Courgette, coconut and almond curry

Because everyone is always googling for ‘courgette recipes’ in the summer, when there’s a glut, and because I’m always looking for a good courgette curry recipe and not finding it, I did this amazing thing.

I say amazing, it hardly took five minutes, but then the recipes are often such. The key is not to overcook the courgettes; cut them chunky and yes soften them but not to a mush, they must retain some bite. Swathe them in a fragrant, spicy, coconut and almond sauce and you have one of the best courgette recipes you will ever have tasted. It’s also absolutely beautiful with a naan bread instead of rice.

Courgettes are a doddle to grow and produce an abundant crop. They also make beautiful pickle.

Prep time: 5 mins

Cook time: 20 mins

Servings: 2

Ingredients

olive oil
1 large white/yellow onion peeled and finely diced
1 red chilli, deseeded and finely diced (I use frozen onion, chilli and garlic). Feel free to add extra chilli
1 clove of garlic peeled and finely chopped
2 tablespoons of Thai yellow curry paste
4 large courgettes quartered lengthways and chopped into thick chunks
1 tablespoon of tomato purée
1 tin of full fat coconut milk (about 420ml)
sea salt
100g of ground almonds

Instructions

If having rice use brown basmati or brown jasmine rice and start cooking that before you start the curry.

Gently fry the onion, chilli and garlic in plenty of olive oil until the onion is translucent. Now add the curry paste and give it all a good stir and cook for a minute or two more.

Throw in the courgettes and cook away for 5 mins or so until they soften but not mush, they need to stay nice and green. Then add the coconut milk and tom purée and stir; bubble that up a bit for a minute before adding the ground almonds and plenty of sea salt as the courgettes do need seasoning to bring out their beauty.

Cook for 5 mins more then serve sprinkled with fresh herbs – coriander, parsley or Thai basil – with a warm naan bread or the rice, or if you’ve just climbed Everest, both!

Nutrition Info

Courgettes

You might not put courgettes at the top of the ‘superfoods’ list but that would be a tragedy as they have a really broad range of nutrients even if not as massively stuffed with one or the other as something like broccoli.

Their top one is copper; copper is needed to make collagen, that vital thing that holds lots of bits of us together! It also helps to convert carbohydrates into energy, as well as incorporating iron into red blood cells. Copper is a co-factor for an enzyme called superoxide dismutase, which is one of the major antioxidant enzymes in your body – a co-factor means a kind of helper.

Courgettes are also an excellent source of manganese, which is great for bones and skin and again is a co-factor for that superoxide thing I mentioned above 🙂

And let’s not overlook their brilliant amount of fibre, essential if you want happy gut flora!

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