Dealing with the Plethora, III

Zucchini for lunch?
Here's a great recipe for a zucchini bread that I love to eat spread with peanut butter. The added sunflower nuts (shelled seeds) make it special. For many years I made your typical zucchini bread with walnuts or occasionally with raisins, but I like this better!

(I started posting this yesterday, along with the other zuke recipes ... but then K and A arrived, and we went off to play. The girls loved sandwiches made with this bread. They spread their own peanut butter and jam, to the PB&Jelly song ... what fun!)

(Warning! A (gasp!) Political Note on my 'happy talk' blog:
I also appreciate the fact that this recipe calls for sunflower oil, a healthy alternative to the Genetically Modified - sourced oils such as soy, corn and canola that I no longer use. I believe in voting with my wallet, which is why I don't shop at Wallymart or eat at fast food chain restaurants. So kill me.)

Sunflower Zucchini Bread
Source: Country Living Gardener magazine (1993)

1 3/4 cup unsifted flour (I use spelt when I have it)
2/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup hulled sunflower seeds
1/2 cup raisins
2 teaspoons grated lemon rind
1/2 cup sunflower oil
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups shredded zucchini

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare a loaf pan (I use a minimal amount of shortening to stick wax paper to line my loaf pans. Never have a problem with sticking.)

In a large bowl, thoroughly combine dry ingredients, then stir in peel, raisins and sunflower nuts.
In a separate measuring cup combine the shredded zucchini with the wet ingredients.
Stir the wet ingredients into the dry until just incorporated.
Spread batter into the loaf pan and bake 55-60 minutes, until cake tester comes out clean.

Cool bread in pan for at least 10 minutes, then on wire rack until cool.
Enjoy.

Getting near that time of year

The angle of the sun lower, dawn later, sunset sooner, the nights cold, the geese practicing their maneuvers, the colors changing, the school buses on the roads, the children wearing book bags, me in the garden picking the last tomatoes.



The medicinal herbal plants in the photo include goldenrod - Solidago canadensis, boneset - Eupatorium perfoliatum, great blue lobelia - Lobelia siphilitica, and that yellow sunflower which is one of the tallest perennials that grows here, the cup plant - Silphium perfoliatum.
Trees in the meadow-turned-woods are tinting yellow-y now. There used to be a cow pasture there, then a corn field there, and now a scrub woods is beginning. I used to look across that field all the way to the far hedgerow, and in the winter I could see rabbits popping their heads up out of their barrows. Last year three deer leaped out of the thicket of trees while I was putting the garden to bed. Nothing stays the same.

Spring and Fall, to a Young Child
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Ah, Sunflower

Here is an nice version of the Blake sunflower poem, set to music, illustration by William Blake. One of the original end of summer songs, one of Blake's Songs of Experience.

Ah, Sunflower

...and bee.



I was looking for Blake's appropriate poem to post with Melinda's wonderful sunflower photos above, but ran across this one by Frost that I like as well. It's a spring poem but the message is just as timely right now at the end of another summer.
(Thanks for letting me post your photos, Melinda!)

A Prayer in Spring

by Robert Frost (1915)

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfil.