Wednesday, August 31, 2011

To Market, To Market

On Saturday mornings I like to shop at our local farmer's market. Most of the food is locally grown and I want to support the farmers who work so hard to provide the fresh fruit and vegetables sold there. Especially this summer with the record heat and drought that totally wiped out my garden (except maybe my sweet potatoes--haven't tried pulling them up yet).
I try to get to the market early to beat the crowds. There's a lot to choose from, but on this trip I bought flowers, lettuce, cucumbers, peaches, tomatoes and zucchini.

Last year at this time I was baking zucchini bread like crazy trying to keep up with the output of my two plants and I've missed doing that this year. So I used the zucchini and some of the blueberries we bought on our recent trip to Michigan to try a new recipe for Zucchini Blueberry Bread.
2 Cups Grated Zucchini
2 Cups Blueberries
3 eggs
3 cups flour, 1 T cinnamon, 1 tsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp baking soda
Here's the changes I made to the recipe that appears on allrecipes.com: I salted the zucchini and let it sit for about 20 minutes, then squeezed out the excess liquid. I decreased the sugar to one cup and made that half brown sugar, half white. I'd probably use a tiny bit more sugar next time because the blueberries at this time of year are a little more tart. I used 1 cup unbleached flour, 1 cup whole wheat flour and 1 cup oat flour. I didn't have applesauce on hand or I would have replaced some of the oil with that. Here's the result:
Yum!
I grate the zucchini by hand and last year I asked DH to grate it for me. He really put his muscles into it and the zucchini came out in pretty big chunks instead of the usual shreds. I should have put it on the cutting board and chopped it up a little, but I unwisely went with it as is and ended up with chunky zucchini bread.

3 comments:

Robin at The Primitive Hutch said...

Awesome pics Roberta,
I live in a very small town, we have our farmers market on Fri. nights. We try to support our local growers as well.
Your blueberry zucchini bread looks yummy! Thanks for the recipe.
Prim Blessings
Robin

Carmen and the Primcats said...

That looks really YUMMY!

I love farmers markets too!

Carmen and the Primcats

TheCrankyCrow said...

Beautiful photos of the market goods Roberta! When I worked, there was a small farmer's market every Wednesday that I would sneak out to on lunch - loved Wednesdays! Thanks for the recipe - adding blueberries is a different take on my zucchini bread recipes - bet that's really good! Have a great rest of the week! Smiles & Hugs ~ Robin