A Week of Zucchini Dishes

or The Vegetable That Keeps Giving and Giving 

or Today's Equivalent of the Loaves and Fishes--Zucchini

Our zucchini with tomato for comparison

Recently, Aunt Martha gave us a zucchini from her garden. It was one of those that somehow got hidden and grew to almost the size of a baseball bat before it was found and harvested. Our goal last week was to eat it until it was gone. We knew it was big, but didn't think that we would be able to cook it in five different dishes before we saw the last of it. But we did. Below are our results with links to the recipes we used.

 
Day One: Zucchini Patties
We were having salmon cakes this day so it seemed like a natural accompaniment.  The cakes were basically pan fried shredded zucchini and bread crumbs. Everyone liked the taste, but Theo and I weren't crazy about the texture. I thought they were a little gooey from too many bread crumbs, and Theo didn't like the stringiness of the shredded zucchini. I got a tip for this recipe from the Frugal Girl.  



Day Two: Zucchini and Cheese Casserole
This has been a favorite recipe in our family for many years and is a favorite of guests.  It is a baked casserole containing zucchini chunks, eggs, cottage and shredded cheese topped with bread crumbs. I usually add another vegetable like broccoli or asparagus to give it more flavor. This recipe comes from Jane Brody's Good Food Book.


Day Three: Hearty Tuna Casserole
This recipe was given to us a few years ago from a friend when were trying to find new ways to cook zucchini. We make other tuna casseroles, but this is my favorite. The dish contains the standards for a tuna casserole including noodles, tuna, sour cream, and shredded cheese. However, there are layers of zucchini slices in it as well as diced tomatoes on the top. We leave out the mustard and green onions as a favor to Ward and still find it very tasty. A word of warning: the zucchini and celery take far longer to cook than the 30 minutes allotted for the casserole. We cook them a little before we add them to the dish so it doesn't take forever to bake.



Day Four: Oatmeal Zucchini Bread
For years, I have been carrying around this recipe for zucchini bread that included cooked oatmeal. Last week, I finally made it. The bread was very good but was dense and gooey. This may have been because the recipe called for three eggs and I only had two. I read somewhere on the internet that you can substitute milk for an egg and you will never know the difference. Well, I think we knew the difference. However, the four loaves disappeared in less than 24 hours.


Day Five: Continental Zucchini
 As we were brain storming about what we were going to do with the last of the zucchini, Ward remembered a dish he had as a child-- continental zucchini. This dish is stir fried zucchini and garlic with corn and pimentos added. The whole thing is topped with melted mozzarella cheese. When we made it, we also added some yellow squash that we had. Everyone liked this dish. However, Ward thought it could use black pepper. Also, this dish would lend itself well to the addition of sweet or hot peppers We may try that next time.

Zucchini dishes from last week.

I Spy Green

Can You Find:

1. Wally's Pog Container

2. The watering can that we recovered from someone's trash.

3. A great book by a humorous British author

4. The fire extinguisher that is by our wood stove

5. My new garden gloves

6. One of our grocery bags

7. Ward's new drill

8. Socks that were knit for me as a Christmas present

9. Ward's lunch box that has yogurt in it most days

10. The calculator that no longer works

11. My go-to book on perennials 

Thankful Sunday--July 29, 2012

I am thankful that we have a working air conditioner during these very hot days.

Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions--July 27, 2012

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money.

Also, I am using this public forum to encourage us to eat out less which includes better meal planning.

This Week's Food Waste

Apparently, this sour cream wasn't done souring or growing mold for that matter. There was only a little left, but I had plans for it--big plans. But it had plans of its own--growing mold, so away it went.

This Week's True Food Confessions

Look, we cooked!

Despite the fact that this week contained National Drive Thru Day, we had a pretty good week. We only ate out one time as a family and that was for a special occasion. Wally and Theodore just visited their favorite drive thru three times--a big improvement.

Since we didn't eat out much, that means that we did eat at home. Zucchini was the ingredient of the week, and we had it in four different dishes. (A post is coming about our zucchini cooking when we finally finish it all.) Also, we had a family meeting to establish a better schedule for meals at home. We're hoping that will help.

Next week, we still need our menu plan which will probably come from the freezer because it's getting a little messy in there. That's my favorite kind of planning-creating with what is on hand. I'll let you know how it goes.

