Bean and Courgette Salad

While I think of this as a salad, you might consider it simply a vegetable dish served at room temperature. No matter: it’s a glorious summer dish whichever way you look at it: green and yellow courgettes/zucchini, cut into batons, oil-dressed and oven-roasted; jade-glowing broad beans/fava beans and deep emerald fine beans, both lightly boiled then refreshed in a bowl of icy water to keep their verdant intensity. It's a recipe that sings of summer and, indeed, is adapted, with a few changes, from my book, Nigella Summer! If you can’t get yellow courgettes/zucchini, simply use all green ones. I am stricter when it comes to the broad beans: you really need to shell the beans as well as pop them out of their pods. It’s not actually hard. Once you’ve plunged the drained cooked beans into icy water, and left them there for five minutes before draining them again, you’ll find it easy — and rather satisfying — to squeeze them out of their tough skins. When I use frozen broad beans — which I often do — I defrost them in a bowl of hot water, then shell them before cooking them very briefly along with the fine green beans, and I then just drain them both and plunge them into a bowl of iced water for a minute or so. Should you have any left over, cook some pasta, drain it, warm the beans and courgettes gently with a little olive oil in the pan you've cooked the pasta in and then add the pasta to the vegetables and stir to combine, along with some grated parmesan. For US cup measures, use the toggle at the top of the ingredients list.

Great

% Daily Values based on a 2,000 calorie diet