Saturday, August 8, 2009

Zucchini Cookies and Summer Prospects

My kitchen table was a mess yesterday with all of the produce I bought. I also see that one of my puny garlics made it in the shot!



This week is blueberry picking and preserving time. I really enjoy canning and have only done the cherry sauce and spiced honey. I still want to make apple butter this fall. I think that will be good.
Yesterday, however I got taken off guard by a Yakima fruit stand near my house. He has 26lbs of tomatoes for $18.oo. This isn't bad for our prices and I could make 12 pints of tomato sauce for the winter. I also bought 5lbs of peaches and tomatoes for $4.50 each. I've never canned tomatoes and I'll have to invest in a food mill, but it seems like a lot of fun. I know it would be cheaper to just buy cans of tomato sauce from the grocery store at these prices, but it's nowhere close to as satisfying and tasty! It's difficult for me now to focus on the just producing some blueberry jam and apple butter for the year. I am starting to think some ketchup, pizza sauce and spaghetti sauce would be fun. We'll see how my budgeting this week goes before I take the plunge.
Last night I made zucchini chocolate chip cookies from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It's a great recipe using no white sugar. I doubled the batch and added more flour as the dough was kind of thin. Next time I'll add less flour, I think it was thin because I was using whole wheat pastry flour. I also used my flat stoneware dish to bake them. They turned out great and the stone was awesome.

2 comments:

D.L. said...

Yum! Apple butter. These cookies look delicious, I've never thought to include veggies in my baking really.
I can't wait to see what you end up canning this year:)

Idle Hands said...

Yeah, the zucchini cookies weren't bad. I think I didn't grate them enough because it's supposed to be invisible in the dough. It's cool though, you can't even taste them. Once I saw Seinfeld's wife on a talk show and she wrote a whole recipe book on how she sneaks fruits and vegetables into her families foods!! He seems like such a healthy guy!