Potato Chip Comparison

Or Playing with My Food Again 

A few months ago, we took a family outing that included a tour of a potato chip factory. We learned a lot of interesting things, but what fascinated me the most was that they match the potato size to the bag size they will go into. Meaning, that big potatoes are sorted, sliced and cooked to go into big bags and the small potatoes are sorted, sliced and cooked to go into small bags. Recently, I thought about it again and decided I wanted to check out this claim. Or maybe I just wanted a good excuse to buy chips, but nevertheless, I did a completely unscientific observation to see if the factory claim was true.

I had a very small sample size of one large bag and one small bag of potato chips. Realizing even big potatoes can have small slices on their ends, I decided to pick out the five largest and five smallest chips in each bag. What did I find? The big bag had bigger chips and the smaller bag had smaller chips. By golly, the tour info was right.

Now onto the next question. Can I keep from eating all of the chips tonight? We'll see. There's nothing like a fresh potato chip. You can't eat just one.

But wait there's more!
What you see on the big bag plate is 1/2 of a serving size. The 1/2 serving size has 70 calories, 3.3 grams of fat, and 60 mg of sodium. But the important part is that it has 5% of your daily recommended dose of Vitamin C. Now that's good news. Eat up.

A Second Look--July 25, 2012

Despite the heat, we had a new color of day lily blooming this week. Also, a rain from a couple of days ago, brought out a crop of various kinds of fungi.  The finches and cardinals have been steady visitors to our feeder, but the most excitement this week was caused by a baby rabbit. It got stuck in one of our basement window wells and had to be rescued by Wally. In the meantime, the cats were going crazy from the inside watching the bunny trying to jump out. I am happy to report that all was well in the end for all parties involved.

Here's what I saw this week during a Second Look.

The rescued baby bunny

Marigolds

Fungus

Two female house finches. One leaving the feeder and one coming to the feeder.

Celosia

Another color of day lily blooming

Deer and fox jaw bones

I Spy Yellow

Can You Find:

1. Ward's lumber sorting system made from cat litter buckets

2.  A squash from Uncle Billy's garden.

3. What Ward and I have for breakfast most mornings.

4. The exercise ball that is used more as a foot rest than for exercising.

5. The burro from Guatemala.

6. The flashlight that Theo keeps beside his bed in case of emergency.

7. My favorite topping, along with onions, for a hot dog.

8.  Maryland's state flower.

9. Currently, our favorite cookbook.

10. A hot wheels car that Wally used to race across the floor.

Visiting a Museum

Yesterday, we visited the Appalachian Trail Museum in Pine Grove Furnace State Park, Pennsylvania. It is a small museum that focuses on key people in the history of the Appalachian Trail. Even in this small, limited-topic museum, the different viewing styles of my family were evident loud and clear.

Ward is a reader. He reads and studies each and every item thoroughly. Wally is a talker. He looks at the exhibits until he can find someone to talk to. Theodore is a waiter. He skims the exhibits and then waits until the others finish. What I style am I? I'd like to say that I'm the perfect blend of all three, but you'll have to ask my family to be sure.

What is your style?

Thankful Sunday--July 22, 2012

I am thankful that Ward had a good backpacking trip in Yosemite National Park and is home again safe and sound.

A Few Sights From His Trip.

Typical dusty trail

Lower Lake Ottoway

Red Peak Pass

Nevada Falls

Vernal Falls

Home again.

Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money.

Also, I am using this public forum to encourage us to eat out less which includes better meal planning. 

This Weeks Food Waste 

No waste this week, or at least that's what I say. However, my friend says that I wasted an egg on my frying-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk experiment. (Did I mention that it's really hot here?) I consider the egg part of my entertainment budget, and pretty cheap entertainment at that. 

This Weeks True Food Confessions

Some of the cooking that we did this week.

Now onto how we did this week with our efforts to eat at home. We did well. The only time someone ate out was when Wally and Theodore had breakfast at the local diner while they were waiting on the car to be fixed. Our success can attributed to our menu plan and our determination. We found it hard to not stop somewhere on the way home from work when we were tired and hungry, but we didn't.
 

Grilled cheese and sauteed kale. This was tasty.

