My day(s) in the kitchen…and studio.

It started on Saturday when my friend Julia (no blog) gave me these two beauties, freshly picked from her garden.

Initially, it was my intention to make a zucchini bread with one and a stuffed zucchini with the other.  Unfortunately, neither was large enough for stuffing so I decided to improvise as you’ll see below.

I don’t recall where I got this recipe for zucchini bread but I can assure you, it’s yummy.  If you’d like to give it a try, you can find the recipe below.

I like to gather all the ingredients first.

I shredded one of the zucchinis and found that I’ll have enough to make 6 loaves.  This particular recipe makes two loaves so I took what I needed and divided the rest to freeze.

Ta da!  The best tasting zucchini bread you’ll ever taste…and moist too!

Give it a try, you won’t be disappointed.

Zucchini Bread

3 C flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

3 tsp cinnamon

3 large eggs

1 C vegetable oil

2 1/4 C white sugar

3 tsp vanilla extract

2 C grated zucchini

1 C chopped walnuts

1 C golden raisins

1. Grease and flour two 8” x 4” loaf pans.  Preheat oven to 325F.

2. Sift flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda and cinnamon together in a bowl.

3. Beat eggs, oil, vanilla and sugar together in a large bowl.  Add sifted dry ingredients to the creamed mixture and beat well.  Stir in zucchini, nuts and raisins until well combined.  Pour batter into prepared pans.

4. Bake for 40-60 minutes or until tester in center comes out clean.  Cool in pans on rack for 20 minutes.  Remove from pan and allow to cool.

Note: If you use glass loaf pans as I did, it increases the cooking time by 30 minutes.

While the zucchini loaves were baking, I decided to check out some of my favorite blogs.  Lo and behold, Stephanie from Loft Creations posted a recipe today for crock pot apple sauce. 

I’d never heard of apple sauce made in a crock pot and after reading the directions, I decided to give it a whirl.  It just so happens that I bought a basket of apples at our local farmer’s market on Saturday.

Once again, I gathered all the ingredients…

then peeled the apples…

and cored them.

I saved the peels and cores to give to Rhoda, Ruby and Roxanne…our three Rhode Island Red hens…to give them as a snack when I go out to the barn to collect their eggs.

It took about 20 minutes of prep time.

While the apples were stewing, the aroma was intoxicating.

An hour and a half later… voila!  Fresh, yummy applesauce! 

Guess what’s going on my toast tomorrow morning?

If you’d like the recipe, just click on the link to Stephanie’s blog highlighted in red above.

While the loaves and applesauce were cooking, I made a meat-based tomato sauce.  The dish on the left has thickly sliced zucchini in the bottom topped with the sauce.   I saved some of the meat mixture for the stuffed green peppers on the right and then topped them with the tomato sauce.

Dinner is ready!  And for dessert…

this pumpkin pie that I made yesterday.

And just so this post is not entirely about food, believe it or not, I did manage to get some cutting and piecing done yesterday. I signed up for a mini quilt swap on Kathleen Tracy’s Small Quilt Talk board and thought that I’d get a jump start on it. 

The top is done and now comes my favorite part…the hand quilting…which I’m hoping to start tomorrow.

I probably should have spent the last two days working outdoors because the skies have been blue and sunny with record temperatures in the high 70’s and low 80’s.  Oh well, there’s always tomorrow…right?    *wink*