Rachel Roddy’s recipe for pasta con le zucchine – pasta with courgettes and basil | A kitchen in Rome

Cook courgettes slowly, first by frying, then by simmering in their own juices, before tossing through pasta with salty cheese to taste

This week’s recipe is the last meal I made in Rome before we left for three weeks in Sicily. In the days before that, we’d been “eating down”. I’m not sure where I picked up this expression, the longer version of which is “eating down the fridge” – that is, eating anything that might go off before a holiday. But pick it up I did, and now it pops up like a cold sore every time I look at the fridge as a holiday approaches. Anyway, things were going well: there was just milk, cherry yoghurt, parmesan that was already quite hard, lettuce for the friend coming to feed the tortoise, and a large courgette left.

While a well-stocked fridge is full of possibilities, it also presents you with choices and decisions. A near-empty one, on the other hand, takes responsibility and tells you what to do. Fry the courgette, the fridge said. How? The answer to this is in my still unpublished pamphlet, How to Turn any Vegetable into a Pasta Sauce, a work of six sections: boiling (which is usually followed by dragging), roasting, pounding, dicing, frying and the steamy braise. Steamy braise is the best section, because it is a great approach: fry the vegetable first in oil (not to brown it, but to seal the surface), then add just enough water and salt that the vegetable bubbles and steams away in its own juices. The liquid reduces while the courgette softens and collapses enough to become a sauce.

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