Of the things we cooked this week, there was an old favorite and a new favorite. Our old favorite was meat loaf based on the recipe from Quaker Oats box. Our new favorite was a grilled cheese sandwich based on a recipe from Cook This, Not That! by David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding. The sandwich included dijon mustard, bacon, granny smith apples, and cheddar cheese. We will definitely have these again.

Next week still needs a menu. There can be a few carryovers from this week and hopefully, those will get us through until there's time to work on one. See you next week for the next installment of True Food Confessions.

Egg Frying--Part Two

You may remember that a couple weeks ago, we tried to fry an egg on our driveway to test the old saying, "It was so hot, you could fry an egg on the sidewalk." The experiment failed. All that happened was that we got hot, and the egg dried out and attracted ants. According to the internet, we needed to supplement the blacktop and sun with foil and a magnifying glass to be successful. That was the only way we could generate enough heat to reach 158° F, the temperature needed to cook an egg.

Well, I thought we were done with our experimenting until I heard that it was Fry an Egg on the Sidewalk Day. I took that as a sign that we, Theodore and I, had to try again. We were so confident that it would work this time, Theo and I discussed whether or not we were going to try also to fry bacon to go with the egg. Well, no such luck. Even with the magnifying glass, all we got was a raw egg and really hot and sweaty.

I'm done with this experiment and I'm moving onto something else. Really. Unless we get a better magnifying glass, and heat the egg up to room temperature first, and ...

Our Second Attempt at Frying an Egg on the Driveway

A Second Look, July 18, 2012

The extreme heat was back this week along with humidity. Meaning, I spent most of my time indoors. However, I did venture out to take some pictures of butterflies because this week found the arrival of  swallowtails along with variegated fritillary. They joined the cabbage whites and skippers that have been around for awhile.

 Also, I found a monarch caterpillar. We'll see if it can turn into a butterfly before a hungry bird has a tasty snack.

See the butterflies I found this week during a Second Look.

Black Swallowtail Butterfly on Tiger Lily

Black Swallowtail Butterfly

Skipper Butterfly on Cone Flower

Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly on Tiger Lily

Flying Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly

Variegated Fritillary Butterfly

Variegated Fritillary Butterfly on Coneflower

Cabbage White Butterfly on Purple Sage

Monarch Caterpillar on Milkweed Leaf

Everything old is new again.

Recently I was looking through a box of old books and found one that caught my eye, A Paragrapher's Reveries by Mary Wilson Little. The book was published in 1904 and is full of pithy little sayings. I wasn't sure what a paragrapher was; however, I learned that it was a person who wrote paragraphs or fillers for newspapers. I also found that what I thought was an obscure book was available in many different formats and sold practically everywhere. This made reading the yellowed pages from an original copy even more interesting to me

Here are a few fillers copied from the book. Some of them may seem outdated and some of them are very applicable today over 100 years later. I'll leave it to you to decide which is which.

--The penalty of success is to be bored by the attentions of people who formerly snubbed you.

--The woman who sits up and cries because her husband is kept very late at the lodge doesn't bring him home any sooner, and only makes her nose as red as his.

--Quilting bees are going out of fashion. The women who can sew are dying of old age.

--Jack Frost makes a capital artist, but his pictures lack warmth.

--It's difficult to see why lace should be so expensive. It is mostly holes, and holes are not expensive.

--The pain caused by a bee sting can be instantly relieved by jumping in a mud puddle.

--In the trials of the canning season preserve your temper when you can.

--Happiness is the well-balanced combination of love, labor, and luck.

I Spy Blue

Can you find...

1. Freshly picked blueberries from Uncle Billy's blueberry patch.

2. My grandmother's good luck bottle.

3. A really fun memoir about the 1950's.

4. The oil that did not fix the car door squeak.

5. The natural peanut butter than no one likes.

6. One of Theodore's textbooks.

7. Bluebird eggs that have since hatched and flown away.

8. Theodore setting our flowers.

9. A cat spoon stirring squash and tomatoes from Aunt Martha.

10. Our new hydrangea.

11. The picture I didn't name.

Thankful Sunday--July 15, 2012

I am thankful that Uncle Billy has a 

bountiful garden that he shares.

The Wisdom of a Book Club...

Or eleven heads make good decisions. That is how it seems in my book club. I have been in this book club for several years now and I am always pleased with the group of books we select each year to read. This is mostly because I get exposed to a wide variety of books that I wouldn't necessarily pick on my own (or finish if I didn't have to discuss them). Upon looking at the last few years of what we have been reading, I found that my perceptions were right about our selections and variety. Every year our list includes memoirs/biographies, nonfiction, and fiction including mysteries, science fiction, and classics.

