Courgettes

The garden is doing strange things this year. Perhaps it's the warm and damp weather that is influencing the development of my crops. The potato tops have died back, leaving us with a relatively small crop this year. Carrots have not grown, I suspect the masses of slugs and snails have cropped the seedlings before they were able to establish. However, we do have a glut of Courgettes.
I have planted two courgettes plants in the greenhouse, for an early crop and there are three plants in the raised beds outside. Yesterday, I picked off the excess fruits, trimming off any slug damage. This provided a stuffed courgette from the largest one and a courgette soup from a few of the others.
The recipe that I used was a Nick Nairn favourite, which always works well. Use a couple of courgettes, half an onion and a potato, chopped small and sautéed in butter. Add 1/3 pint of stock and simmer for 20 minutes. Throw in some flat leaf parsley and then liquidise the lot.
warm to serve, salt and pepper to taste. The topping is made with equal measures of good quality olive oil and chives, blended in a liquidiser and fit to drizzle on top. I like a course blob in the middle. It is great with a few slices of home made bread.
This left me with a lot of spare courgettes, so I made up a larger quantity of soup using a recipe from Ailsa Fisher. Using more onion and more stock, with a little milk - and substituting the butter for margarine - you end up with a soup that will freeze well and still taste good when defrosted.