When zucchini showed up in my CSA this week, I wasn’t quite sure how to prepare it, but I also knew that I didn’t want it to meet an untimely demise in my refrigerator, as enigmatic produce sometimes has a tendency to do.

Despite the presence of a green vegetable, zucchini bread is usually loaded with the usual suspects: oil, butter, sugar, et al. This bread, however, would probably fall somewhere between Ellie Krieger and Paula Deen on the Food Network spectrum.

Though I adapted this recipe from the latter domestic diva, this bread is absent of her signature stick of butter. I took the recipe and modified each ingredient, line by line, until I had a simple, kind-of-healthy zucchini bread recipe that I can freeze in portions for weekday breakfasts. The recipe yields two loaves of bread but I turned one of the batches into muffins.

If you think that grating zucchini is time consuming, just set yourself up in front of the TV with a grater and a large mixing bowl. Time will fly, and the rest of this recipe will only take minutes.

Zucchini Bread, Healthified

What you need:

3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 cups sugar
1 cup pumpkin
4 eggs, beaten
1/3 cup water
2 cups grated zucchini
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans (optional; I did not add)

What you do:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, salt, nutmeg, baking soda, cinnamon and sugar.

2. In a separate bowl, combine pumpkin, eggs, egg whites, water, zucchini and lemon juice. Mix wet ingredients into dry, add nuts and fold in.

3. Bake in 2 standard loaf pans, sprayed with nonstick spray, for 1 hour, or until a tester comes out clean. If you’re short on time and only have one loaf pan, you can use one loaf pan and 12-cup muffin tin.

Tagged as: baked good, bread, healthier zucchini bread, healthy bread, zucchini bread