsweeten it.

They make quite good compost.

I usually only grow them for an early crop and then grub them out for space to grow something more useful.
I can be quite hard hearted at times.

It may well come to compost at this rate ....

Cows, sheep and goats love them, too - and you don't need to cook them!

What the cows, sheep and goats????

Flo wrote: ↑Thu Aug 23, 2018 5:33 am What the cows, sheep and goats????

Er, no - not them, either.

I remember when I was in France, we gave huge ex-courgettes to our house cow - she loved them. Was really uplifting to see her take big chunks out of them.

Wine, chutney, pickle, cake...... the neighbours usually get a good few here too!

Just bottled my courgette (zucchini) wine and got 7+ bottles from about 4 kilo (8 lbs) from 3 very large squash. Wine is straw colored and bright and clear. I back-sweetened this so that it is just off dry (you need to stabilize the wine before you can add any sugar otherwise any viable yeast still in solution will glom onto the sugar and treat that as theirs for further fermentation.)
The wine is about 12% ABV. My plan is to let this bottle age for another 6 -8 months and as summer looms crack open a bottle.

Courgette in a pickle is just awesome! Try it