I had high hopes for some great garden harvests this year. Well I got my wish. The zucchini are overflowing and tomatoes will be following soon after. The zucchini plants are growing so fast that even though I prefer to pick them on the smaller side, some are surpassing two feet in length when I find them! That is a whole lot of zucchini. So I’ve shared some with friends and family, have been searching Pinterest for zucchini recipes, but keep saying to myself how I wish I could have this all year long.
So this weekend I decided to take a days harvest and save it for the winter months ahead. Who doesn’t like warm zucchini muffins from the oven on a chilly fall night. With chocolate chips of course. Yum. My mom has always made the best zucchini bread. I’ll be sure to share her recipe soon.
I went out and pulled three huge zucchini. My foot is just for reference to see the size of these things. Please don’t judge my lawn. It was hot as heck here for a couple of weeks and its brown. Oh well. My garden is not and that’s all I really care about. Anyway, back to the zucchini. They are almost too big to do much with other than shred and use in breads, etc. I LOVE noodles, but these are way too big to attempt to spiraling.
So I got out my handheld grater, my FoodSaver and got to work.
I mean, look at the diameter of these zucchini! My arm got tired awfully quick!
This veggie is very juicy! I wanted to avoid freezer burn as much as possible so instead of just draining in a colander I put in my salad spinner to get a little extra moisture off. If you don’t have a Salad Spinner, you need to get yourself one! Especially if you have a garden! So good for washing your produce and avoiding soggy lettuce leaves. Yuck, nobody likes soggy lettuce.
Most bread recipes will call for two cups of zucchini so I pre-portioned them into two cup bags to freeze. I shredded 20 cups of zucchini from TWO zucchini! I saved the third for bread for dinner:) That means I have ten loaves of bread, or batches of muffins already for the winter months ahead!
Unfortunately, my old Foodsaver decided to call it quits during this process. As I was pulling it out I said to my husband, I think its time to upgrade my Foodsaver. Well, it heard me and promptly quit working. Darn, I had to take a trip to Target. What a shame! I mean if Starbucks and that Target sign doesn’t scream BEAUTY at you I don’t know what will!