The Wife's Zucchini Bread

     Like I've told you before, my wife doesn't do much of the cooking in the house. We have an agreement where I do most of the cooking and she cleans up the wreckage. She does, however, have a few recipes in her repertoire.  They are all very good. Her zucchini bread is one of my all-time favorites. She got the recipe from the One Million of the World's Best Recipes CD-ROM. You know what? I'm calling bullshit on that CD. How can there be more than one of the "World's Best" anything? The CD should have one recipe. Even if it was the "World's Best" of each type of food I still can't believe there are a million distinctly different categories of food. I think a more accurate title would have been "One Million Really Good Recipes and Lots of Okay Ones."

Sorry, I seem to have gotten off track.

     Anyway, this bread is fantastic. The wife leaves out the walnuts from this recipe and I think that's a really good call. The bread is such a wonderfully soft consistency, I think the crunchiness of the walnuts would throw it off. As always, any notes or changes are in blue.

The Wife's Zucchini Bread

Ingredients

• 3 eggs
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 cup vegetable oil (we substituted 1/2 cup apple butter in for 1/2 cup of oil. Applesauce would work, too)
• 2 cups white sugar
• 2 cups grated zucchini
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts (omitted)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 325F. Grease and flour two 8"x4" loaf pans
2. In a large bowl, beat eggs until light and frothy.
3. Mix in oil (and apple butter if you're using it) and sugar.
4. In another bowl, combine flour, cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder, salt and nuts (seriously, leave the nuts out. It's so much better. Or don't. I'll never know). Stir into the egg mixture.
5. Divide batter into prepared pans. Bake for 60-70 minutes, or until done (ours took 75 minutes. Fairly close for once!)

Good times!