Baking with the CSA Share

When Suellyn’s perennials—elderberries, currants, and other fruits and nuts—start to bear fruit, CSA members will probably be doing more baking, but there are some things that lend themselves to baking even among the annuals providing our produce right now.

Zucchini is the first thing that comes to mind when you want to do a bit of baking with locally grown food. Over the weekend, my kitchen was transformed into a zucchini bakery as I shredded a couple of zucchinis (I had one left over from last week that was still good but needed to be used). I used the big bowl of grated zucchini, enhanced with some more exotic fruit in some cases, to make loaves of zucchini bread, some zucchini-blueberry muffins, and a really delicious pineapple zucchini upside down cake.

There’s a basic zucchini bread recipe* in a blog from two seasons ago, and fresh blueberries and pineapples are both available at Findlay Market right now, even though they weren’t grown around here. The blueberries came from North Carolina, and I suspect the pineapple was all the way from Hawaii. Still, they are in season and quite tasty despite the fact that they didn’t come from around here.

I just added whole blueberries to half a batch of zucchini bread batter and put it in muffin papers, baking them at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes. I had about a dozen moist muffins bursting with blueberries to enjoy for several breakfasts. The zucchini pineapple upside down cake wasn’t too complicated either: I melted ¼ cup butter (half a stick) in a pan in the oven, already at 350 degrees for the zucchini muffins. Then I spread ½ cup brown sugar over the melted butter, and topped that with pieces of pineapple cut small—it probably took about a third of the fruit from one pineapple. Then I poured the other half of the zucchini batter over the fruit carefully, and baked it for about 35 minutes.

If the zucchini keep rolling in, I’m thinking I might try a zucchini relish or salsa, but the zucchini bakery this weekend was definitely a success!

*I use less sugar than is called for in the recipe; usually 1¼ or at most 1½ cups of sugar. You can use even less if you are using fruit in the recipe, or as in the case of the zucchini pineapple upside down cake, you use a ½ cup of brown sugar in the bottom layer.