Zucchini-Potato Pancakes... Sort of

We've eaten this recipe before, but I don't see a recipe on my blog for it. Hmph. Laziness is keeping me from posting the details of the recipe. The gist of it is that you shred equal parts potato and zucchini, add egg, onion/scallion, tarragon, salt and pepper. Lightly fry as pancakes. It's a variation on latkes, and the last time I remember our making this, they were GREAT!

Tonight was a more frustrating experience. Tasted great but more trouble than they were worth. I should have had another meal of the pumpkin soup. :P Since the recipe is a Weight Watchers recipe, it doesn't call for much egg. I ended up adding eggs, which of course means that the ones I made are not 2 points per serving (a serving being 2 pancakes). So much for that controlling my food thing. Even after adding the egg to make the mixture hold together, the pancakes were still pretty flimsy when I would flip them. In other words, what started as a pancake which looked like it would hold its shape ended up being a pile of shredded vegetables. I had a plateful of fallen pancakes before Aaron came home.

Fortunately, I had not exhausted the supply of "batter" by the time he arrived. I handed over my spatula and refused to do any additional work on the dinner. Aaron asked if I wanted a different job, and I angrily refused that too since I had been listening to increasing levels of whine from a certain adorable 2.5 year old for the previous hour. While Aaron saved dinner, I watched the end of Toy Story with Caleb.

All of this frustration does have a happy ending. Caleb ate many of the pancakes, which is not terribly surprising. Ellie ate more than one serving, which is a huge surprise, and had applesauce (another surprise as she has been rejecting applesauce this month). And she looked at me in the middle of dinner, and unprompted said "This is EXCELLENT!" in a perfect imitation of her brother's usual food praise.

Break Fast and Fall Cooking

It feels odd to write about food at the end of Yom Kippur, but we celebrated the end of Yom Kippur with much cooking, baking, and preparing food for our new chest freezer. We also made pizza for the first time for dinner to end our fast (how did we wait this long?).

First the pizza! During naptime today, Aaron and I realized we had no desire to cook in our usual way because we were tired from our day without food. Dinner usually takes an hour to prepare unless we're doing leftovers, and we just didn't feel up for it. Aaron suggested using the extra dough from bread I made on Saturday and leftover diced tomatoes as the base. When we picked up our CSA box today, we received a bunch of basil to add to the pizza. We added minced garlic, oregano, and our regularly stocked shredded cheese. There aren't any measurements - we just made the pizza look like we thought a pizza should look like before popping it in the 375 degree oven for about 20 minutes. We'll let it bake a bit longer next time, but it was fantastic. Food after Yom Kippur always tastes particularly good, but even Caleb who ate all day requested the pizza in his lunch tomorrow. Too bad there were no leftovers!

After the kids' bedtimes, Aaron and I got busy cooking, baking, and preparing food for our new chest freezer. Tonight I mashed up approximately a triple batch of applesauce for about 14 cups of the delightful comfort food. While that was bubbling and cooling, I also made two more loaves of zucchini bread because I discovered a zucchini in our vegetable drawer that was screaming "Bake me!!" And how did I discover the zucchini but by realizing that I needed to pack Caleb's lunch tonight in order to avoid total chaos tomorrow morning. While I bounced between apples, zucchini, and Caleb's lunch, Aaron processed the corn we have both from the farmers' market and the CSA. He steamed it, packed it in freezer bags, and reorganized the chest freezer when he took it to the basement.

I shared "my" applesauce recipe in an earlier post. Caleb's lunch includes a turkey and cheese wrap, leftover grilled green beans, chopped cucumber, and diced white nectarine. I use my mother-in-law's recipe for zucchini bread. I've made variations on this, depending on whether I want to include nuts or use chocolate chips instead of raisins. Here is the original recipe:

Zucchini Bread

INGREDIENTS:
3 cups flour (I use white whole wheat, but other flours should work fine)
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon (I also add about 1 tsp. nutmeg)
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. baking soda
1 1/2 cups walnuts (OPTIONAL)
1 cup raisins (sometimes I sub 1 cup chocolate chips)
2 cups zucchini, grated (this *might* be 2 medium zucchini)
3 eggs
1 cup oil

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Blend flour, sugar, cinnamon (and nutmeg), salt, baking powder and baking soda in large mixing bowl.
   
2. Chop nuts coarsely. Combine nuts and raisins in small bowl and set aside.
3. Discard tips of zucchini. Grate whole zucchini in food processor. Measure 2 cups of zucchini and add to the flour mixture.
4. Blend oil and eggs (I do this in a measuring cup). Add to the flour mixture. Stir until moistened.
5. Add raisins and nuts. Pour into 2 greased loaf pans. If you added nuts, you may want to sprinkle nuts on top.
6. Bake 45 minutes at 350 degrees or until loaf tests done.

I often skip the nuts so that I can send the bread to school with Caleb. When I substitute chocolate chips for raisins, I use 1 cup of chips for the 1 cup of raisins. I also have used this recipe with summer squash or combined zucchini with summer squash. You can use the same recipe for muffins by changing your pan (duh!) and reducing the bake time to 25 minutes.

Coming up next ... CSA box and this week's menu!