I grew up with a vegetarian hippie mother (who still ate fish) and an extreme meat-eater step father. This resulted in a very interesting diet. One night I’d be eating spaghetti with “meatless meat balls” (I’m still not sure what they were made of, but I think they had walnuts in them), and the next night I’d be eating pork chops and Yorkshire Pudding. Tuna burgers, hamburger helper, eggplant parmesan, bacon cheeseburgers, meatless meatloaf, pork chops, fried cheese, fried zucchini and tofu.
My mother made her own yogurt, ice cream, pickles, jam, bread, birthday cakes, cookies, and she maintained two huge gardens and a greenhouse. The garden had everything we could possibly want- lettuce, carrots, swiss chard, tomatoes, potatoes, green and yellow beans, radishes, zucchini, pumpkins, squash, corn, sunflowers, peas and much more. I grew up on thirty acres of land with feilds of hay and raspberries, blueberries and blackberries and a huge forest that we’d build forts in and get our Christmas trees from. We had a barn with pigs and goats (for meat), we always had chickens for our eggs.
I’m happy to say that I took on a lot of my traits from my mother- I LOVE baking, and feel sorry for people when they tell me their mother would pack their lunch with processed foods and packaged snacks. Not that it’s wrong, I just think my mother’s amazing for bringing up three children and working part time and made it a priority to do all of these things for us. I hated never having sugar cereal like the rest of my friends, and the sugarless peanut butter was embarrassing when I’d have people overnight. But I appreciate it now. She was (and still is) an amazing mother. I can’t imagine my life without her. She even had a recipe for homemade play dough- we never had the real stuff.
But back to the strange foods she’d feed us… along with the eggplant parmesan (I still hate eggplant) and meatless meatballs, she has some really great recipes- like rhubarb jam, rhubarb relish, rhubarb cake (yes, we also had a rhubarb supply on our property), mustard pickles, zucchini bread, pizza dough, chocolate chip cookies and brown bread.
I was thinking about all of this while I was making a loaf (which should have been two loaves) of zucchini bread today. It’s a FANTASTIC recipe- a really moist bread that hardly tastes like zucchini at all (it’s sweet without being too sweet, and is best warm with butter), and I’ve decided to share the recipe. Here you go! [Oh, and remember I'm the one who brought you Blueberry Grunt, so you have to trust me!]
Zucchini Bread
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup oil
1.5 cup flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp powder
1/2 tsp soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup grated zucchini
Beat eggs, and add sugar and oil until well mixed. Add dry stuff and then vanilla and zucchini. Pour into one or two loaf pans (your preference- I’d probably do two pans) and bake at 350 for an hour.
