More courgettes and preserving under oil.

Having had our fill of courgette recipes over the last few days, I picked the rest from the plants and spent an hour preparing them for freezing ready to use throughout the winter.

Each plant has at least one large marrow sized courgette still on it - ready to be made up into stuffed marrows, and more baby courgettes on the way, they just need a couple more days to warrant picking.

I freeze them in either baby courgette thin slices, thicker courgette chunks or larger thicker skinned courgettes, peeled and sliced, ready for whatever a recipe may demand, use from frozen otherwise they go all limp and mushy.

While feeling inspired to get preserving, I found a couple of sweet peppers mouldering away in my veggie basket and rather than waste them or even worse, they go off and I have to bin them, I thought I would preserve them under oil.

I do this whenever we get a glut of things in the garden and as an alternative to freezing stuff all the time.  I like the flavoured oils I get at the end too.

So - with some jars sterilised in the oven, (at a high heat for 20-30 minutes), I chopped the peppers quite thinly, so they are ready to use straight from the jar, sliced up a couple of rich ripe plum tomatoes, and peeled a whole head of garlic.

Stuff the peppers into the jar, about half way add a few slices of tomato then keep stuffing with peppers, as a finishing touch wedge a couple of cloves of garlic in, I do this with the jars piping hot direct from the oven.  Then pour over your oil of choice.  Because I want a flavoured oil at the end, and olive oil has too rich a taste of its own to take on the delicate flavours of peppers and tomato, I use grape seed oil instead.  It is also much lighter in colour so you see a lovely mix of colours from the veg themselves.