You may wonder how we come up with our reading lists. It's really quite simple. Once a year, every member nominates two books and then we vote on them. The only restrictions are based on availability and we sometimes bend those rules. That is how we get our diverse and well rounded lists. There is no plan, just the wisdom of the crowd.

The wisdom of the crowd has actually been explored extensively in a book that Wally introduced to me several years ago, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. Basically, the book examines the premise that a group can make better decisions than an individual even if that individual is an expert. A prime example of that (although not mentioned in the book) is my book club.

Maybe I'll nominate The Wisdom of Crowds for next year's reading list. We'll see if the wisdom of my group thinks that it is a good idea to read The Wisdom of Crowds.

Food Waste Friday, July 13, 2012 and True Confessions

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. 

Here it goes for this week.   

Wasted potatoes

This week I had to throw out some mashed potatoes. They may have been okay except that they were stored with meat, so didn't want to chance it. We probably made too many in the first place, so we'll try to cut back next time.






Now onto true confessions. We don't waste much food anymore with the help of our public accountability, but we have another area that we struggle with. We eat out way too much and that's not good for us nutritionally or financially. We have never been able to sustain the habit of menu planning and cooking at home for any length of time.

There are several factors contributing to this:

• Everyone has a job or school that keeps them busy.
• No one in the family likes to cook.
• Everyone in the family likes takeout food. 
• No one likes to plan menus. 
• Everyone in the family can drive. 
• No one likes to shop. 
• Everyone has money to spend.

We have tried a lot of different ideas to get us to eat at home more often realizing that planning is the key to success. We have had family meetings to plan menus. We have assigned menu planning on a rotating basis to everyone. We have subscribed to menu planning and cooking sites. We have had serious talks about the health consequences of most take out food. We have had a theme to our menu plans like Mondays are pasta days, Tuesdays are chicken days, etc. And the list goes on with Wally's planning being my favorite. He randomly opens the cookbook and then we get to choose from between the two recipes he has opened to. 

A few of our past menus.

I am going to take another stab at this and use public accountability as the new tool in my belt. So each week along with food waste, I am going to report on how we did with our menus and cooking. Maybe I'll try posting menus or describing a new recipe we tried. We'll see. Does anyone have suggestions?

Crisscrossing Sprials

Sometimes Ward and I have a "discussion" during which we are irritated with each other. We're annoyed because we can't seem to get the other one to agree with what we think is a very good point.  We "discuss" for a while until we have a light bulb moment and realize that we haven't really understood what the other is saying. It often turns out that we agree on the issue, but haven't been communicating very well. This usually happens when we bring different perspectives to the situation, but we don't realize it. It doesn't occur to us that there is any other way to look at things other than our way because it seems so obvious.

I was reminded of this recently when I was showing Ward pictures of flowers that I had taken for a Second Look. He seemed to be staring at them for a long time and I finally asked him what he was doing. He said that he was looking at the Fibonacci crisscrossing spirals in the middle of the flowers. Translated, that meant that he was seeing spirals in flowers and thinking math.  I, on the other hand, was seeing petals, leaves, and colors and thinking plants. We were looking at the exact same things, but we were seeing different things.

I hope that I remember this example the next time that Ward and I have a "discussion", and we can get to our light bulb moment sooner rather than later.

What do you see?

Note: Ward plans to do a post on just the middles of these flowers and the Fibonacci series.

A Second Look--July 11, 2012

This week there were a couple of new things blooming including tiger lilies and black-eyed susan. It seems that our black-eyed susan are never very robust, but we enjoy them all the same. Also, you may remember last week when I showed the bar soap that was supposed to deter deer that wasn't working. This week, I found a piece of it far from any flower bed and it had been partially eaten. I don't know what took the bites, but I'm guessing a fox or raccoon.

Here's what I saw this week during a Second Look.

Tiger lily

Colelus

Black-eyed susan

Day lilies

Queen anne's lace. Notice the "deer repellant" soap below it.

This piece of soap had been drug far from the flower bed and chomped on. I'm not sure by what.

Bunny enjoying some clover. We mostly see the rabbits in the early morning.