My (Sad) Green Thumb
If you ask anyone in my family, they’ll be the first to tell you not to buy me any sort of flowers or house plants. I will definitely kill them——I really do have good intentions, but I do NOT have a green thumb in any way, shape or form. Not a huge deal——my husband planted low maintenance perennials all around the house so that I literally don’t have to touch them. If there are flowers in the house, they’re fairly cheap ones that we all have come to an understanding they will die as soon as the initial vase water fill up dries up. Anything that does require any sort of watering, like the hanging flower baskets on the porch during the summertime, have come under the care of my husband. The way I see it, I keep 4 young children alive and well every day—-you can’t expect me to also take care of plants.
Where this very sad fact about myself comes into play is that every summer, I suddenly think I’ll have a vegetable garden. Not just a vegetable garden, but like a HUGE vegetable garden...with rows and rows of vegetables that I can feed my whole family with all summer. I have big dreams of having meticulously manicured garden full of all sorts of vegetables like I did when I was growing up——asparagus, pole beans, peppers, potatoes, rhubarb, broccoli, carrots, eggplant, and of course, zucchini. I would argue, one of…if not the most versatile vegetable of all time. And every summer, my dreams are pretty quickly crushed and I’m pushed back into reality when I remember that I can’t keep a plant alive to save my life. And since my family is also well aware of this, my wonderful dad built me raised garden bed that I could put into my yard that would require little to no maintenance—-probably more so for my kids to experience trying to grow a plant because he already knew I wasn’t capable.
The planter really is the perfect size. I can put a few different vegetables in, with no weeds, and (at least in my head) vegetables would magically grow, I’d have a bountiful crop and cook with the food that I grew. And that’s kind of what happened. Except the one thing that I wasn’t banking on is that the zucchini plant gorw at rapid speed and would look like it came from the little shop of horrors. This thing honestly took over——the leaves became so big that there wasn’t enough sunlight for the other plants that I had put in there, which started to quickly kill them off. So once again, even if I didn’t directly kill all my plants and the psychotic zucchini plant choked the others out, I still managed to end up without vegetables. That is except for those freaking zucchini.
So what does one do with a family of 6, trying to stay on some sort of a food budget, when you have 10,000 zucchini that look like they’ve been pumped full of miracle grow? You look for all the zucchini recipes that you can find and get to work.
I could list off a handful of the things that I’ve made so far——but it’ll start to sound like that scene from Forrest Gump where Bubba starts talking about Shrimp. I’ve sauteed zucchini, grilled zucchini, zucchini on kabobs, zucchini fritters, zucchini boats. Most of these meals have been met with rolling eyes from my kids (sometimes my husband, too). And I’ll admit it’s getting a bit old to have it included with every other dinner. But have no fear——I’m not wasting these suckers. I had an ace up my sleeve. There was one recipe that I had come across and knew I needed to try. When I made it I was met with smiles and requests for more. Double chocolate zucchini muffins. Go figure——cover a vegetable in chocolate and of course everyone will love it.
It’s another Sally’s Baking Addiction success, this time Double-Chocolate Zucchini Bread baked perfectly into muffins. I used the King Arthur 1:1 Gluten-Free All -Purpose flour for this recipe. I didn’t have Greek yogurt on hand, but she mentioned that you could use sour cream so I also opted for that. Because there was so much fat (the sour cream, oil, and eggs) and moisture from the zucchini, I took a chance and didn’t let the batter sit 30 minutes prior to baking like a do a lot of other gluten-free items I baked. That chance paid off, because these were delicious! Definitely something I’ll be baking again——and probably freezing a batch or two so that I can enjoy all of that zucchini goodness all year long (plus I have to still use up my never-ending supply). So that when I have a craving for a muffin this winter and pull one of these suckers out of the freezer, I’ll remember that one time I didn’t kill a plant——in fact, it flourished. Clearly zucchini plants are some sort of freaky, immortal plant, but they sure do make delicious muffins.