Recipe #1 - Orange-Scented Zucchini Bread

My first adventure with the Our Best Bites cookbook began this morning.  Yesterday, my fantastic neighbor brought me over a bag of fresh zucchini from his garden, and my first thought was that I needed to make zucchini bread.  Why?  Because it's delicious.  Nuff said.

Luckily Sara and Kate had provided me with two delicious looking options, neither of which I had tried.  The Orange-Scented Zucchini Bread option won!  (This is one of the many recipes they have listed on the Our Best Bites blog, so you can go here to get it.)

PET PEEVE ALERT:  I frequent the website allrecipes.com, and I rely on the reviews of others to help me determine which recipes I want to try.  However, I get so bugged when someone gives a recipe 5 stars but then they add a comment like, "But I didn't add the applesauce, I used oil.  And I thought it needed more spices, so I added blah, blah, blah.  With my 35 changes to the recipe, it is near perfection."  Or they do the opposite, "My son is allergic to milk so I made it with soy milk and it didn't set up.  I'm sure its the soy milk that did this, but I was really disappointed in this recipe.  Wish it worked out better.  1 star."  Hello?!  How can you review a recipe when you didn't even make it correctly?  Its like watching Gnomeo and Juliet to properly review Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.  They are not the same.

Okay, stepping off my soap box now and getting back to the recipe at hand.  The whole point of that tangent was to say that I plan to make each of the recipes as they were intended to be made.  (Ironically, I made this one without the nuts, go figure.  But I consider nuts to be optional in quick bread.  Right?)

As a busy mom, one step that I always skip when cooking is the combining of the dry ingredients.  I'm sure there is a perfectly good reason for it, but I never do it.  Today, I did.  Yes, I followed the recipe.  I even took a picture to prove it.

Once the bread was all ready to go, I snapped a quick photo and headed upstairs to get ready for church.  While I was getting ready, my house began to fill with a fantastic aroma.  My kids were excited about the bread even before it came out of the oven.

 

During the 10 minutes that I had to wait before taking the baked bread out of the pan to cool on the racks, craziness took over in my house.  I realized how late it was and that we had to book it if we were going to be all ready for church in time to taste this delightful bread and snap a few pictures.  The incentive to get ready quickly?  Warm bread.  Doesn't get too much better than that.

Here is a picture of my version of the final product:

Once I cut into the bread, my kids hustled into the kitchen, ready for their "taste testing" session to begin.

Personally, I thought the bread was heavenly.  The orange zest made all the difference in the world from my normal zucchini bread recipe.  In addition, it was fluffy.  YUM!  But the big question is: Did the Sanders kids approve this recipe?  And the verdict is:

3 Yes's!  We're off to a great start.  Now to plan for tomorrow's test testing...