Stuffed Courgettes

Crossposted to cookbook_challenge.

I picked this out of the "Vegetables" section of my mother's cookbook, partly because I was charmed by the description. It's another newspaper cutting that starts:

"Courgettes are the midget marrows you see in most greengrocers at this time of the year. At 10p per lb. you get quite a lot for your money."

Charmed both by the price and by the need to introduce the courgette as a kind of marrow, rather than vice versa. My father grew marrows in the garden and there's a stuffed marrow recipe in here I'd quite like to try* but marrows are a lot harder to find these days than courgettes.

( Ingredients )

( Method )

Mistakes, Changes and Substitutions
This felt a little like a Bake Off technical challenge. How many courgettes? how hot an oven? how long in the oven to "gratinate" (not a word I had come across before though its meaning is clear). Anyway we used four courgettes which seemed about the right amount for the amount of stuffing we had, and we baked them at 180C for 20 minutes in the oven which seemed to work.

I did not pipe the stuffing because I don't have a piping bag or nozzle though, frankly, if I'd been going to pipe it, I would have whizzed the lot in the food mixer before the attempt

Verdict
An odd one this. We liked the stuffed courgette idea and we liked the stuffing itself (I have a Delia pasta recipe that makes a mushroom sauce in a similar way) but weren't entirely convinced by them together - it was fine just not more than the sum of its parts, if you see what I mean. Our Rose Elliot book has several stuffed courgette recipes in it, so we may try some of them.

*I feel very nostalgic about it despite the fact I was a fussy eater as a child and hated it.

Frankenstein's Meme: Q22

Q22: Name a character that you’d like to have for a friend.

Nyssa from Doctor Who.

She'd be interesting and sensible and not too much like hard work.

( Questions Under the Cut )