Cuisine – Summer salad days

These long, hot summer days call for bright, fresh salads. And salads are a great way to use up the vegetable glut in the summer garden. Those of you who are gardeners will know what I mean by the summer vegetable glut, especially in the form of the courgette. One day you have one small courgette on the plant and the next you have three marrows. What is it with that! It is like they grow faster overnight than through the day, surprising you the next morning with their vigour. This recipe is a nice way to use up some of those courgettes, with the added freshness of green beans and fennel. The fennel is optional as not everyone likes the aniseed flavour that fennel brings to a recipe. You could swap out the fennel for celery or cucumber. This salad is a delicious accompaniment with seafood.

Courgette and Bean Salad

3 courgettes
200g green beans
1/3 cup olive oil, plus extra
1 tsp Dijon mustard
Juice and zest of 1 lemon
1 tsp Sugar
Salt and pepper
1 fennel bulb (optional)
Sliced almonds (optional)

Preheat the oven to 190C. Line two oven trays with baking paper. Slice the courgettes 2-3mm thick, use a mandoline if you have one. Lay the slices on to the lined baking trays in a single layer. Brush with a little olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Place in the oven and bake for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool. If you can’t fit all the slices on the trays at once, you can carefully take the cooked slices off the trays and repeat as necessary until all the slices are cooked. Trim the ends off the beans and cut in half. Drop into a pot of boiling, salted water and cook for two  minutes. Drain off the boiling water and rinse in cold water. Set aside to cool. Combine the olive oil, mustard, lemon juice and zest and sugar in a bowl and whisk to combine. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Thinly slice the fennel and combine it in a bowl with the cooked courgette slices and beans. Dress with enough lemon dressing to lightly coat everything. Tumble into a serving bowl and garnish with sliced almonds. Store any leftover dressing in a jar in the fridge for one week.