When the Garden Gives You Zucchini, Make Muffins

My Mom lovingly tends to the garden each summer when my Dad's leaves for the Midwest. Tending to the garden is a time consuming and sometimes difficult job, especially when the temperature has been over 100 degrees many a day, and humid too!

Tomatoes, 3 colors of bell pepper, strawberries, lemons, onions and zucchini grow in this garden. The zucchini grow fast and big. I picked some zucchini yesterday. Gave a couple to a friend and brought a couple home.

I have decided to make MUFFINS! I am not a fan of zucchini bread. It weird, really. Put a zucchini in something sweet? I am used to eating grilled zucchini, not sweet zucchini. I found a basic recipe for Zucchini Muffins on the Internet. This site has just about every muffin you could imagine on it. http://www.muffinrecipes.net/. I modeled my recipe after one I read, but spiced mine up a bit.

Garden Fresh Zucchini Muffins

1 cup sugar
2 eggs (white thingies removed)
1/2 cup canola oil
1/3 cup buttermilk
1 cup shredded garden fresh zucchini
2 cups unbleached flour
1/8 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 cup chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Mix the first four ingredients together. Add the zucchini, and dry ingredients and mix well. If you would like some of your muffins to be pecan free, stop here and fill muffins cups 2/3 full. Add the chopped pecans to the remainder of the batter and mix. Fill the remaining cups. You should have enough batter for 12 muffins and one mini loaf or 4 more muffins.

Bake for 20 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. Serve warm with butter, or cooled with nothing.