zucchini – Culinary Cents – A Frugal Foodie Lifestyle Blog

Zucchini Muffins

Well, after two glorious weeks of summer holidays, it is back to work tomorrow for this girl 🙁 The past two weeks have been jam-packed with activities – our 2 year wedding anniversary, a Rider game, a comedy show, lots of cleaning and purging, and lots and lots of nesting. The baby’s nursery is pretty much completed, and most of the major baby purchases have been made. But as I’m sitting here on this Sunday afternoon, I feel like there are so many things that I haven’t tackled yet! Oh well, it’s too late to start on anything now. After I finish this post, I plan on sitting on the deck with a good book and soaking up some sun!

Actually, there’s one more thing I should do first. I have one lone zucchini left in my fridge and I should probably do something about that. I could do another loaf of zucchini bread , but let’s do zucchini muffins instead. It’ll be quicker to grab a muffin and pack it as a snack for the work week. My one lonely zucchini made exactly 1 1/2 cups grated, so this recipe is modified for 1 1/2 cups of grated zucchini. I was able to make 9 muffins out of this.

Hope everyone has a great work week, and for those still on vacation…I’m so jealous!

Zucchini Muffins

Print Recipe

Serves: 9 muffins Cooking Time: 30 mins

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups grated zucchini
1/3 cup melted unsalted butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg, beaten
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. In a large bowl, combine the sugar, egg, and vanilla. Stir in the grated zucchini and then the melted butter. I just used my whisk for all of this.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, salt and nutmeg. Add these dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and whisk well together.

Prep your muffin tin with baking cups, and fill each cup with the muffin dough.

Bake the muffins for about 25 minutes. Test with a toothpick (or wooden chopstick!) to make sure the centre of the muffins are done.

Cool for about 15 minutes and enjoy!

August 21, 2016 By Elizabeth Nguyen

Canadian Recipes/ Featured

Quick and Easy Zucchini Bread

Well, it’s that time of year again when everyone has an abundance of zucchini in their fridges and no idea what to do with them. Either you’re finding that your own harvest of zucchinis is out of control or your neighbours are secretly dropping off their excess on your doorstep. As for me, I order an organic bin of produce every week from Body Fuel Organics and we got two big organic zucchinis in our bin this past week.

I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t really care for zucchinis in a savoury dish. I’ve tried to roast them, sauté them, bread them and fry them, and I still find them to be bland and unimaginative. So what’s a girl to do in this situation? Bake them into some sort of pastry or sweet treat, of course!

Usually, I will use my zucchini in some sort of ultra sweet dessert, like brownies or chocolate cupcakes. However, my husband has some sort of superpower where he can tell when a dessert is somewhat healthy and not a “real dessert”, in his words. He is always able to tell when my double chocolate brownies contain zucchini, or when my chocolate cupcakes is made with quinoa instead of flour. And once he senses that it’s a ‘healthy’ dessert, he will refuse to eat it. So this time around, I decided no more trickery. I am going to bake a zucchini bread, and I am not going to disguise it with chocolate or fudge icing or chocolate chips or anything. It is going to unashamedly be a straight-up zucchini bread. And what do you know? The picky husband liked it! Granted, I had to smear a pat of butter on his slice to make it more manly, but he liked it and promised to help me eat all of it. In his words, “It tastes like banana bread but with zucchinis. You should make banana bread next!”. (*sigh*) So stay tuned for a banana bread recipe soon, I guess.

My favourite part about this recipe is that you only dirty up one bowl! I hate recipes where there are multiple mixing bowls required. Although I love cooking, I detest cleaning up after myself.

Give this recipe a try and let me know what you think. And if anyone has any good savoury recipes that uses zucchini, I would love to hear it!

Quick and Easy Zucchini Bread

Print Recipe

Serves: Makes 1 loaf Cooking Time: 1 hour, plus prep time

Ingredients

2 small eggs, beaten
1 cup sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup grated zucchini
1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking sod
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
Optional: adding some chopped nuts to this would give it some extra texture. I just didn't have any kicking around.

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Peel the zucchini and then grate into small slivers. I just used my cheese grater, on the side with the biggest holes.

Add grated zucchini and all other ingredients into a big bowl. Mix until well blended. (I used my hand mixer)

Pour into a greased and lightly floured bread pan.

Bake for an hour at 350 degrees. Use a toothpick to determine if it is fully cooked. When you stick a toothpick into the middle of the loaf and it comes out clean, it is done. (Side note on how Asian I am: I usually don't have toothpicks kicking around, so I use a wooden chopstick. Works just as good!).

Remove from oven and let cool before removing from bread pan.

August 18, 2016 By Elizabeth Nguyen