Slack Lasagne: Tuesday's courgette emergency

I managed to pop home for lunch today and was reminded of the remaining almost festering courgettes. I’m going out for dinner at a local garden centre with Barbara, my mother-in-law, tomorrow and there was no way that these would last two more days. So tonight’s tea would have to use them up.

The courgette is not an inspiring vegetable. The best thing I have ever done with it is an amazing cake with pine nuts, sultanas and lemon. But that requires lovely, sweet, small courgettes. It might feature in the summer, maybe with home-grown courgettes. I once made some courgette / cocoa muffins which I thought were quite nice but my camping companions did not seem to agree, although they were too polite to say so in so many words.

By the time I got home from work I was afflicted by the unfortunate trio of tiredness, hunger and coldness (particularly my feet). I didn’t know which to address first. As Matt, my husband, was due to go out for some stag-do planning the pressure was on for eating so I decided to get straight on with preparing something to feed us. Having, predictably, failed to find any inspiration for the courgettes I reverted back to one of our regular teas. Roasted vegetables. Along with the two courgettes this also involved half a butternut squash, half a sweet potato, a green pepper (also often at a loss at what to do with these but they also put them in those bargain pepper multipacks), an onion, some tomatoes (the ones that had previously been destined for toasted sandwiches) and 3 big mushrooms that were well past their best. There should have been 4 big mushrooms but one of them was irredeemable.

Using this many vegetables produced lots of scraps that would be ideal for our new Wormery. Unfortunately we haven’t got the worms yet. So we’re storing up the scraps in bags / boxes in the kitchen in keen anticipation of their arrival. There is clearly a limit to how long this scrap build up can continue. This limit will probably be tomorrow unless the previously mentioned garden centre is able to supply some worms.

To go with the vegetables I did one of my favourites: camping couscous. First made for me by my mum on a campsite in Devon, this basically consists of couscous and tinned tomatoes. Over the last few years I have made lots of different variations on the theme. Tonight’s included onion, red pepper (left over from the dumplings), and celery.

Tonight’s tea really called for cheese. Having not featured significantly in our diet since the original slack lasagne (although frequently as a minor to moderate addition) I felt it acceptable to have some tonight. The choice was feta, soft goat’s cheese, cheddar or halloumi. Since we had four block of halloumi in the fridge I opted for this (plus it bakes fantastically with the veggies). The large supply of halloumi is not explained by it being either mine or Matt’s favourite cheese (mine is a lovely squidgy brie-like thing called Vignotte, Matt’s a strong cheddar) but by our difficulty last summer in obtaining any on barbeque days. So Matt’s solution is to stock pile it (it has a very long shelf life) so that it won’t matter if the shops sell out on barbeque days this summer (let’s hope there are plenty).

Due to Matt’s early start tomorrow (and I think that I’m supposed to be taking him to the train station) he rescheduled the stag-do planning (which also means he can get a haircut at the same time), so there was plenty of time to allow the veg to cook. I like it when they start to burn a bit.