What do you do with a lot of courgettes?

Wow! My first post! Hopefully I will keep up with this, I'll try anyway! So what have I been cooking? Well one of my colleagues at work has an allotment and brought in some giant courgettes from the glut that she has from her allotment, and I took three of them off her hands. So this week I've been turning courgettes into various things! The first thing I made was courgette and cheddar soup, from an old recipe of my mum's, it was delicious!



I also made a Camembert, Courgette and Potato Bake, which unfortunately got a bit burnt so I didn't take an pictures of it, and tonight I'm going to try a Courgette Lasagne, more on that later hopefully!

I've had a week off work this week, so I've been visiting museums and art galleries in London. I started at Tate Britain on Sunday and saw the Lure of the East exhibition, which was fantastic. Then on Monday I went to the Hammershoi exhibition at the Royal Academy, this was absolutely amazing, very like Vermeer but slightly more bleak. Yesterday I went to Kensington Palace and saw the Debutant's exhibition, which was so interesting and also the State Rooms there and then to the Banqueting House on Whitehall where many previous Kings and Queens held their Royal Banquets.

This morning I went to Buckingham Palace! I've never been before so it was a new experience, we went around the 19 State Rooms and the Ballroom was set up for a Royal Banquet, it was absolutely magnificent, the floral displays were spectacular and they had 5 wine glasses at each place setting. It is one of my aims in life to see all of the Johannes Vermeer paintings, there are 27 of them scattered around the world, and I have so far seen 9 of them, so I'm not doing to badly, anyway, there is a Vermeer painting in the picture gallery at the Palace, 'The Music Lesson' and I saw that this morning, it was so exciting, I absolutely love his paintings.

Tomorrow I'm off to Bath to see my little Niece and then home to see my parents.

My photos are not all that good at the moment but I hope to make them better with practice, so bare with me, I hope you enjoy the soup!



Courgette and Cheddar Soup
(makes 3/4 servings)

2 large courgettes
2 medium potatoes
2 cloves garlic
500ml stock
2 tbsp creme fraiche
100g roughly mature cheddar cheese, grated
salt and pepper

This is all approximate as you just keep tasting as you go along.

Chop the courgettes into thickish slices, and peel and quarter the potatoes.

Put the courgette, potato, garlic cloves and stock into a pan and cook until the potato and courgette are soft, 15-20 mins.

Take off the heat and add the creme fraiche, blitz it in a blender or with a hand blender, then add the cheddar and salt and pepper to taste. Mix together so that all the cheddar melts and serve.