Zucchini Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

Like every good midwestern gardener in August, I've got an abundance of zucchini.  I've been expecting this, and I've been keeping a list of potential recipes as I've seen them.  When I saw this zucchini carrot cake with cream cheese frosting from Tiffany at Eat at Home, I knew I wanted to give it a try.  I've always been a fan of carrot cake, and I expected zucchini could only make it better.  It does!

I used zucchini I had shredded and frozen earlier in the week.  As I've been warned, there was quite a lot of liquid in the thawed zucchini.  I wasn't exactly sure whether I should drain it first or just add it in.  I did a quick search online and saw most people omitted the liquid when using frozen shredded zucchini, but a friend of mine had suggested I add the liquid.  The cake batter looked pretty dry, so I ended up using about half of the liquid. 

This frosting is really, really good.  Emphasis on really.  You've been warned.  I was generous with the frosting, and I still had plenty left over, so I guess you save it for another baking project.

Also this week, I cooked up this Betty Crocker recipe for zucchini meat loaf.  It uses 2 cups of shredded zucchini in place of other liquid (my usual recipe calls for milk).  It was good.  And an easy way to get my non-zucchini eating daughter to eat zucchini.  She did notice the green bits and asked about them, but I told her they were tiny pieces of green beans, a vegetable she likes. Yep, that's me lying to my daughter!  It totally worked.

I've got zucchini cakes (think fritters), zucchini boats, cheesy baked zucchini, and zucchini quesadilla recipes bookmarked and ready to try. My go-to zucchini is just sauteed in olive oil with onions, garlic, salt, and pepper.  Yum!  So how do you use up your zucchini?

Early Garden Harvest Pasta

Last night, after spending a little time in my garden, I had a typical first harvest--a lot of odds and ends but nothing substantial of any one thing: 2 tomatoes, 1 cucumber, a handful of green beans, exactly 3 pea pods worth of peas, and 1 zucchini.  I decided to throw it all together into a yummy pasta.

While the pasta cooked, I microwaved some bacon and sauteed the green beans. I threw in some onion flakes (sad) because I was all out of onions.  Then I added the zucchini to cook for a few minutes.  Once the pasta was cooked and drained, I threw in the cooked veggies and bacon, adding some chopped cucumber, chopped tomatoes, minced garlic, parmesan cheese, and olive oil. I stirred everything together and added a little salt. You can eat it right away, although I prefer to refrigerate it overnight and serve the next day.  It's better the second day when everything is cool and crisp and fresh and the flavors have mixed together.  I do wish I'd had some onion and maybe a green pepper, but my peppers plants are pitiful this year.   

In full disclosure, despite the abundance of noodles, my daughters were not big fans of this meal.  My three-year-old said she likes "soft" green beans (i.e. canned). She did appreciate the bacon, however.  Don't we all?  Personally, I loved it.  I ate it up and had seconds. It's a great light, fresh, cool meal for a hot summer night.

By the way, if you're like me and hate frying bacon on the stove and don't like heating up your whole house to bake it in the oven, this is a great alternative! It's the only way I cook bacon. In fact, I specially requested it for Christmas several years ago. My parents have one too. (Not an advertisement, I just really like it!!)

Garden Update

I posted some pics of our vegetable garden early on.  We used Weed Barrier this year to keep the weeds to a minimum, and let me say I'm so glad we did.  We were away from home for about a week, and when we came home our plants had doubled in size.  Had the weeds had the run of the garden, we would have been in big trouble.  Instead, I weeded the entire garden (basically the area between the plants in each row) in less time than it took my husband to take our girls to the park. I took these photos on Thursday, and the garden has exploded with growth even since then.

So far we've got a bumper crop of radishes, and I've harvested two zucchini. There are about 962 more radishes where these came from.

We've got tomato plants loaded with green tomatoes.  A little early for that, isn't it?

Several squash are on the vine. And I'm VERY encouraged by these big, beautiful watermelon vines, currently with blossoms. 

Deer and rabbits have been munching the leaves of our green beans, but they are full of blossoms, so I'm expecting them to be just fine.  And the peas are looking good.  I think.  I've never grown peas before, so I'm not exactly sure.

