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Do you plant a garden in the springtime?  If so, is it a big one or a little one?  With the size of my family, we should plant a very large garden.  But we found out years ago that a smaller one works better for us.  Still, we end up with a lot of zucchini!

Zucchini is a pretty easy plant to grow.  We’ve tried to grow different things in the past.  Corn, well that was a disaster.  We’d get a couple of rows going and then a storm would come and blow it all over.  My poor kids and I would be out there trying to straighten it back up…packing the dirt around it to get it to stand back up.  Just picture it! Out there on our knees with our hands caked in mud. This had to be a hilarious site to our neighbors who were serious farmers.

Carrots? We could never quite let them stay in the ground long enough.  Garlic…. hah!  Never saw it grow.  We’ve had a lot of failures where a garden is concerned.  We also realized that if it’s too big, the weeds take over.  I hate weeding a garden!  Keeping it to a size we could manage works best.

So, we finally decided on tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, peppers, and zucchini.  This, we can handle. 

Somehow, every year, we usually manage to harvest a lot of zucchini!

But what do you do with all of it?  It is amazing all of the different ways one can eat zucchini.  We must not be the only ones who can coax that particular plant into sharing its fruit.  Because people have come up with some very imaginative ways to eat it.  And most of them are good.

I thought I’d share a few we like with you.

To start with, two favorites pop into my mind, Zucchini Bread and Zucchini Crisps.  My family loves these.

You can find a lot of recipes for Zucchini Bread.  I like a simple one that I can adjust if needed.  This is the one I use, but I never add the raisins.  I also like to use half whole wheat flour. Plus, you can make it in any size or shape you like.  Just adjust the cooking time.

Did I tell you I am kind of a lazy chef?  Yeah, I kinda am.  Actually, I definitely am.  If I can make it easy, I will.  So, I have some gadgets that make my life simpler when dealing with the abundance of zucchini we grow.  I have a couple of pretty sweet pans that I use as well.

You see, when I started packing lunches for my boys, I decided to make zucchini muffins with this same recipe.  Way easier to transport muffins than a slice of bread, don’t you know?  And I have this incredibly awesome muffin pan that bakes 24 muffins at a time.

I also use the same recipe in a different pan. I have a pan that makes four mini loaves to use when I want to give small food gifts to people.  This zucchini bread makes a nice little treat for someone.

I usually double the recipe, and make 24 muffins and 4 loaves of bread at the same time.  Not sure if that’s lazy or just efficient! 

You can freeze the muffins and bread. Then, you can thaw it out and serve anytime.  Can I go with efficient??

A lot of our zucchini gets shredded for bread or other dishes.  Once it is shredded, you can freeze it as well.  This way, we get zucchini throughout the year.  You gotta love that!

Zucchini Crisps are…what is the phrase…to die for.  They are so easy and so yummy!  Basically, you slice them, sprinkle them with salt, pepper, and Parmesan cheese, and bake them.  The recipe is easy to follow.  However, once you’ve made them a time or two, you won’t need it.

You can use a knife to slice the zucchini or a super cool mandoline.  Either way works just fine.

But, if you have a mandoline, you can slice nice, long, thin pieces to make 3 Cheese Zucchini Ravioli with Roasted Tomato Basil Sauce.  This recipe is delicious.  It just is.  I made it for the first time this week and my family is ready for it again.  The mixture of the Ricotta, Feta, and Parmesan cheeses wrapped inside the zucchini nails it.  Of course, the baked cherry tomatoes add the extra zing to this meal.

This week we also pulled out my spiralizer. Yep…zoodles!  How fun is that?  And really, spiralizers are fun.  In fact, if you have a kid, you can count on them wanting to make your zoodles.  This week we had the spiralizer, the mandoline, and the shredder all working at the same time.  I would go from one “station” to another to keep an eye on it all.  I’ll have to let them switch things up next week so they all get to use the spiralizer. 

Zoodles are fun to make.  You can end up with super long strands of zucchini that no kid can resist playing with.  That is the downside of kids in the kitchen.  But, so what?!?

Zoodles can be used in the place of…you guessed it, spaghetti.  And of course, they are healthier.  Actually, zucchini is extremely healthy for you.  They have incredible health benefits that you can check out at this site.

There are so many creative ways to use up all that zucchini.  I am just beginning to explore some of them. 

Do you have a favorite recipe that you use?  If so, drop a link to it.

I might like to try it!