Courgettes present a particular difficulty when presenting recipes with no guidance to weight. It's okay to say, for example, one large tomato. Most people know what a big tomato or a small tomato is and you usually get a mixture of sizes in the bag to choose from. Unless you shop in an EU supermarket, I suppose. And then they're usually all EU standard tomato sized. Courgettes, on the other hand, can vary greatly in size but usually come in similar sizes in the same bag. Here I say two small courgettes, but please don't let that put you off if you only have a bag of large ones. I couldn't sleep if I thought people were spurning my recipes just because they discovered the wrong size of vegetable in the cupboard. Use one large courgette and by the time you've chopped it up, nobody will notice..
This will do about four people.
Ingredients
350-450g of pasta
2 small courgettes
1 red pepper
3 or 4 cloves of garlic
2 tomatoes
A pinch of black pepper
A couple of large pinches of dried rosemary
A few capers
100-150g of single cream
Olive oil
Salt
Put a pan of salted water on to boil for the pasta then chop all the vegetables into very small pieces - you can put the courgettes, pepper and garlic together but keep the tomatoes separate.
When the water has boiled, chuck in the pasta and stir. When the water comes back to the boil, turn down the heat and simmer for about twelve minutes. It will take you less time than that to do the sauce so you could take a wee break at this point. Pour a quick glass of wine or go and have a smoke.
To make the sauce, heat some olive oil in a frying pan then sizzle the chopped courgette, red pepper and garlic together for four or five minutes, then stir in the chopped tomato, rosemary, capers, black pepper and a little salt and remove from the heat. Stir in the cream with a little salt and that's the sauce ready. Drain the pasta when it is cooked, return it to the pan, pour over the sauce and mix well.
You could serve this dish with a green salad (maybe with a bit of fresh basil and a few toasted pine-nuts in it). You'll have plenty of time to make one while the pasta is cooking - a healthier option than either of my alternative suggestions above.
If you like this recipe, why not try pasta and courgette with pumpkin seeds, or pasta with courgette and capers.