The cabbage are huge and it looks like heads are starting to form.  The pepper plants are growing pretty slowing but are hanging in there.

For the first time it seems like the cucumbers are lagging behind everything else, but a few days ago they had a growth spurt and are now sporting blossoms.

Back in June on a whim I entered our garden in our local paper's Beautiful Garden contest.  Mostly I entered because I was so excited to finally have a vegetable garden I could be proud of.  I was also encouraged by the fact that no one else had entered at the time.  The voting period has officially begun, and I've got a 2 in 3 chance of winning first or second prize.  Now I admit the other two entries are very beautiful gardens, but I'm telling myself their owners are retirees who have all day to spend tending plants. I, on the other hand, have a crazy work schedule (12am anyone?), two little ones at home, and a very busy husband.  So if you're so inclined, send a vote or two my way.  You do have to register on the new paper's site first, but once you do that it's pretty easy to vote.  And you can even vote daily...not that I'm doing that or anything!  There's a handy link to the voting on the upper right corner of my blog.  Thanks, everyone.  And happy gardening!

Keeping a Neat Garden

OK, if someone had told me last year I'd be blogging about how to keep a tidy garden, I would have literally rolled on the floor laughing.  It's always been a struggle for us to keep the weeds at bay, but last year after an untimely vacation (is there such a thing, really?), we came home to the biggest weed patch I've ever seen.  Surprisingly there were still some thriving veggies in there, so what's a girl to do?  We put our neighbor girls to work.  It took two teen girls almost four hours to get the job done.  And they were working hard, trust me, I was watching them from the air-conditioned comfort of my kitchen window.  It got a little embarrassing when one of their mothers came over to offer them support and an extra pair of hands for a little bit.  I was even shamed into coming out to help.  We paid the girls well, and it was worth every penny for us; I'm not sure the girls felt the same way.

Each year since we moved into our first house, over six years ago, our gardening efforts have gotten more and more involved.  The first year the garden was an afterthought.  I planted, but I didn't really expect anything to really grow.  That was the year I learned that radishes thrive in my soil, I ate some unidentified weeds thinking they were early spinach, and I handled all of the weeding (not that I did much).  I grew a very, ahem, "natural" garden.  It's a strategy that has persisted until this year.  Let me tell you, veggies grow just fine when they are surrounded by weeds.  And I have a theory that all of the weeds throw the rabbits and deer off track.  They seem to have stayed away from our plants when they were the weediest. 

Since that first year, our garden has grown.  The variety of plants has expanded.  This is my first year for potatoes, peas, and cabbage!  Last year it was okra and broccoli.  Over the years I've learned a few things.  I've learned I can actually grow watermelon large enough to eat (IN MINNESOTA!), only to have them all crushed by baseball-size hail days before harvest.  By the way, that was the only year I've been able to grow them.  I try again every year and fail--usually because I can't find the young plants in the tangle of weeds.  I'm trying again this year, and so far they look great!  I've  also learned two people really can't consume a 10'-row worth of radishes even if the radishes do grow really really well.  The same goes for cucumbers.  You can only eat so many.  We've added a fence after rabbits and deer ate the leaves off of two big rows worth of green beans and to keep our dogs out after they ran all over our freshly planted seeds scattering them everywhere.  Last year we got fancy (ha!) and used string to mark our rows to supposedly help me know where my pants and not the weeds were coming up (did I mention I ate weeds?!?!). We've learned a few things.  But clearly we had some room for improvement in the weeding department.

Last year, my husband asked someone at the nursery what they do to control weeds in their garden.  She said they use Weed Barrier.  Now we've talked about it before.  Weed Barrier is an investment.  It's not cheap, but after Weedgate 2010 I was willing to give it a shot.  Once the initial tilling was done and the weed barrier was down, I was responsible for doing the actual planting.  I will say it was hard work this year!  Cutting strips out of the weed barrier to plant the beans, peas, radishes, and carrots took extra time and energy.  But just LOOK! 

It's June and everything we planted is thriving.  I weeded the garden the other night and it took me minutes!!!  Not to mention I can do it in flip-flops and come out with toes still relatively flesh colored.  Totally worth it.  My husband tells me we can use the weed barrier for several years, so I think we have a winner.