Who wants a zucchini??!!!

Every year, right about now, I am confronted with zucchini.  It is everywhere!!  I feel like Oprah…..”You get a zucchini” and “You get a zucchini”……”EVERYONE GETS A ZUCCHINI!!!!!!!”

The first year of our garden we planted like 12 zucchini plants.  Let’s just say, we did not know what we were doing.  Consequently, we had zucchini coming out of our ears!!!  We have scaled back each year and this year, I thought we are only doing 4 zucchini plants……..Still too many……..  My husband is always worried about one dying off or not producing.  Then we won’t get any zucchini, so we need backups………But they always grow so well and produce more zucchini than I know what to do with so………Yeah we don’t need any backups.

This morning the girls and I shredded 10 big zucchini.  I am talking baseball bat zucchini.  This is not the first time we have shredded zucchini this year but thank goodness for the food processor!!  Hailey was shredding, Mikayla was bagging and I was cutting the middles out and peeling them.  We were actually quite efficient and the girls did a great job of helping.  But we shred them up because one of the things we make is zucchini chocolate chip muffins, all year round.  They are a great breakfast and a great snack after school.  I have adapted the recipe from an old church lady cookbook my mom gave me.  But I figure if I can sneak a vegetable into a muffin and my kids eat it, it is probably a win.  Here is the recipe I use…… 

The other thing we like to do with zucchini is to make parmesan zucchini crisps or spears.  We do this when the zucchini is not so big or seedy.  Like a lot of my ideas with zucchini and tomatoes, there is not really a recipe for this.  I cut up the zucchini in discs or spears.  I mix together some parmesan cheese, Italian seasoning, salt and pepper.  However much your family likes for seasoning.  Preheat the oven to 350°.  Put some olive oil on the zucchini and then top it with the parmesan cheese mixture.  Bake it for about 15 minutes or until it is tender.  The crisps actually get a little bit more “crisp” and you can add bread crumbs if you would like them to be even more crispy.  My Food Network watching tells me you might also want to do an egg wash to help the bread crumbs stick.

Challenge Time!!  What do you do with your extra zucchini??  What recipes can you share??  If anyone else out there is like me, you probably have extra zucchini.  You can post your comments here or on our Facebook page, Speaking Jelinese.  As always, hitting those sharing buttons helps promote the post, site and community.  We are all just trying to build some healthy balance in our lives!!

Talk to you soon!!

Angie