When friends give you zucchini, make zucchini bread

I am one of those special people that has a total black thumb. Growing up and living in rural Illinois, I have a good many friends and relatives who are farmers. People who grow things for a living. They cannot figure out my total lack of ability to grow things. (It likely stems from lack of watering my plants regularly, but hey). At any rate, I cannot grow zucchini. So I am one of those people who quietly buys her zucchini from the grocery store or farmer's market. That is, until one of those previously mentioned farmer friends get wind of my purchasing zucchini and bring me a huge grocery bag full.

For my zucchini bread recipe, I turned to my trusty family cookbook. My mother and grandmother were both prolific zucchini growers and had a ton of recipes for zucchini bread. I decided to adapt one of the recipes to try an make a lower fat version and was met with success. I changed the sugar to honey (and in some cases Splenda) and I replaced the cup of oil with applesauce or yogurt. I also experimented with taking out the some of the eggs and replacing them with egg whites.

Zucchini Pineapple Bread
2 cups sugar (or Splenda or honey)
2 cups shredded zucchini
1 cup vegetable oil (or plain yogurt or applesauce)
1 8oz can crushed pineapple
3 eggs (or 1 egg and two egg whites)
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 cup chopped nuts (optional)
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 cups all purpose flour ( you can use 3 cups all purpose flour if you do not have whole wheat flour)

Mix ingredients together and pour into two loaf pans. Bake at 350 degrees until done (about 50-60 minutes)

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Of all of the comfort foods in this world, my absolute favorite is a chocolate chip cookie. It is the first recipe I learned to make. It is my go-to recipe when I need to bring a dessert to a friend's house. When I am craving something sweet, a scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough cures it every time. These cookies taste fantastic warm and gooey straight out of the oven and are still good three days later when you dunk them in milk so soften them up.

The recipe I use is from my mother's Betty Crocker cookbook. It is the version she got when she was my age. Her cookbook is old and the pages are dog eared and falling out from years of use. You can't even read the oatmeal cookie recipe because there is a hole worn in the page from being wiped clean of batter so many times. It is just a guess how much brown sugar is needed. But my sister and I tried to get her a newer version of the Betty Crocker Cookbook and the chocolate chip cookie recipe is just not the same, so the book sits unused in her cupboard. The recipe is good, don't get me wrong, but those same feelings of nostalgia do not come bubbling to the surface with each bite.

When my sister and I used to bake these chocolate chip cookies, we used to fight over who got to pour the vanilla in and who got to stir in the chocolate chips. We have made this recipe so many different ways depending on what we had in the cupboard. If we were just going to eat the dough, we left out the eggs. We have made it with no vanilla, no baking soda, butter instead of margarine. We've put butterscotch chips, vanilla chips, cinnamon chips, M&Ms, and mint chips in them, but honestly, never have we put in the optional nuts. Each time the cookies turn out a bit different but still good. We have probably made these cookies for almost every person we know.



I made this batch of cookies for my husband's interns. It is their last week of work because summer is coming to a close. However, he forgot he had meetings in the city early this week and would not be seeing his interns, so no cookies for them. But chocolate chip cookies never go to waste...

Chocolate Chip Cookies adapted from Betty Crocker
2/3 c. shortening
2/3 c. margarine
1 c. brown sugar
1 c. white sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
3 c. flour
1 12oz package chocolate chips
1 c. nuts (optional)

Mix ingredients together. When I was little, I melted the shortening and margarine in the microwave and stirred in the ingredients by hand. Now I am big and I have a Kitchen Aid stand mixer and so I just throw everything in there with the paddle attachment and whip the batter right up. Its really personal preference. The mixer gives you a more whipped dough than stirring by hand, but the cookies come out pretty much the same. So I guess it depends on whether you like to eat whipped dough or not ( because really, who can make chocolate chip cookies and not snitch some of the batter?)

Scoop tablespoons onto a cookie sheet. If you used butter instead of margarine, leave a lot of room between cookies. They will spread like crazy.

Bake at 350 degrees for 8-12 minutes or until the bottoms are just starting to turn brown. My family prefers cookies on the gooier side, so I tend to try and err on the side of caution by pulling them out a bit early. However, if you like crunchy cookies, leave them in.

Enjoy!

Let Them Eat Brioche

I know, I know, the next recipe in the BBA challenge is bagels. But I already made and posted about the bagels in this book. I need to go back and make them again, because mine had a flaw in them somewhere, that I need to figure out. However, I decided to go ahead and skip them in order to keep on track and to keep trying new recipes.

