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Freezing courgette/marrow flowers

Posted by on Friday 15 July 2011 in cooking, Featured, growing, preserving | 13 comments

We love having marrow flower fritters for lunch at this time of year. Made with eggs, courgettes & marrow flowers from the garden, and served with homegrown salad, they’re very low in terms of food miles – and they’re easy & super tasty to boot.

But at the moment, our 13 (gulp!) courgette plants are cranking out more flowers than we can sensibly use – so I freeze them.

The petals are torn up for the fritters but I think it’s better to freeze them whole so they don’t clump together too much. I treat them like soft fruit – I wash the flowers then spread them out individually on trays before putting them in the freezer. A few hours later (well, probably sooner but I leave them that long), they are frozen solid and can be bagged up for longer term storage.

Because they’re so delicate, they don’t take long to defrost at all – we lift out the half dozen or so we need at a time, and leave them on the side while were gathering/mixing the rest of the ingredients. By the time the flour & eggs are mixed and the courgette chopped and added, they’re ready to go.

I don’t keep them in the freezer for months and months but they’ll certainly be fine for a few weeks, by which point our fresh supply may be waning slightly.

Do you eat marrow (summer squash) flowers? What do you do with them? We’ve got so many that I wouldn’t mind a few more recipes! :)

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John’s Grandma’s marrow flower fritters recipe

Posted by on Wednesday 7 July 2010 in cooking, growing, recipes | 0 comments

I remember eating some of John’s Grandma’s marrow flower fritters at the very start of our relationship and so they always remind me of that exciting trying-new-things-with-a-new-person stage. I’d been thinking about making some with the courgette flowers we’ve had popping up over the last few weeks – when John’s mum arrived with a bag full of them last week.

While I encouraged our niece Mia to play ukelele and take photos of strange things, John and his mum whipped up a batch of fritters for lunch. Here’s the recipe – but unfortunately it’s a bit vague as it’s not been written down in their family for decades (if ever!) <- suggestions for revisions gratefully received!


Marrow Flower Fritters Recipe

Ingredients (to make roughly 6 palm-size fritters)
Self Raising Flour about 2oz/50g per egg
The aforementioned egg or eggs
About 6 marrow flowers per egg
Some courgette/zucchini (optional but makes it more of a meal)
Pinch of salt
A little black pepper
A little water
Oil for frying

Method
Tear up the marrow flowers into pieces – size is up to you – anything from confetti size to about half the original petal size. If your plants are already fruiting, you can add a thinly sliced courgette (zucchini) to the mix too.

Mix the flour, egg, salt and water together to achieve the consistency of American pancake/drop scone batter – slightly thicker than usual British pancake batter.

Mix the flowers (and courgette, if you’re using that) into the batter.

Heat up some oil in a frying pan for shallow frying. (John & his mum used less oil when they made them and they stuck & burnt a bit.)

Drop a dollop of the batter-with-flowers into the hot oil and fry until golden brown. Flip over to cook the other side and serve immediately. John & his mum ground some more salt onto the top of the cooked fritters but that made them too salty for me – I’d have much preferred more pepper on top instead.

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