Zucchini you can count on

The good news from Saint-Aignan is that the weather has turned nice. The bad news is that the vegetable garden is still pretty sad. We are getting good handfuls of green beans every other day (though many of the beans Walt planted never came up), but a lot of the little tomatoes on the vines are rotting before they even have a chance to turn red or yellow. If this spell of good weather lasts, there is still hope.

When all else fails in a garden, however, you can always count on zucchini. They're called courgettes in France and in England, and we have both green and yellow summer squash growing out back. They hide under the big leaves of the plants they grow on and before you know it they get gigantic.

Barquettes

It's the perennial summertime gardening problem — how do you possibly use up all the squash that just a couple of plants can produce? Well, the best way is to make stuffed zucchini, or boats.

Yesterday when I told the bread lady that I was making boats out of my courgettes, she just looked at me with a perplexed expression and said she didn't understand. Then I remembered that the French word for that is barquettes. When I told the bread lady that in English we called those bateaux, or boats, she just chuckled.

Ready for the oven

I went to SuperU yesterday morning and bought about three pounds of beef for stew (bœuf pour bourguignon). Back at home, while I scooped out the zucchinis, Walt ran the beef through the meat grinder a couple of times. We think the beef we buy and grind ourselves is better than the already-ground beef sold at the supermarket, and when we grind it we at least know exactly what it has in it.

I cut the squash in half and scooped out the raw pulp and seeds. I chopped and cooked some onion and garlic, added some herbs and spices, and then mixed all that up with the ground meat, a half a cup of heavy cream, two eggs, and two chopped fresh tomatoes. Then I stuff the zucchini halves with the mixture.

And now ready for the table

To make sure the squash boats cook along with their meat filling, I put some liquid in the bottom of the two pans I was using. In this case, I had some tomato sauce and diluted it with water so that it was really thin. Then I covered the pans with aluminum foil and put them in a fairly hot oven for about an hour. At the end, it's good to remove the foil and let the meat brown on top.

This is not gourmet food, but it is good, especially with some grated parmesan and a dribble of olive oil. Simple food is often the best. I made ten boats; we ate two and then wrapped the rest in foil and put them in the freezer in plastic bags. It's food for the fall and winter.