Monday, July 14, 2008

Funny Story


I'm just enjoying my first week of being home after a week-long journey with the family to Las Vegas. My husband had a business trip there, so the kids and I crashed the party since he was staying at the fabulous Mandalay Bay. We had a wonderful trip.

When we arrived home, we realized our garden had continued to grow without us. (Thank you automatic sprinkling system.) It was good to see our plants had shot up about a foot with all the warm weather. On the other hand, we were completely ambushed by zucchini. To those of you unfamiliar with LDS culture, zucchini is a long-standing joke among us since so many of us plant gardens. Zucchini, being so easy to grow, often grows much faster and larger than many of us can keep up with. Sometimes, during prime zucchini season, people just drop it off on your porch and run away, as fast as they can.

I guess being among so many non mormons during my week in Las Vegas, I decided to be very domestic and do something with some of our zucchini. I started searching our recipe books for a nice zucchini bread or cake or something. After finding a recipe that did not call for lard, shortening, or cardamon, because I didn't have any, nor ever will I, I settled down to make some zucchini bread.

This is how it went: I first grated some of my zucchini. I cut a few strips and ran them through my food processor. I was having so much fun that before I knew it, I had four cups' worth. The recipe only called for two. The zucchini I had cut in to was only half gone! So now I had to decide whether I was going to make a cake and some bread or just double the bread recipe. Since it is the middle of summer and to keep my kitchen cooler, I decided to just double the bread -- I could bake it at the same time. Looking back on that decision now, it may not have been completely smart. Most LDS recipes already make a pretty big batch for our larger than average families.

Before I knew it I was trying to fit six cups of flour, six eggs, four cups of zucchini into my Kitchen Aid. In the meanwhile, my 18 month old daughter came up and tapped on my legs. I picked her up, so she could see what I was doing. I went to the refrigerator for some brown sugar. Jacey started having a tantrum over the pickles, so I got out the pickle jar and gave her a pickle. She toddled off to squish the pickle into the living room carpet. Meanwhile, I looked back in the fridge and really could not remember what I was looking for. I had to walk back over to the mixer and re-read the recipe to find the ingredient I was searching the fridge for. I call that mommy-induced alzheimer's. I figure it will go away shortly before the real kind kicks in. After holding my breath and squishing that brown sugar in there, I got it all mixed. Then I remembered that a lot of good zucchini bread has chocolate chips in it. I'm all for that, so I headed to the pantry for some chocolate chips. Thinking that one unhealthy turn deserves another, I snagged several Cheetos puffs before heading back to the mixer to add the chocolate. That wasn't Body For Life approved. Oh well. The recipe didn't call for the chocolate -- it's just something to help wash down the zucchini taste. I wasn't sure how much to add, so I just poured. After a few shakes, the batter looked more like chocolate chip cookies than bread, so I added a few more shakes.

Finally, I was ready to pour the batter into bread pans. After pushing aside muffin pans, mini muffin pans, some kind of bear molds?, and several cake pans, I found the bread pans. I only have three, but I figure I was pretty good at squishing the batter in the mixing bowl... Nope, I'm going to have to figure something else out. Pushing those muffin pans to the side actually had a good side effect. Now I can have zucchini bread and muffins -- more neighbors to torment! Won't that be great? Now when I'm dropping all this off at unsuspecting neighbors's houses, I can leave some single portion little loaves! Perfect! It all came out of the oven perfectly -- well it looked a little squished. Total zucchini down -- 1/2 of one!!! Zucchini to go -- about two dozenand a half or so. Oh well, I guess I'll get out my chocolate chips!

2 comments:

Hali said...

Ha ha! I had forgotten what a serious nut you are. (And that's NOT easily done my friend!)

The bread sounds yummy...and the chocolate chips and Cheetos sound even better ;).

Glad you successfully made your way in to the blogging world---momnesia and all.

Take care!

Jana said...

I'm totally blog stalking, but I love this story. We have had the same problem. I'm sure we will all hate zucchini by the time the summer is over!