Next on the list was Brioche. There were three options to choose from: Poor Man's Brioche, Medium Brioche, and Rich Man's Brioche. The difference in the recipes was related to the quantity of butter in the dough. Brioche is an incredibly rich buttery dough that to me had similar characteristics to a croissant. I chose the Rich Man's Brioche because I had never made a bread with that high of a butter content and I wanted to see what the dough would be like and how difficult it would be to work with.

The dough came together fairly easily, rose like it should have, and was not to difficult to handle.

Honestly, the finished product was pretty but too rich for my taste when eaten alone (which is really saying a lot). Eating it with some raspberry jam was actually a good pairing, the butter flavor went well with the sweetness of the jam.

Greek Celebration Bread

The next bread for the BBA Challenge was Greek Celebration Bread or Artos. There were a couple of options when making this bread in regards to the shape of the bread. You could make Christopsomos which is served at Christmas time and has raisins, cranberries, and walnuts mixed in. The other option would be to make Lambropsomo, which is served at Easter and has raisins, apricots, and almonds mixed in. The bigger difference in the two breads though, is in how they are shaped. Chistopsomos is what I made and is shaped like the above photo. Lambropsomo is braided and has colored eggs nestled in the grooves. This bread was fairly easy to make, however you did need a wild yeast starter already prepared. As it so happens, I have a wild yeast culture just lounging in my fridge waiting for me so that was not a big deal for me. It does take some time to grow though, if you have never done it.

This is not one of the best breads I have ever made. The glaze made the bread sticky and undesirable to just snack on. I was concerned about all of the add ins, so I didn't put in any raisins or cranberries and that was a poor decision. There are a lot of spices and the dried fruit would have really helped offset the strong flavor. Overall, it was fun to make, but not overly fun to eat.

BBA Challenge Breads

I know I am posting about it a bit late, but I am participating in the BBA challenge put forth by Nicole from Pinch My Salt. Its quite an interesting challenge. The idea is to work through Peter Reinhart's book The Bread Baker's Apprentice at the rate of one recipe per week. Because life has gotten busy on me, I have not had the opportunity to post about any of them until now. I am really enjoying going through a cookbook and forcing myself to bake the recipes as they come. I never have made all of the recipes in one book before, I usually pick out several that intrigue me and leave the ones that seem too boring or too hard for later and then later never really comes.

The first of the challenge recipes was Anadama Bread. Peter Reinhart had a cute story to go along with this bread. Its a story about a man, whose wife is named Anna, leaves him with nothing but a bowl of cornmeal mush. He is so upset that he shouts "Anna, damn her!" and proceeds to throw a few more things into the bowl and voila (insert appropriate accent mark) there was Anadama bread. This was an interesting bread because it utilzed a cornmeal soaker. The idea is to extract as much flavor from the cornmeal as possible. The bread was fairly easy to put together and resulted in a hearty flavorful loaf. It was a good choice to start off our bread baking challenge.

Lemon Sugar Snaps

These are Lemon Sugar Snaps from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook. These cookies are straight up amazing. My husband's extended family lives in Kentucky, and each time we trek down there I make these cookies because they travel so well and yet taste awesome. They take a little bit of work, they need to be refrigerated, which takes time. They also need to be rolled into balls by hand and additionally rolled in sugar. You know Martha recipes, nothing is ever just easy but the results are well worth it. These cookies taste like buttery sugar cookies with a definite lemon flavor. The citrus reduces the overwhelming sweetness of the sugar cookie, making it so that you can eat about twenty of them in one sitting. It's crazy. Here you can find almost the exact same recipe, it makes a few more cookies and you use some shortening instead of all butter, but I suspect you will get a similar result.

Reckless with Anticipation

There is something amazing about Spring. It is full of what could be. Northern Illinois usually has fairly substantial winters; complete with lots of snow, ice, and below zero days. Somewhere around March, Mother Nature starts toying with us and she tosses us a few 60-70 degree days. Enough to make our hearts beat faster, hoping that winter is behind us and leaves us salivating for spring. But sure enough, it gets nasty and cold and rainy again for a few more weeks. Maybe she even throws in a snowstorm or two.

But by now, here in the middle of May, we are well into Spring. My tiny container garden plants are sprouting, leaving me to anticipate the delicious homegrown produce that is to come. Baby animals are born, like my little chick above. She leaves me reckless with anticipation because I know in a few short months she will have shed her fuzzies and will be laying beautiful brown eggs for me. And I know its been said a thousand times, but there is nothing like a fresh egg for baking.

So enjoy this season of anticipation, enjoy considering the endless possibilities from your farm fresh eggs or your bell peppers, or whatever it is that you are anticipating great things from this spring.