Recipe: Lil yellow stuffed courgette

1 garlic head, roasted in a little olive oil

100g unroasted kasha buckwheat, cooked in 200ml of veg stock

5 yellow round courgettes, centre hollowed out, keep lid

3 small red peppers, deseeded, keep lids

200g cauliflower florets, processed until they look like couscous

200g broccoli florets, processed until they look like couscous

4 cherry tomatoes, quartered

A couple of sprigs of fresh thyme, tiny leaves pulled off the sprig

Olive oil

Salt and Pepper

Preheat your oven to 200c. First roast your garlic head in olive oil in a baking tray for 15 minutes. Then remove from the oven, let cool and squeeze out the garlic cloves. Set aside. (You can do more of these and keep them in a little bowl in the fridge, useful for many recipes).

Cook your kasha in double the volume of liquid, in this case stock, just like you would cook rice. You can buy this from any Eastern European shop. It’s not a grain actually but acts like one. Healthy, low GI, no gluten, all that good stuff.

Then prep your courgettes and peppers. When I cook, I often start with colour. In my minds eye, I saw a yellow and red dish with a little bit of green. So I had some round sunflower yellow courgettes and postbox red romano peppers in the fridge. I sliced off the top of the courgettes, retaining the ‘hat’, then hollowed out the courgettes, but making sure I didn’t gouge a hole in the side. I cut the romano pepper in thirds. I then stacked the courgettes and peppers, alternating the colours, in a small oiled baking dish.

Then, do this new thing that’s all the rage: make couscous from vegetables. Maria Elia in Smashing Plates does it with carrots, American chefs are doing it with cauliflower and broccoli. You just put the raw florets into a food processor and process until they look like couscous. (You can also use this technique to make a raw salad).

I mixed the kasha, vegetable couscous with the cherry tomatoes and fried this mixture, lightly, in a frying pan, in olive oil, adding the roast garlic cloves. This took about 5 minutes. I also added some fresh thyme leaves.

Check your seasoning then with a spoon, stuff the mixture into your yellow courgettes and red peppers. Make sure you can see a little bit of red cherry tomato in the yellow courgette stuffing.

If there is any of that tasty oil left from the garlic clove roasting and the veg couscous frying, drizzle that over the courgettes and peppers.

Bake at 200c, covered with foil, for 15 to 20 minutes. Take off the foil for the last five minutes.

Serve this with rosé or this heady white wine

Apologies to Olivia Newton John, Lionel Ritchie and Prince.