Zucchini/Almond/Blueberry/Grow loaf
Ingredients:
1 large zucchini (or two medium, more or less), grated
4 scoops Grow
.5 Cup almond meal
.25 Cup chopped walnuts
1 Cup blueberries
.5 teaspoon baking powder
.5 teaspoon cinnamon
Nutmeg and cloves to taste.
1 egg
Sweetener of choice (I use liquid splenda, but you can use anything that will stand up to cooking).
Instructions:
Grate the zucchini into a clean piece of fabric - a panel from a ripped pillow cloth works, or probably a ditto from
a recycled t-shirt. Cheesecloth actually doesn’t work that well, but it’ll do if you don’t have any clean rags.
Squeeze as much liquid out of the zucchini as you can, and then squeeze a little harder. Put this aside. I actually use more than 1 zucchini - frequently 1 large and 1 medium, but there’s a fair amount of flexibility there.
Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
Combine the dry ingredients (this does not include the blueberries) in a large bowl and stir to mix in the spices and baking powder evenly. Add 1 whole egg and stir.
Now add the zucchini and stir until well mixed. It may seem a little dry at first, but really mix it and most of the powder will get absorbed. Stir it until the zucchini and the dry ingredients are entirely mixed -
I find that if I leave it for a few minutes, even more water gets released by
the zucchini, so the batter ends up wetter.
At that point, if it’s still too dry, then add water in small quantities - the consistency should be a little wet so it mixes easily when you fold the blueberries in but not
sopping.
Add blueberries and stir gently (you want them to stay whole). Taste and add additional spices or sweetener as needed.
For me, this comfortably fits in a loaf pan. If you’ve used more or less blueberries or zucchini, you may need
another size pan. Individual muffins work well.
Put the batter into your pan of choice (greasing it as appropriate) and put it in the oven (it may rise a little, so
you may want to put a drip pan underneath) and cook until the top is firm and a knife inserted comes out clean.
This is definitely a work in process, my last batch was a little dense so I’m going to increase the baking soda and
see what that does.
I may also experiment w/ getting it to rise a bit w/ yeast (may need to add some whole wheat or wheat gluten for that). Once you fine tune the recipe the way you like it, you can make a bunch of batches and store them in the freezer, they defrost well in the microwave. If you do that, you’ll probably want to slice it and wrap the slices individually.
For me, this makes 4 servings of 30 g protein and a little under 300 calories.
Variations:
I’ve made this subsituting for the zucchini -
1 bag, chopped frozen spinach (it doesn’t taste spinachy to me and I think the green and blue looks pretty cool)
make sure you squeeze the liquid out after you defrost the spinach,
or
1 thoroughly cooked, peeled butternut squash
both were quite good. I haven’t tried it, but I think you could probably do something w/ canned pumpkin too.
I used blueberries because they’re 1. in season here, 2, really good for you, 3. low carb. There are lots of other
fruits that would work well.
If you don’t do nuts, I have made this successfully using .5 cup wheat gluten instead of the almond meal.
It had more of a bready consistency and didn’t taste quite as good to me, but it was palatable. If carbs aren’t an issue
for you, you could use whole wheat flour.
One variation that I think would be cool would be using dried apples and peanut butter. That’s a little carby for my
needs, but ymmv. If you do try it, tell me how it works.
I prefer sweet loaves to savory, but I think you could easily reinvent this as a savory by skipping the fruit (and
probably the walnuts) by using cheese and perhaps some dried tomatoes, things like that.
Additions:
almond extract and topping w/ slivered almonds is nice to make more of an almond loaf;
raisins, craisins, grated carrots.