“You could make zucchini bread.”

“You could make zucchini bread.”  Those were Madame’s parting words the other day as she left for work.  I looked at the large zucchini sitting on the counter.

I smiled and sighed.  Waiting in the garden were two more.  (And this is in spite of the squash vine borers!).  Zucchini is wonderful, but it is also very unforgiving if you get even the slightest bit behind in eating it.

My young assistants and I were waiting for their two young friends to arrive.  Every week a friend of mine and I take turns swapping our kiddos so we can each get some things done, and the kids enjoy it too, it’s a win-win!

I began looking at different recipes, hoping to find one that used honey in place of sugar*.  I found a few but none appealed to me.  In the end I made up my own, loosely based on the Joy of Cooking’s version.  The other boys arrived and after they had played for a while my young assistant and his friend helped me do all the dumping of various ingredients, stirring, and licking of the utensils.  We waited and then ate most of the bread while it was still warm.  And that was before lunch… woops.

Zucchini Bread

• ¾ cup all-purpose flour
• ¾ cup whole wheat flour
• ½ tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1+ tsp. cinnamon
• ½ tsp. nutmeg

• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 2 eggs
• ½ cup oil
• ½ cup honey*
• 2 cups grated zucchini, squeezed to remove water
• ½ cup chopped walnuts (optional but recommended)
• ½ cup (or more) chocolate chips (also optional, but in reality you know they’re not optional)

1. Preheat oven to 350.  (Or don’t preheat—just know that you’ll need to turn the oven on at some point.)
2. Mix together the dry ingredients in one bowl.
3. Mix together the wet ingredients in another.
4. Mix the two bowls’ contents together.
5. Dump the mixture into one normal sized bread loaf pan, or two smallish ones.
6. Bake for 40 minutes (30 minutes for the small pans) and check by inserting a toothpick or your finger (probably a better idea to go with the toothpick).  Bake 5 minutes longer if it sticks heavily to the toothpick.
7. Allow the bread to cool a bit and then eat it!

And now, get moving, there are bees working hard to make more zucchinis!

*As an experiment we split our recipe in half and made one loaf with 1/4 cup sugar and the other with 1/4 cup of honey.  Interestingly there was very little difference between the two sweeteners.   That’s why for the recipe I’ve posted here I just said to use 1/2 cup of honey, it works great!  But of course you could just substitute 1/2 cup of sugar, or possibly other sweeteners.

Taking the bread to the Wednesday Party Wave.