Zucchini Bread, also known as a workout

The Man has been harvesting all kinds of things from the garden, especially zucchini.

Lots of zucchini. If you have a garden and grow zucchini, you know two things - how fast they grow and how many they produce.

A few nights ago the Man brought in a zucchini that measured about eighteen inches long. It was probably 5-6" in diameter at the fat end. It was so big I think you could have sliced it up and served one slice on each dinner plate.

Ridiculous.

He wanted to toss it out but I couldn't do it. It seems so wasteful to invest so much time into these plants to simply toss the zucchini out because it got too big. Instead, I decided to make zucchini bread. The recipe I found on Pinterest called for three cups of grated zucchini. I {very} briefly thought about getting out my food processor but decided to grate it by hand instead. 

It takes too much time to clean the food processor. So many parts. 

I started grating. 

And grating. 

And grating. 

My arms got tired. I got bored. I grated some more. I started watching my arms jiggle as I grated. It was hot. I was getting sweaty from all the grating. I kept on grating. For hours, it seemed.

I lifted the grater and had about a half cup. Two minutes had gone by.

Hmmm. This is a lot tougher than I thought.

I kept on grating.

Finally I had three cups of grated zucchini. 

I followed the recipe, putting all the wet ingredients in the bowl and then slowly added the dry ingredients. My hand mixer got broken a couple months ago and I haven't replaced it yet. I have a KitchenAid mixer but I keep it in the basement and didn't feel like carrying it upstairs.

It's heavy. And there are too many parts to clean.

So I mixed it by hand with a wooden spoon. 

And mixed. 

And mixed. 

My arms got sore from stirring. Three cups of flour is a lot of flour to stir by hand. The first cup goes in pretty smoothly. But the last cup? That batter gets kind of thick, if you ask me. I mixed for hours it seemed.

I looked at the clock. Two more minutes had gone by.

Jeeesh. I must be getting soft. This is hard work.

I kept stirring until all the flour had been combined.

The completed product. It tasted good.

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Some things I learned from baking zucchini bread:

1. Prairie women were in much better shape than I am. I bet they grated for hours and never broke a sweat. And I bet their arms didn't jiggle.

2. Appliances have made us soft. It's so much easier to throw everything in the KitchenAid, turn it on and let it run. It's harder to stir things by hand.

3. It's much easier to clean up when you don't use appliances. Instead of fifty seven billion parts to clean from a food processor and KitchenAid mixer, I had to clean a grater, a wooden spoon, and a bowl.

4. I felt quite satisfied making the bread from scratch, with my own hands doing all the work. Turning simple ingredients into a moist, delicious quick bread felt good.