Father's Day :-)

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there!!

We spent the day at the lake; cruising on the boat and swimming in the water. It was awesome! It would have been perfect if it wasn’t 95+ degrees outside, but thankfully it wasn’t as humid as normal. My hubby can handle the heat and humidity pretty well. Me on the other hand - not so much. It’s ok though, the sun doesn’t like me either. Haha! I say this, because normally I get burnt very badly even with half a bottle of 50 SPF waterproof sunscreen on. Today was different though - I didn’t get burnt at all, not even a little bit. Sadly, one of my daughters did though, and she had just as much sunscreen on as I did… weird. Thankfully being on the boat makes the heat bearable. Well, as long as the boat is moving or you’re in the water. I’m really looking forward to going out again later this week.

Once we got home we cleaned up, ate, and I decided to do some baking :-) I know – baking in this heat?! No worries, I haven’t completely lost my mind. I don’t generally use my oven. I have a convection oven with a rotisserie that I use ALL the time. I can cook/bake all I want and there’s no competition with the air condition! It’s awesome and I love it!! The only drawback is it’s not quite big enough to cook more than two loafs of bread at a time.

Ok, back to the bread… I have 4 loaves of zucchini bread (made with zucchini picked fresh from a friend’s garden early last night). One of the loaves is almost gone already and 2 are cooling.  Oh, and I have a loaf of banana bread in the convection now. I did cook a lot of bread, but I heard it freezes well, and I always take some to my family, so none will go to waste. The zucchini bread was such a hit that when my oldest daughter walked in from playing with the neighbor kids, she grabbed a slice and her exact response were, "Wow, mom, this is awesome!" Hahaha, I love it! I love when I create something yummy from scratch and my hubby and daughters love it!

Here are the recipes if anyone would like them... Zucchini Bread and Banana Bread.  I did make a few changes to the recipes.  For two of the loaves of Zucchini Bread I substituted -

• ½ the all-purpose flour with whole wheat flour
• ½ the sugar with the equivalent to 1 ½ cups Splenda
• omitted the nuts
• cooked at 350 degrees for 40/45 minutes
• drained the shredded zucchini by placing it in a towel and pressing out the access water. This step is important; or the bread will come out too wet. At least that’s what a few of the reviews said :-) 

For the other 2 loaves of zucchini bread I used -

• whole wheat flour rather than all-purpose flour
• Splenda rather than sugar
• I also added 1 cup of water rather than 1/3 cup. The whole wheat flour made the batter very dry and adding the water helped greatly. You could use the 1/3 cup water and not pressed out the access water from the zucchini and it should to good moisture wise. I had already pressed the access water out before I started the 2nd batch of batter.

As for the Banana Bread, the only changes I made were substituting the all-purpose flour for whole wheat flour.  Everything else stayed the same :-)

The Banana bread is almost finished.  I'll try to remember to added a couple pics later.  Now it's movie time with the family - Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian  My girls have already seen it and they absolutely loved it!  Oh boy, my house smells of popcorn! Can you smell it? YUM!!   
Have a great night everyone!!