Stuff your courgettes!

It’s amazing what you can do with an onion, a garlic clove, a handful of rice, five courgettes, lemons, herbs and olive oil!

Our kitchen in Kolokithia is tiny, a micro-kitchen if you like. It’s hard to believe the creations which appear from it. Massive tiropitas are pulled from the tiny oven much like a magician might pull a large rabbit from a small hat. The many pots of pickled anchovies, various honeys, yoghurt starter, big pots of brightly coloured spices, and frozen green herbs are packed into a kitchen which must have belonged to Mary Poppins. The only conclusion to be made is that spells are cast and food magic is created here.

Food prep, however, is often done outside, especially if the recipe involves more than one bowl! Surrounded by my mother-in-law’s hydrangeas, hibiscus and daphnes- and the basil pom-poms she has so lovingly pruned-we sit at our gingham covered table in the shade, soaking up the warmth of the wall at our shoulders, and the view across the fir tree filled valley below.

This time, it’s stuffed courgettes, rather a staple here especially as our village - Kolokithia- essentially means ‘courgette’! They grow huge here, and wide. Not like the narrow ones we find in the supermarkets, but almost marrow width, although I am assured they are not marrows. We’re making courgettes in lemon sauce- lemons from the valley, obviously.

We sit in companionable silence, peeling, chopping and holing out the insides of the courgettes. The next stage involves herbs and I head back into the house. “The door, the door!”, my mother-in-law gasps as if the house were on fire. It is easy to forget the necessity of closing the doors up here in the mountains, but the perils of scorpions ready to take advantage of my nonchalance soon drums it into me! The same with sinks and showers… the scorpions aren’t like the large ones I imagined, but small, dextrous ones which crawl up through the pipes, and they are rather nasty if you happen to disturb one during its evening shower.

Inside, the fridge is heaving with food, and the freezer houses a myriad of frozen green herbs which leap like frogs out as I open the door, the freezer breathing a sigh of relief at releasing its overfull shelves. Flavours all preserved. The parsley still reeks strongly, the dill the same. And we breathe warm life back into them, and add them to a dish which we have just filled with mince and chopped leaves of fresh mint. Outside, we pack the courgettes with this squelchy cold mix of mince, onion, garlic and herbs. Bright green housing dark green speckled pink… I would almost have said they were like mini watermelons. The whole dish full, we squeeze to fit the last courgette third in. Drizzled with oil and salt and pepper, usually in that order, we fill the dish with water and boil it for about an hour. Whilst that’s doing, we make the lemon sauce: an egg, a lemon and a little cornflour. We like to have it quite thick, so when we pour it over the courgettes to cook a little longer it’s like pouring over a slightly runny cake mixture. And I love this dish…almost as much as cake.

Yet another so good and so healthy dish!