Marmalade and Muffins

Last weekend I had a friend over to teach her how to can things.  She is also a big gardener but has never tried canning.  She brought over a huge cooler full of grapefruit from her tree and we combined them with my meyer lemons to make a really great marmalade!  We used a recipe from the SF Chronicle but varied the citrus.  We both ended up with several jars.  I still have a ton of left that I have to figure out how to use up.

Speaking of using things up our zucchini plants are going gangbusters in the backyard!  Everyday I go out to check on the garden and come back with at least two or three more enormous zucchinis.  Pretty soon I will be in the same situation with cucumbers and tomatoes but for now I am just trying to eat up the zucchini as fast as I can.  I've made chocolate chip cookies with zucchini, orzo with zucchini (both recipes from Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle which is a great read if  you are at all into food).  This morning I made a batch of zucchini muffins and a chocolate and zucchini bundt cake which used just one of my monster zucchinis total.  I made a few slight variations on the bundt cake: meyer lemon zest instead of orange zest for obvious reasons and I added chocolate chips instead of nuts because my husband is allergic and I will be feeding it to little kids.

My grandfather was a big gardener and my grandmother an excellent cook.  I was looking through a book of her recipes this morning and came across a number of zucchini recipes.  Tonight we'll be having zucchini casserole for dinner, and I might make some jars of zucchini pickles or relish.  

I am taking the bundt cake to share with our playgroup today.  Maybe I will make a big pitcher of lemonade too.