Home made Zucchini Muffins

We recently harvested our first zucchini and decided to make a batch of zucchini muffins. It turned out to be a lot easier than making pumpkin bread and they are just as delicious. I will post the recipe and pictures of the process, but first I have some news. I have now lost count of the chili peppers and snow peas, so I will no longer be updating them on the scorecard. We've started to harvest the corn, and despite a couple of hungry, hungry caterpillars most of the ears are turning out great. We've also started harvesting squash, onions and bell peppers. Unfortunately our pumpkin patch has come under attack by a fungus. I will go into it more in my next post. Here is the recipe for zucchini muffins.

1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla
2/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups grated zucchini
5 1/3 tablespoons (or 1/3 cup) butter
1 1/4 tsp. baking soda
pinch of salt
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg

First, cut the end of the zucchini off and cut out the seeds. The seeds can be left in but I chose to remove them.

 

After the zucchini is cleaned out it needs to be grated with a cheese grater.

Once the zucchini is grated the rest of the ingredients can be mixed together. I mixed the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, nutmeg, and cinnamon) together first.

Then I added the egg (beaten first), vanilla, butter (melted in the microwave first) and zucchini, and mixed everything together.

 

Once all of the ingredients are mixed the batter can be put in a muffin pan and cooked in the oven at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes.

Home made pumpkin bread

I baked two loaves of pumpkin bread today with the pumpkin that I harvested on Friday. I opted to bake bread rather than pie because it seems a lot easier and required less ingredients. It probably took a total of three hours to make, but only because we could not microwave the entire pumpkin at once, and we could only bake one loaf of bread at a time (we only had one pan). The recipe that I used came from Pumpkin Patches and More, which is a great site for pumpkin recipes.

This is how to make pumpkin bread with a real pumpkin.

To make pumpkin bread you need a pumpkin, eggs, flour, baking soda, allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, sugar, water, and vegetable oil.


1. First, you will have to make pumpkin puree. Cut open and clean all of the seeds and guts out of the pumpkin.



2. Once the pumpkin is cleaned out you need to put it in a microwaveable bowl with some water and microwave it for about 20 minutes.


3. It is done when the pumpkin has become soft and peals off of the skin. Now you need to remove all of the skin and mash or blend the pumpkin into a puree.



4. Now that the puree is done you can actually make the bread. Mix the flour, sugar, baking soda, nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice and salt. Than add the oil, water, pumpkin and eggs and blend everything together.




5. Pour the blend into a 9x5 baking pan and bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour.



6. Once the hour is up you will have a delicious loaf of pumpkin bread. Our pumpkin produced enough puree that we are going to make another four loaves of bread. The extra puree can be frozen for later use.


Here is the finished product.

Bountiful Harvest Part 2

We just had the most diverse harvest of the summer. We harvested about 15 pea pods, a banana pepper, 14 jalapeno peppers, 17 chili peppers, an onion, a squash and a pumpkin!


Also, I'm not going to follow the schedule I made because I can't follow it and it would be too boring. Instead, I'm going to make pumpkin pie on Sunday so look forward to seeing the result.

Squash, zucchini, angry peppers and a pumpkin

We have a huge zucchini thats almost ripe, as well as a few squash. I didn't take any pictures of the cucumbers or onion because they aren't that interesting. However, I took a picture of some angry looking peppers and one of the pumpkins.
Zucchini

Squash

Peppers

Pumpkin

Panoramas, Peas and daily specials

I've made the beginnings of a panorama of the garden. I'll have the completed image soon.


We picked another handful of peas as well.



I'm going to start blogging about one vegetable each day. Here is a preliminary schedule.

Sunday: Pumpkin
Monday: Chili, Jalapeno and Bell peppers
Tuesday: Green Beans and Snow Peas
Wednesday: Corn
Thursday: Squash, Zucchini, Cucumbers and Onions
Friday: Eggplant and Banana peppers
Saturday: No post. This will be a day of mourning for the tomatoes.

Tomorrow is Wednesday so I'll show you the corn. Here is a preview.


Also, the cows are being moved across the field behind our house.

The Vegetable Garden Begins

Here are pictures of the garden from the beginning of June, July and August. I should have done this as one of the first posts so you could see how the whole garden looked. I'm going to try to make each set of images a panorama so they are easier to view but this is what I have for now.

June:





July:



August:

Bountiful Harvest

We just harvested 23 pea pods from the garden. That puts the total at over 40. Lately it seems like everything is in abundance. Here is a picture of the snow peas.

This is a picture of our second eggplant, some chili peppers, cucumbers, snow peas, the tomatoes that we managed to salvage from the garden and a chopped up banana pepper.