Friday, June 29, 2007

zucchini baby

Yesterday my aunt gave me a giant zucchini from my uncle's garden. I put my zucchini child's picture up on flickr and he's now famous thanks to boing boing! Here's the famous photo:


Here he is next to a regular grocery store zucchini, and with a quarter for size comparison:


So what to do with a giant zucchini child? Apparently it's not really desirable to have your zucchini get this big, but he looks pretty tasty to me, so I won't let him go to waste. My first thought was bread, so I shredded part of him up and made a loaf and a dozen muffins. I used this recipe from the ol' Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book that every household seems to have:

Zucchini bread

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 cup sugar
1 cup finely shredded unpeeled zucchini
¼ cup cooking oil
1 egg
¼ teaspoon finely shredded lemon peel
½ cup chopped walnuts

preheat oven to 350

In a mixing bowl combine flour, cinnamon, baking soda, salt, baking powder, and nutmeg. In another mixing bowl combine sugar, shredded zucchini, cooking oil, egg and lemon peel; mix well. Add flour mixture; stir until just combined. Stir in chopped walnuts.

Pour batter into a greased 8x4x2-inch loaf pan. Bake in a 350 oven for 55 to 60 minutes or till a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes on a wire rack.

Remove bread from pan; cool thoroughly on a wire rack. Wrap and store overnight before slicing. Makes 1 loaf (16 servings).





I didn't add the lemon zest, though, because I didn't have it. Also instead of walnuts I added a bag of salted sunflower kernels from the 7-11, and a couple handfuls of golden raisins. The result was good. A little too sweet, though. I'd add less sugar next time. And there will be a next time, since this double batch only managed to take care of about 1/6 of the zucchini baby.

5 comments:

Alanna Kellogg said...

Very funny!!

Anonymous said...

My roommate brought home a couple zucchinis that size last summer. They took over our kitchen, and we did everything we could to eat them in a week. Zucchini muffins with butterscotch chips added in them were a favourite, as was cooking grated zucchini with spicy italian sausage and stuffing that mixture, plus feta in peppers and baking them.
If you're really innovative, you can probably get through it in a week, and still not be sick of zucchini. Another thing coming to mind, would be to grill it with some olive oil, and grill mango as well. So delicious.

Anonymous said...

I had some large zucchini in my garden this year as well - not as large as your baby, but still a good size. When I grated one of them up, the seeds were pretty big, big and tough enough to not want in the zucchini bread but small enough to not grate. Did you de-seed the portion you grated for bread? Or grate up seeds and everything?

Roni said...

Thanks for the AWESOME picture, I linked to you...
http://greenlitebites.com/2008/08/06/giant-stuffed-zucchini/

Leslie said...

This is hilarious. I just went to my garden after not tending to it for a couple of weeks and found two giant zucchinis! One is almost two feet in length and about 6 inches at its thickest part. I will definitely be blogging about it :)