Gimme a Z!

So we've been doing a garden-type thing this year, and yesterday Genie came into the house with the most ginormous zucchini I've seen in a long time. The thing must've been eight feet long....well, maybe a little under two, but still...it was big! Now, what's the first thing that people tend to do with zucchini? That's right: figure out who they can give it to.

I'm not sure when zucchini became equated with gift-giving, or why the initiator of said tradition felt that their recipient would look upon such a gift the same way that they would an antique wall clock. Call me crazy, but I don't see "Give the gift of zucchini" going very far as a marketing slogan, although it probably has a slight edge on "Nothing says 'I love you' like a zucchini." (More like "Nothing says 'I don't know what to do with it, either' .....")

Granted, there are those souls in this world who just love the stuff, whether on its own or mixed with other assorted veggies, and in all sincerity, I'm very happy for the five of you. However, the rest of us have had to come up with all sorts of creative ways to ingest the copious quantities of zucchini that are grown each year. Along that line, I'd like to share just two examples of such culinary zucchini creativity...

Soup
Some time in my youth (I believe), my mother was doing what many moms have come to develop into quite a skill: the art and science of collecting various ingredients that happen to be hanging around the kitchen and turning them into soup. In this particular instance, she decided to include zucchini in the invention, along with star-shaped pasta, blended tomatoes, Worchestershire sauce, golden mushroom soup, and assorted spices (I'd be happy to pass along the full recipe to anyone who asks). I don't know if I was the first to taste the result, or if it was simply my outcry of, "Oh, mother...this is the most wonderful soup that has ever crossed my taste buds!", but the invention was shortly thereafter added to the collection of official family recipes, and labeled as "Justin's Favorite Soup". Mom put together a notebook of family recipes not long after Genie and I were married, and I was pleased to see said soup included. We just had some not too long ago, in fact, and it brought back a plethora of memories.

Bread
About as curious as the origin of zucchini gift-giving is the origin of the idea to shred the stuff, mix it with a sweet bread dough, and bake it in the oven. I have a hunch that it was the invention of a mother who could find no other way to get her younguns to eat their veggies. Come to think of it, she's probably the same woman who came up with carrot cake. Whoever she (or he) may have been, all I can say is this: THANK YOU! I recall the first time my mother offered me some zucchini bread, although I don't recall if I was told up front that it contained a shredded squash, or if I was allowed to taste it first before the truth was told. I do know, however, that I was instantly hooked.

So when Genie introduced me to our monster zucchini, I had two answers in my mind to the perpetual "what do we do with it" question. The first we'd already partaken of in the recent past (and even in the not so recent past), but the second I hadn't had in a LONG time. In fact, we hadn't made any zucchini bread of our own since we got married. That, my friends, was an oversight that had to be corrected as soon as possible.

And for making the suggestion, guess who got to shred the whole thing? Yeah......

Anyway, we made four loaves today, with enough zucchini left to easily make another eight. Of those first four, we have less than half of one left. No, we're not complete zucchini bread pigs. Three of the loaves were given away. While zucchini on its own is a questionable gift (in my mind, at least), zucchini bread beats an antique wall clock any day.