Meanwhile, in the courgette patch…

Sunday, 2 March 2025

Mike White is a senior writer and columnist for the Sunday Star-Times.

OPINION: My partner rushed back into the kitchen to arm herself with a knife.

“How could I have missed him!” she cried, as she disappeared back out the door.

For a moment, I wondered if the neighbour’s bastard cat had crapped in the garden once too often, and was going to get it this time.

But no, I realised the only thing she was going to slit was a courgette, another courgette, which had somehow escaped her notice, shrouded under a vast canopy of leaves that wouldn’t look out of place in an equatorial rainforest.

She returned, green glory in her hands, and a look on her face that I couldn’t quite decipher, but judged was a mix of horror and hopelessness.

She placed it in a bin in the fridge, which already had several courgette cousins filling it.

The courgettes were winning, we couldn’t stem the tide.

I boiled the potatoes I’d harvested from the patch beside the courgettes.

I braised the pears that had tumbled from our overburdened tree, and laid them on a bed of our lettuces, which have continued to go from success to surfeit.

I stared at the salad, and thought it looked a bit bare.

I know, I thought, I’ll add some courgette, so opened the fridge, retrieved the one my partner had just picked, and set to grilling it.

I then heated up the rest of the zucchini fritters my partner had made the night before, and called out to her that tea was ready.

She stared at the salad.

“It’s got zucchini in it,” she said.

“I know,” I replied quite triumphantly, “it’s good isn’t it?”

“But we’ve got zucchini fritters,” she said, still staring a bit blankly.

Amazingly, I hadn’t thought about this before.

She had a very fair point, but I tried to make light of my witless double-up, and made out it was deliberate.

“Yes, but this is different,” I said. “This is courgette.”

She carried on staring.

Midway through the meal, she gently said she wasn’t sure she could finish the courgettes in her salad.

I scooped the remaining grilled rounds off her plate, and pretended they were the most delicious thing I’d had for weeks.

They weren’t.

It was clear my partner had reached peak courgette. And I was on the same road, not far behind.

“I don’t mind them - as long as they’re disguised,” she said, indicating the fritters.

I understood.

But that didn’t solve the problem of the ones still in the fridge, staring back at us like abandoned puppies at the SPCA, morosely asking “What’s wrong with me…?”

In one of our recipe books, there’s a sheaf of torn-out magazine pages with tantalising pictures of courgette dishes. They were obviously written by someone who’d been where we were, coping with a late-summer overload of courgette bounty.

There’s roasted zucchini, peppers and pumpkin; zucchini and pinenut frittata; charred zucchini with mint and vinegar; crispy-topped baked zucchini; Sicilian zucchini. Oh, and that well-splattered page devoted to the well-loved zucchini fritters.

And, oh dear god, what’s this? Ricotta gnocchi with basil and… zucchini.

I should feel inspired.

I feel overwhelmed and unappetised.

But deliverance may be at hand - or over the fence.

Our wonderful neighbour gratefully accepted one yesterday and foolishly declared courgettes were her favourite vegetable.

She may regret saying that by the end of summer.

The problem with courgettes is, like everyone who’s grown them knows, they transform overnight from dinky fingerling things, to werewolves of the vegetable patch: marrows.

You think, oh, I’ll just leave him another day, and when you wander out there in the morning, cutesie courgette has been replaced by gigantor.

Marrows are the lovechild of tardiness and inattention, and it’s like a week of growth is time-lapsed into 12 hours of unbelievable gestation.

Fortunately, I don’t share the same aversion to marrows that others do.

I have been stuffing marrows since, oh goodness, well, at least since I got brainwashed by wholefood cultists and once giddily declared that millet soufflé was transcendent.

But, delicious as a stuffed marrow is, they take about three days to get through.

By that time, the spawn of gigantor have appeared and swollen and are swaggering like pot-bellied bullies in the vege patch.

We have a community food drop-off. But it’s clear from the marrows already filling its shelves that (a) lots of other people have our problem, and (b) nobody likes marrows.

But I remain determined, resolute, planning the week’s menu around the goodness from our garden, with disguised courgettes centre stage.

My partner walks back in through the door.

“You know that other courgette I planted out the front?

“There’s one almost ready to pick…”

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