He's a handsome devil.

When someone asks you if you want a homegrown zucchini, say "Yes." Or even "Yes please!" Or possibly even "HECK YES!" You won't regret it.

Because here's the thing about zucchini. You can make zucchini bread with it.

It's been a year or two since I visited zucchini bread. This time around I really wanted to try something different, maybe even vaguely healthy. And heaven knows, with such a gorgeous specimen I certainly have plenty of opportunity to experiment.

I've seen recipes for Chocolate Zucchini Bread, which, of course, begged for a try. But the other thing I wanted to experiment with was cutting the amount of sugar and oil that most recipes call for. So. I scoured the internet for appropriate recipes and found these likely candidates:

Smitten Kitchen's Zucchini Bread
Joy of Baking's Chocolate Zucchini Bread

BUT. I cut the amount of sugar in both recipes in half. Anything can be tasty if you add enough sugar, but you take the chance of losing the real flavor. Plus it makes my kids crazy. Also, in the Smitten Kitchen recipe I took her advice and used 1/2 applesauce. Here are the results.

I took the candidates to work with me and introduced them to the ladies. And they willingly sampled a bit of both. Here's the verdict: regular is better. The Smitten Kitchen recipe is really, really awesome. Excellent flavor and texture, even with the changes. The Chocolate Zucchini is just, well, chocolate and zucchini. It's not bad, it's just not as good as old faithful. Probably with the addition of the extra sugar it would have been a lot better, but, as I've established, that's cheating. At any rate, they're both gone, so they must have been okay.

Brace Yourselves.

It's my first bad review.

I love the Pioneer Woman. I want to curl up on her front porch and live off her table scraps. I want to mosey around the ranch and name all the calves. I want to hang out with her kids and hold her sister's adorable baby. Which makes what I have to say very hard.

The recipe she posted for Hummus was yucky.

I once had Hummus at a Greek restaurant and I immediately fell in love. Store bough versions never came close to tasting the same. So when I saw her "Classic Hummus" I thought BOOYA, and I went out and bought all the ingredients. I think the ingredients themselves were right on, but the amounts she has listed are waaaaaay off. I followed the recipe exactly and ended up with cement. There's not a chance you could actually pull this recipe off in a blender. Unfortunately, I had company that evening (WHATUP PEEPS!) and couldn't really mess around with it to try to fix it up. They were good sports and ate it anyway. But there was so much left over that I decided to experiment.

I tripled the amounts of lemon juice, olive oil and water and it almost came close to what I remembered. This is what it looked like with three times the amount of liquid listed.

Still a little bit thick for my taste. Sorry, but this one is definitely not a keeper. 1 star.

Food Quirk.

I think that I prefer to eat my salad in a circle. I put all the salad components in a circle around the plate or bowl, and then drizzle the dressing on all of it. Then you just stab your fork in each section and you end up with the perfect bite every time. No naked spinach leaves, no drowned orange slices. Do you think it would be too Sally from "When Harry Met Sally" of me to order it like this in a restaurant? I'm kind of that girl when it comes to on the side and all that jazz. Hmmm.... anyway.

This is my pseudo Asian chicken salad... grill up some chicken with house seasoning on it, add mandarin oranges, red bell peppers and spinach. (I usually have a few toasted almonds on there but I forgot this time.) The dressing is just rice wine vinegar, a few shakes of soy sauce, pepper, splenda/sugar and canola oil shaken up in a small Tupperware jar to taste.

Try it!