Zucchini Bread

Thursdays are our pick-up day from our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture group- find one near you here!). This is our second year with Hawthorne Valley Farm, and we love them. The produce is delicious (the best we've had since leaving California), healthy and abundant. Did I mention abundant? I'll probably start listing our weekly inventory here- it's pretty amazing. In addition to all the social and political benefits of eating local and supporting small farms, CSA's have the added benefit of ensuring that you are eating lots of veggies, cause they just keep coming, every week, and you've already paid for them.

Right now, we're seeing a lot of zucchini. In addition to the zucchini we got from the CSA last week our neighbors gifted us with several large ones as well. We've eaten a lot of zucchini this week, and yet on Wednesday night I had 3 good sized zucchini in my fridge and was staring down the barrel of MORE zucchini arriving the next day. I suppose I could have grilled some up as a tasty side dish to our dinner (arugala, white bean and red pepper salad with sausage and onions), but instead I decided to bake zucchini bread.

I trust Cook's Illustrated for nealry all things food related, unless I already know better myself. This was not one of those occasions, so I pulled out my trusty (and enormous) Best Recipe cookbook. I grated, drained, and squeezed the excess water out of 2 pounds of zucchini (I figured I may as well bake two loaves, thus using up all my current zucchini and only turning my oven on for the same amount of time). As I was mixing the dry ingredients I started to remember doing the same thing the previous summer. And I seemed to recall that Robert had found the Cook's recipe, the very one I was about to make 2 loaves of, bland and boring. In fairness it is a pretty bland recipe, but they claim it's something like "bright and relatively light" (yes, definitely relatively, as it calls for 6 T of butter per loaf!). At any rate, I didn't want to bake bland zucchini bread, so I threw caution to the wind, ignored Cook's advice, added a touch of cinnamon to the batter, and sprinkled the tops of the loaves with a cinnamon/sugar/nutmeg combo. They just came out of the oven, and they smell awesome. Stay tuned for a full review...