In Damon Lee Fowler's Classical Southern Cooking, there is a recipe for stuffed acorn squash. It's just simply a squash hollowed out and filled with sausage meat. Baked in the oven, it is cheap, delicious, very basic and yet it seems festive. The recipe put me in mind of a summer staple of my childhood. I hadn't thought about it in years.
Oh -- and the fine photo above is by Indigo Goat at www.flick'r.com. I'd guess this is someone who just loves their allotment.
When the first marrows were available, I would be sent to crop them and then cook this dish. My measurements for this recipe remain a little vague because much depends on the size of your marrow. (Girls: ain't that true?) It also works with courgettes, by the way -- but the latter doesn't, for me, hit the spot. I think the vegetable has to be larger and more robust for this to seem rustic and satisfying enough. I am aware this paragraph is managing to sound smutty.
Take your marrow --I suppose it would be one about 15cm in diameter: so hot foot it out the vegetable patch with your tape measure-- peel it with knife or peeler. This is very satisfying: do it in long thin stripes. One by one. Force yourself to think of nothing else. I digress: cooking keeps me sane. Now cut the marrow in half length ways and, with a dessertspoon, remove all pith and seeds, scraping the final threads out carefully.
For the filling, you can do simply fill it with sausage meat and a good grind of black pepper --that's it-- or do what I do, which is as follows. Oh --if you do want to use sausage meat, remember that you can always undress some decent sausages: there are easier to procure, I find, than decent sausage meat.
Quickly saute a chopped medium onion in a little oil then add about 480g of minced lamb (you could also use beef). Cook until browned and then add two medium tomatoes, finely chopped and a big handful of fresh thyme or marjoram which you have chopped finely. Cook for a couple of minutes and then check for seasoning. Pile it into the halves of the marrow and either bake each piece separately, covered in foil (take it off for the last ten minutes to brown) or put the whole vegetable back together, wrap it tightly in foil and then cook. It should take about forty five minutes if you have cooked it in two halves; about one and quarter hours if it is all of a piece.
Pierce it through the foil and, if it gives but there is just a touch of resistance, then that's your time to take it out and brown it. Or you could just skip the browning stage altogether. Either way, it won't be at all dr. It will be savoury and cheerful and you will wonder why you never did it before (as I wondered why I had forgotten).
If you want to make a vegetarian version, a marrow is nice filled with a mixture of cooked red, green or brown lentils, mixed with a little sauteed onion, some cheddar cheese (or feta-- but go easy) and the same herbs as before. I do want, though, to keep the number of ingredients down for this dish. Ideally, there would be just two!
And the bit about the lettuce in the title? That's just one of my favourite recipe opening lines. I shan't be dealing with lettuce now. But if you hang on for my winter edition, I will tell you how to make chou farci -- stuffed cabbage. Three ways! This does involve cutting out the heart of a (grown up) cabbage.
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