In Season Right Now: Zucchini
Ten fabulous recipes to help you keep up with the bounty of zucchini season. Pasta, fritters, salads, starters, sweet treats, and more! Plus Annabel's late summer gardening guide.
Few plants produce as profusely as the zucchini (or courgette if you’re so inclined). At this time of year, it can often feel like it’s hard to keep up with the bounty of these summer squash — it’s easy to feel at a loss for what you could possibly make with them all.
At the beginning of the season, we are always so excited about these tender, versatile vegetables — grating, julienning, peeling, and slicing with gusto as we add them to our dishes whenever possible.
As zucchini season is so long, by the time late summer rolls around, we often need a bit more encouragement to feel that same burst of enthusiasm. Fret not — we have a bumper load of ideas that will get you excited about cooking zucchini again!
It’s hard to beat a good fritter, and this fab recipe for Spiced Zucchini Fritters is wonderfully light and packed with flavour. It’s also gluten and dairy free which makes things easy for those with dietary requirements. The recipe serves one but can be easily scaled up. You can also make smaller fritters and serve them as a finger food if preferred.
Our Zucchini & Feta Crostini is one we keep coming back to. It’s an economical and healthy vegetarian snack you can throw together in a hurry when friends turn up hungry and your fridge looks almost bare. You can have the bread toasted and the topping made ahead of time, so you only need to assemble and serve.
This gorgeous Summer Pasta with Zucchini & Broccoli from Summer at Home is one of our favourite things to make in the summertime. Loaded with vegetables and infused with creamy ricotta and lemon, it makes for such a delicious dish that looks fab too.
Our Zucchini Frittata is a fantastic breakfast-for-dinner recipe that is also a welcome addition to any summer picnic. You can use whatever vegetables or herbs you have at hand. We like to use little potatoes from the garden, but any potatoes will do.
We love making these Roasted Zucchini Flowers as a special treat. A lighter (and less fussy) version of deep-fried zucchini flowers. These are so moreish, and are sure to impress a crowd. Zest the lemon for the ricotta filling first, then cut it into cheeks to serve.
No one enjoys eating dry falafels so we’ve added grated zucchini to these yummy Falafels to keep them light and full of moisture. It’s also an easy way to up the vegetable content of your meal, so it’s a win-win! Whilst traditionally deep-fried, we’ve chosen to pan-fry them to keep them a little healthier.
One of our favourite ways to eat zucchini is grilled — it soaks up all those lovely barbecue flavours wonderfully and holds its shape very well. This colourful Rainbow Salad with Halloumi is a welcome addition to summer barbecues and potlucks.
When small and sweet, raw zucchini is fabulously fresh and tender. This Herbed Cauliflower Couscous is wonderfully light and flavourful thanks to an abundance of fresh crunchy vegetables, lots of aromatic herbs, and a creamy yoghurt dressing. If you don’t have a food processor, you can grate the cauliflower to a fine crumb consistency.
The lovely thing about zucchini is the way their mild flavour goes well with so many foods. It’s also very easy to disguise, making it a perfect candidate for sweet treats. Adding grated zucchini into your baking is a fab way to sneak in some extra vegetables — the kids will never know!
Our Ginger & Zucchini Loaf is a delicious disguise for a bounty of zucchini, infused with warming spices and crystalized ginger. You can use grated beetroot or carrot instead of zucchini if you prefer.
This Black Velvet Cake is another old-faithful. This rich, dark chocolate cake recipe can be cooked as one large cake or divided in half and cooked as a loaf and 12 cupcakes. You’ll never guess the secret ingredient! Hint: it rhymes with bikini.
What to Cook Tonight
For our paid subscribers, we have lots of fantastic zucchini recipes you might like to revisit. Remember you can always check our Index to see what we have cooked together — there are almost 300 recipes there that you won’t find anywhere else!
We both love a zucchini pizza — wonderfully flavourful whilst still being light and summery. Our Best-Ever Zucchini Pizza truly hits the spot — the simple flavours of ricotta, parmesan, garlic, lemon, chilli, and basil are all you need to make this vibrant pizza come to life.
Rose’s good friend Emily often makes this gorgeous Zucchini & Burrata, which has become a recent go-to. Ribbons of zucchini are gently cooked with the southern Italian favourites — olive oil, garlic, lemon zest, and chilli flakes, until just tender. This is then served with a ball of creamy burrata and a final drizzle of olive oil. So simple, beautiful, and quick to prepare.
This Pasta e Fagioli with Zucchini has been on repeat in our households for a few months now. Adding beans your pasta not only adds a wonderful protein and fibre boost, but you get a lovely creaminess and satisfying texture.
Cooking zucchini right down until it is melt-in-your-mouth tender is the trick to this unctuous Zucchini Sugo. This is a truly miraculous recipe that costs next to nothing to make. You wouldn’t believe how much flavour you can coax out of the humble zucchini with a little olive oil, garlic, lemon zest, and time. Amazingly, you don’t need any cheese!
The Late Summer Garden
Down in Wānaka, Annabel has been busy planting, so she can keep harvesting vegetables through autumn and winter.
One of the things that often trips up vegetable gardeners is the time a seed or small seedling takes to grow to harvest. Crops like leeks, for example, are notoriously slow, taking three and a half to four months before you have something of a decent enough size to eat. And if you leave planting them until late autumn they will take even longer as very little growth happens over winter. From seed, leeks will take six to eight weeks before they are ready to plant out, so if you want them for winter you need to be planting leek seedlings (not seeds) now. Broccoli and cauliflower take two or three months to grow, depending on weather conditions and variety, so you’ll need to plant seedlings over the next few weeks to be harvesting from late autumn through the winter.
I like to plant six to 12 plants (a mixture of broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower) two or three times throughout February to get a continuous supply throughout winter. Kale and Brussels sprouts can all go in as one planting because you can continuously pick both of these crops.
White butterfly is a real scourge at this time of year, as are slugs, and you will need to be vigilant to keep your seedlings bug-free. It’s such a disappointment to come out in the morning and discover your tender seedlings have been demolished. I use neem oil or pyrethrum, which seems to work well. Down in the south, we don’t get the same problems with slugs as we did in our Auckland garden, where they are rampant. Small dishes of beer will drown them and fine sand spread around the plants puts them off.
Some vegetables, such as carrots, parsnips, beets, and leeks, provided they are mature enough (i.e. almost ready to pick by late autumn) will stay in the ground without going to seed right through to the spring when the lengthening days kick off the message to send them to seed.
On the other hand, the flowering bud of broccoli and cauliflower won’t hold its firm, tight head for long – longer, certainly, in the winter than the summer (when you have just a few days to harvest), but nonetheless, you are better to pick broccoli and cauliflower as soon as they are ready rather than leave them to start going into flower, as this toughens the stalks and makes them bitter. If you have too many ready at once, store them in the fridge in a sealed bag or container, and they will keep fresh and green for about a week. They can also be cut into florets, blanched, and frozen very successfully.
Happy gardening everyone! If you have any questions or comments, remember you can find us at hello@langbein.com, or comment below.
With love,
Annabel & Rose xxx
I must say I too have trouble finding specific ingredients through the index. I would love a published list of all the recipes.
Can you please advise me how to navigate your index.
Say I want to find all your chicken dishes is that something that is feasible to do?
I’m struggling 🙄