For his birthday, Sweetie Pea got the Stride-to-Ride Dino by Fisher Price, and he's been tentatively checking it out ever since. Well, yesterday he got the hang of it in a BIG way and today? Today he's a pro. Check out this big walking man:
He's been pushing the dino around for like hours on end and he gets very mad when you try and interest him in something else. As in, go totally limp and shriek mad. Ok, ok, here's your dino back. Go to town. Independent walking is just around the corner, I think!
On another note, after a day of much-needed rain, our garden went bizerk.
And so it begins.
Now, I love zucchini, but after awhile I do struggle to figure out how to use it all up. You can only make so many loaves of zucchini bread. So this year I thought I'd try pickling it. If there's anything I love more than zucchini, it's pickles, so I have high hopes for this little experiment. But I'm completely open to other ideas - do you have any? What are your favorite things to make with zucchini? I'd like to try zucchini parm but I am against cooking anything parm at this stage of my life. No way would Sweets entertain himself through all that slicing, flour-dredging, egg-dipping, breadcrumb-coating, frying and baking. So if you have a secret (or not so secret) family (or internet) recipe that calls for zucchini, please share!
We froze a ton of ours last summer (and will this summer) and used it for bread and chocolate zucchini cake all year long. It was so nice to pull it out of the freezer and whip up a loaf of bread in the middle of winter. I just shredded it in the food processor, tossed the amount needed for bread in a ziplock, labeled it and tossed it in the freezer. The same thing, but larger quantities for chocolate zucchini cake (if it has zucchini in it, it must be good for you, right?)! When I took it out of the freezer, I cut a tiny hole in the corner of the bag and drained out a little bit of the water after it was done defrosting. Just don't get rid of all the water, otherwise the bread/cake won't turn out as moist as with fresh zucchini.
ReplyDeleteOh! I should also mention that we do NOT have a large freezer and freeze bags upon bags of berries, too...but the bags of shredded zucchini barely take up any room, so no need to worry about taking up too much precious freezer space.
ReplyDeleteFantastic idea - why haven't I thought of this before? We've been talking about getting a chest freezer for our basement forever, we just haven't gotten around to it. Surely would help with all the summer surplus!
ReplyDeleteWe would LOVE a chest freezer...but we don't have a garage or basement so I have no idea where the heck we would put it! We're going to have about a bazillion green beans to freeze, I'm hoping I can do some creative freezer organizing!
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