Zucchini Marmalade Bread

I've been continuing on my zucchini craze lately -- trying desperately to eat the pounds of zucchini that appear each morning on my super-happy zucchini plant bush. I've also continued to tackle Tartine as my bed-side book of choice before I have to return it to the library. This recipe for zucchini marmalade bread utilizes both my stock pile of zucchini as well as my pantry full of homemade marmalade. It makes a moist, flavorful bread with a lot of depth. It is lovely as is, and toasts well. We enjoy eating it for breakfast as well as for an afternoon treat with a cup of tea.  If there's a break in the heat this summer, and you can bear to turn on your oven, I recommend giving this recipe a try. If the heat is unbearable, grate up some zucchini and freeze it for later.

Panzanella Salad

A friend mentioned this salad years ago and it just sounded weird.  I think it slipped in and out of my mind without hesitation --my thought process was probably this: bread salad? meh.  How naive I was.

Recently I attended the High Sierra Music Festival in Quincy, CA and it was HOT.  So hot that all we could do during most of the day was sit in the shade.  And drink cold beverages.  And wish we were swimming.  Luckily there was really good music.  We finally left and went to Chico... where it was even hotter (yes, this story does have a point).  In Chico we visited the Sierra Nevada Brewery and lounged in the air conditioning.  Panzanella salad was on their menu -- described with all the fresh vegetables and... coldness... it sounded amazing.  And it was.  I couldn't believe I'd never had it before.  Soon after returning home, where it was still hot, I had to make it again.  And share it with you.  Trust me: fabulous.

A Shout Out for Hallah!

It's been raining for a week straight.  Every once in a while the sun comes out for 5 minutes.  The ground in the garden is totally saturated, with parts flooded.  The creek next to my office has become a river, with whole trees rolling by.  Land slides, mud slides, wind and fallen trees punctuate the news, with Big Sur (one of our favorite ocean-side destinations) blocked indefinitely because of collapsed highway.  I really needed a kitchen project to lighten the mood and the week.  Bread came to mind.

When I was in college I started a bread baking business, Eron's Incredible Breadables.  It was a bread CSA -- if you wanted bread, you paid for 4 loaves of bread (one each week for a month) in advance.  Then I'd make the bread and deliver it, often hot from the oven, around campus.

Sun and Rain bread is a recipe I learned at that time that remains dear to my heart.  It started as a recipe from Beth Hensperger's The Bread Bible:  one golden-colored dough made with corn meal specked with orange zest braided together with a dough of buckwheat flour and baked.  The beautiful contrast of the sunny and gray doughs, as well as the different flavors make this an exceptional bread.  I've made Rain and Sun to celebrate the Jewish New Year, for birthdays... and just for kicks on rainy days when I need something metaphorical to remember that the rain and sun are all part of the yin and yang.  Today was one of those days.  And it was also Friday -- the day that Hallah is traditionally shared for the Sabbath. 

Mystery squash

Keeping up with what was going on in the new greenhouse at work was difficult last spring with 9 staff, an incomplete irrigation system and hundreds of small children, community members and volunteers cycling through.  After rearranging greenhouse tables several times and lots of lost plant markers, nearly all the squash and pumpkins were mysteries.  I was frustrated that I'd lost track of some heirloom seedlings:  Lakota squash and giant pink banana squash specifically.  The mystery squash plants sat in the greenhouse longer than they should have, until a motivated staff member cleared a weedy section of the garden near the road and planted all of them (thanks, Justin!).  During the summer many of them thrived and we harvested great Cinderella, sugar and Howden pumpkins, lots of spaghetti squash and delicata.  After the big harvest day, all the squash were piled up in our outdoor kitchen for distribution and admiring.  Three unfamiliar squash were left abandoned back by the road, where I drove by them numerous times before stopping and lugging them to my car.   While I never found the giant banana squash,  I finally got what I believed to be Lakotas -- two of them.  Strange-looking to harvesters that day, these were two of the abandoned, lonely squash.  The last was an unidentifiable, smooth-skinned, oblong, orange 16-pound pumpkin-like squash.  What are you?  I wondered. 

The Persimmon Tree

Down the street from one of the schools where I work there is a lot for sale. It is about a half acre, locked down with several fences -- a broken wooden one and a 8-foot chain link one. Sometimes there is a big dog inside the fence, too. There is nothing on the lot except a persimmon tree. A beautiful, old, leaning Hachiya persimmon tree. Since the first frost, the persimmon tree is bare of leaves which makes the hundreds of bright orange, heart-shaped fruits stand out against the sky and the otherwise stark lot. I drive by this tree nearly every day, wondering how I might get in and harvest the tree. (What on earth I would do if I had all that fruit?) Well, luckily I work with some great people, with great ideas. A quick call to the phone number posted on the For Sale sign and several of us persimmon-tree gawkers found ourselves on the other side of the fences. An hour later we were several hundred of pounds of persimmons heavier. We donated several bags, but were still left with much persimmon poundage. Time to pull out the dehydrator, freezer bags and muffin tins!