Recipe
Courgettes stuffed with rice and lentils
There is a moment every August when the Italian courgette supply exceeds Italian demand, and the surplus has to go somewhere, and where it goes is you.
If you know anybody with a garden you already understand this. The plant does not produce courgettes gradually. It produces nothing whatsoever for six weeks and then thirty in nine days, and the person who planted it moves through a completely recognisable emotional sequence: pride, then generosity, then mild desperation, then the leaving of unlabelled bags on the doorsteps of neighbours who did not ask for anything. By late August a significant proportion of the country is quietly trying to hand courgettes to somebody else.
Stuffing them is the traditional answer to volume and it is a good one, because a stuffed courgette stops being a vegetable side and becomes a whole meal with the container built in. The filling here is rice and lentils, a combination that turns up independently in Persian, Turkish, Egyptian and Italian cooking, presumably because rice plus pulse is the cheapest complete protein anybody has ever found.
Two pieces of technique matter. First, scoop the courgettes out and chop that flesh straight back into the filling rather than throwing it away, both because it is where a lot of the flavour lives and because binning half a vegetable in a book about cooking for one would be indefensible. Second, salt the hollowed shells and stand them upside down on a plate for ten minutes. They release a startling amount of water, and that water is the only thing standing between a stuffed courgette and a small green swimming pool at the bottom of the dish.
They are very good hot, better at room temperature, and they pack into a box as though they had been designed for it, which in a sense they were.
- Prep 25 min
- Cook 35 min
- Serves 2
- Cost €
Method
- 1
Halve the courgettes lengthways and scoop out the middles with a teaspoon, leaving a 1 cm wall. Chop the scooped flesh and keep it. Salt the shells and stand them cut-side down on a plate.
12 min
- 2
Cook the rice in salted water until just short of done, about 8 minutes, and drain. It finishes cooking in the oven.
9 min
- 3
Meanwhile cook the onion in 3 tbsp of the oil until soft, add the garlic, oregano and the chopped courgette flesh, and cook until the liquid has gone.
10 min
- 4
Stir in the lentils, the drained rice, half the passata and the herbs. Season firmly: the filling has to carry the whole dish.
3 min
- 5
Pat the shells dry, sit them in an oiled dish, and pack the filling in, mounded. Spoon the rest of the passata around them, not over them, and drizzle with the last of the oil.
6 min
- 6
Bake at 190°C fan until the courgettes give easily to a knife and the tops have browned. Add a splash of water to the dish if it looks dry.
35 min
Variations
Peppers, beefsteak tomatoes or halved aubergines take the same filling; tomatoes need their scooped pulp added back to the pan. Grated parmigiano or breadcrumbs on top before baking gives a crust and loses the vegan flag. Add pine nuts and raisins for a Sicilian version. Chopped olives and capers sharpen it up. The filling is also excellent on its own as a warm salad if you cannot face the scooping.