Zucchini Bread

This is the easiest, tastiest, and most moist Zucchini bread recipe I have found. It does well with ingredient variations, so if you only have three eggs, no applesauce, or only white sugar power on!

4 eggs
4 cups grated Zucchini ( I use 4 but you can get similar results with as few as 2)
½ cup oil
½ cup applesauce
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 cups Whole Wheat Flour
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons Cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon baking powder
½ cups nuts (optional)

Makes two 8 inch loafs or 24 muffins.

Grate the zucchini into fine strips. A mandolin chopper works well for this.

I froth the eggs for a few minutes, then add applesauce, oil, vanilla, and shreaded zucchini.

Next, I mix all dry ingredients into a bowl and stir to combine well. I use a combination of half whole wheat pastry or bread flour with half regular whole wheat.Combine wet into dry ingredients and stir to mix.

Bake at 325 for one hour.

Freezing Squash

Our garden has been producing enough squash to feed an entire city block each day. This is pretty common. I heard a joke the other day that here in the South that you should never leave your car unlocked in the summer, not because it will be stolen, but because it will be filled with squash when you get back. Well, I love my squash so I won’t be filling anyone’s car but I want to preserve it to eat after the season is over. After some Internet research I found blanching and freezing is the best method to keep squash. This can be done with pretty much any variety of summer squash. I prepared some Yellow squash and Zucchini.

Step 1:
Wash and trim the squash, then cut into ½ inch disks. Make sure not to cut the squash up too far in advance as it does oxidize if exposed to air for over 30 minutes.

Step 2:
Blanch in boiling water for 3 minutes. You want them to still be crisp and green but blanched long enough to destroy the enzymes that break the squash done.

Step 3:
Drain from the boiling water and immediately put it in an ice bath. Let it stay in the ice bath for about 5 minutes.

Step 4:
Drain the squash on towels. I put one kitchen towel under the squash and one over to help pull the water out.

Step 5:
Put into freezer bags and press out as much air as possible before sealing.

An Abundance of Vegetables

Our garden has done very well so far this season. We are already reaping at least a dozen squash each day and the other plants are loaded with what is sure to be a bountiful daily harvest. The other day I was riding through a close by neighborhood and noticed several large gardens on empty lots. This is exactly what our family did, took an empty lot and turned it into a multi-family project. We take turns weeding and picking the produce. Since it is in my parent’s property they do typically water it daily though. When the garden is at its peak for harvesting it can provide our vegetable needs for most weeks this summer. This in conjunction with our weekly CSA basket will be an overwhelming amount of produce I am sure. Last week our CSA basket was a whopping 17 pounds.
I need to learn to can vegetables and tomato sauce. This got me thinking that I can probably provide for my family home grown local produce year round by learning to preserve the overflow of vegetables this summer. I am not sure why I didn’t start doing this for my family years ago.

Vacation Food Backlash

I have been MIA lately while my family went on a trip to Disney World. We love Disney. It’s fun for all of us and honestly I love it as much as my 3 year old does. Each time we go we get the Disney Dining Plan. This allows me the opportunity to have a vacation from the kitchen and still stay within a reasonable budget while eating out every meal for a week. This is the first time we have been to Disney since making our proclamation to eat as much local in season food as possible. Over the past 6 months our diet has made a lot of changes. We eat a lot of vegetables, we have always had the obligatory veggies with each meal, but now veggies play a starring role in my cooking. We also only eat grass fed beef/milk and pastured chickens/eggs. Our food taste so good and we have never felt healthier. I am also pretty proud actually that when I open the fridge door about 70% of what I see came from a local farm. OK, back to Disney food. We love picking from all the fancy themed restaurants at Disney and ordering anything we want whether it be the $38 steak or the $15 burger. We try to still eat “healthyish” and avoid fried foods and overly processed food. However, this time we noticed something, Disney does not do a lot of vegetables. We’d order a steak and got a huge steak with potatoes and like one piece of edible greenery. Salads on the menu are harder to find and often not included on the dining plan we picked. Vegetable choices are usually fries or another form of potato or mayonnaised up something or another. By mid-week our bodies we not working optimally and we felt the toll way more than we ever expected. I often woke up at night feeling nausea and my husband said he felt bloated and icky (my word not his) often too. It made us realize how much better we feel with our new modified diet of fresh healthy food and thankful that we have the opportunity to eat how we do. We have been home a week or so now and our bodies have been rejoicing in the fresh basket of vegetables from our CSA this week. We will re-think our dining methods for our next vacation to avoid the backlash our bodies dole out.

Family Plot Week 4

Our garden is doing quite well as we arrive at week 4. The tomato plants are starting to bloom and show signs of the fruit to come and the squash are spreading and growing quickly. The okra and bell pepper plants are lagging a bit behind but they were planted a little later than some of the larger tomato plants. The hay bales are also holding up and even though we are not to the extreme heat of summer they seem to be holding moisture. I am very curious to see if the hay bales can sustain the melons we have planted. This week we weeded the garden and have plans for pine straw to minimize weed growth in the future.

Honey Wheat Bread Recipe

This is the very best recipe I have found/tweaked for wheat bread in the bread maker. A loaf doesn’t last long in our house! It’s high in fiber and low in fat and free of any icky ingredients. Sometimes I make variations by adding sunflower seeds or parmesan and rosemary. I have listed the ingredients in the order I add them to the machine. I also take the paddle out of the bread maker before baking for a prettier loaf.
1 1/8 cups warm water
1 ½ tsp salt
1/3 cup honey
1 tbl dry milk
1 ½ tbl oil
3 cups whole wheat bread flour (I use 2 cups bread and 1 cup regular ww for texture)
3 tbl vital wheat gluten
1 ½ tsp dry yeast

The Family Plot week 3

Week 3 of our family garden. So far we have planted several varieties of heirloom tomatoes, heirloom eggplants, organic squash and zucchini, pole beans, heirloom watermelon and cantaloupe, heirloom bell peppers, jalapeno peppers and okra. The garden is doing very well. The hay bales seem to be doing great. I'll post a tutorial of growing in hay bales soon.