Fresh Courgette & Parmesan Soup

We have been a little busy recently, so have been watering the greenhouse vegetables somewhat sporadically. The little cute round courgettes (zucchini) were left to grow.. a little larger than I intended. So I get to Saturday lunchtime and fancy soup (not much of a change there). I had to use the courgettes up so made this soup.

I was half expecting it to be a little flavourless as there is quite a bit of water in a courgette and they are quite mild - but oh it was good. I didn't blend it completely with the hand blender so it had random chunks in it for texture. You can use any colour courgette in this recipe. I just happened to have a large green and a large yellow (picture at the bottom of this blog) and it was so good. And proper decent homemade fresh soup!

Ingredients:

1kg courgette, chopped
handful (20g) fresh basil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tbsp. olive oil
400ml chicken stock (veg is fine - also a stock cube is fine!)
50g parmesan, finely grated
1/4 tsp. white pepper
1/4 tsp. salt

Method:

Put the courgette, basil and garlic into a deep saucepan and cook in the oil for about 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the stock and cook for 8 minutes, uncovered on a medium heat.

Take off the heat and use an hand blender to blitz the soup but try and leave a few chunks of courgette for texture. Put back on the heat and add most of the grated parmesan. Stir through.

Serve with the rest of the parmesan on top with a small sprig of basil and some bread and butter for a delicious weekend lunch!

We ate the lot - it was delicious! See below a photo of the daft sized courgettes. I put a lemon in the photo to show how big they were!

 

Note: taste as you go if you don't like salt, as parmesan is quite salty.