I woke up this morning dreaming about zucchini bread.  Which was uncommon. Not uncommon for me to dream about food, especially sweet things, but the uncommon in fact that I remembered a dream at all.  Unfortunately, that topic will have to wait for an upcoming post about my sleeping issues.  Stay tuned, it’s sure to be an exciting one.

After I woke up salivating for zucchini bread, I decided to make one today.  I don’t have a recipe that I love.  I remember loving my stepmom’s recipe, which she sent me a million times, which I promptly lost each and every time she sent it to me.  I found a few recipes online that look promising and decided to do what I almost always do in the kitchen…improvise.  Normally I’m cooking a meal when this happens, because changing measurements while baking doesn’t always result in something edible, but I felt lucky today.

This is what I’m calling Test recipe #1 because I’m already planning one or two more changes. I put ** next to the items I’m changing as well as an explanation.

2 cups all purpose flour
1 1/4 c whole wheat flour
1t ground nutmeg
1t cinnamon
2t baking soda
1 cup sugar
1 cup dark brown sugar (light would work too; I’m on a dark brown sugar kick)
3 eggs – room temperature (would love to cut down to 2 eggs, but I’m not sure. May try egg substitute)
**1 c vegetable oil (1/2 c oil and 1/2 cup applesauce)
1/3c water
**2 cups grated zucchini (increase to  3 cups grated zucchini)
1 t orange juice (increase to 2t OJ)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a large bowl, combine flours, salt, nutmeg, cinnamon, baking soda.
In a separate bowl combine oil, eggs, water,sugars,  zucchini and orange juice.
Mix wet ingredients into dry ingredients.
Bake in 2 standard, greased loaf pans for 1 hour or until a tester comes out clean.

Super easy.  It was so good!  I think it could use more zucchini and I’d like to replace some of the sugar with honey, and trim some fat by using applesauce.  I’ll make another batch in a few weeks with those changes and see how it compares.  I’m putting a piece in the freezer so I can do a direct taste test.

I’ll take a picture next time I’m upstairs with the camera and will update the post with it later.

Enjoy!