Today was all about making yummy goodness out of the Monster Marrow!! If you missed it, I discovered a massive 7kg zucchini turned marrow turned monster hiding in the plot of silverbeet the other day. This was in addition to the various types of zucchini and normal size marrows I’ve picked… with more in the garden. I’ve already had numerous meals of zucchini and made about 20 jars of zucchini salsa… so today it was time to try some other recipes.
This was my collection at the start of the day:
I spent a good 6 hours on my feet in the kitchen, so it feels really good right now to be sitting down typing this. I’m actually pretty keen to lie down and watch another episode of ‘My Beautiful Friend’ – a show we watched for the first time last night. After 2 minutes Antony was complaining but we stuck with it and found it really good. Anyway I’ll try and get this post done quick… I’ll let the photos do the talking!
Here’s what I did with the marrow… Antony helped me cut into it and then grate and chop it for use in various things.
I made a minestrone soup for lunch with one of the yellow zucchini added to it and also a marrow soup with a large potful of cubed marrow monster. In it was herbs from the garden, a roasted garlic head, chopped onion and stock. I cooked it up then let it cool, blitzed it in my ninja then put it into a clean pot. Collage below has the minestrone top left, bottom right and marrow soup bottom left, top right.
The marrow soup will be for lunch tomorrow (and probably Tuesday too). I’ve put some in the freezer, ditto with the minestrone… and then used leftover minestrone soup as a base and added heaps of soy mince to it so it’s now a herby/tomato/ mince mix in the freezer… to be added to potatoes, stuffed marrows or rice in the future when I don’t have time to cook or need leftovers for school lunch.
I used a lot of grated zucchini in my muffin size quiches- thanks Moyra for the recipe last year. We had these for dinner and 3 went in their own glass dishes in the freezer to be had for school lunches when school goes back.
Six cups of grated marrow went into making two loaves of zucchini bread. It’s so good… my friend Liz’s recipe – I use honey to make it sweet, so it’s more like a loaf than bread. It is deliciously moist so it doesn’t need butter. I like to have some in the freezer for those times when I need something a bit sweet/ filling… I can just pop it in the toaster to defrost/ warm it up.
Also in the sweet department were these zucchini chocolate muffins. They are pretty yum. I adapted a recipe Anthea sent me yesterday to make it gluten and dairy free… it’s pretty good. Might make some more tomorrow!
I have 2 more cups of grated marrow combined with some other ingredients in the fridge – tomorrow it will be whipped up into marrow fritters for dinner. Then I decided to just cut and bake some of the marrow for dinner … while fruit crumble #2 was in the oven. Marrow like this was soooo delicious! Just oil and salt on it, so it was super easy but really nice. Making more of that this week!
After all of that cooking and baking – I still had this much marrow/ zucchini left at the end of the day… plus more in the garden!
I might have to to have another marrow/ zucchini cooking/ baking spree this week to make the most of all this produce! I must mention that accompanying me in the kitchen today was the ‘Quarantunes‘ playlist put together on Spotify by Leah, a friend in Auckland. Never have I listened to such an eclectic mix of music … we had Wilson Philips, Phil Collins, The Beatles, U2, Queen, opera, hard rock, jazz… it was really random. The thing uniting them all were the appropriate quarantine song titles… ‘All by myself’, ‘Better be home soon’, ‘Contagious’, ‘Death and all his friends’, ‘Don’t stand so close to me’, ‘From a distance’, ‘Harder to breathe’, ‘How to save a life’, ‘I think we’re alone now’, ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it’, ‘Protective Bubble’, ‘U can’t touch this’, ‘Waiting on the world to change’… you get the idea!
While I was busy in the kitchen Antony was busy outside in the garden… great he had a day off office work but he was working hard pulling weeds and tidying up things!
Before our garden and kitchen missions began we changed the sheets, did a couple of loads of washing and Antony vacuumed the house. I did an hour of exercise – today’s choice Body Combat # 80. I’d never done it before – lots of jabs and kickboxing and other things I don’t know the name of. It was great… but now after that and yesterday’s GRIT class I can feel all sorts of muscles in my arms and legs! Hope I can move tomorrow.
