How did she do that?

Chocolate zucchini muffins.   Yum.   An easy way to get a green vegetable into husbands,. I’m not saying children, because granddaughter loves vegetables.   Lol

A friend gave me zucchini last night,   Our zucchini plant gave up one zucchini.  We probably,should have put some slug bait out.  I didn’t think that it would be a problem where we planted it.   I really appreciate her sharing.

Most “quick breads” are best made with the least amount of mixing .  Over  mixing  causes the bread to be tough.  Measure and stir the dry ingredients together in one bowl,  measure and stir the wet ingredients in a separate bowl.  Fold the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients,  don't  over mix,—  just mix until all the dry ingredients are no longer visible.   Put your mixture into a prepared  pan and bake according to the recipe.

On another note.  Life is not perfect and you are always going to have some fails.   The buttermilk pancake mix I made the other day was one of those fails.  It turned out to be so thin, it just didn’t work.  Thankfully I had made french toast to use up the bread that was hanging around too long,  I froze it in four slice lots in quart bags.  A little time in the toaster and it saves the day.  It is a good way to use up Texas toast bread that is not being used up fast enough.  It makes for a quick easy breakfast that a older child could make themselves.

I did try another recipe for buttermilk pancake mix.   Thankfully I had only made a half batch. In retrospect, I probably could have used the mix for breading.   I try to limit carbs, however , so I use a combination of nuts, breadcrumbs, and parmesean cheese to bread things like chicken nuggets.  Its really good and it cuts carbs and adds protein.  

Looking for ways to keep costs down while providing good nutrition is a way to eat well on four dollars a day.  Keeping a stock of basic food that is efficiently versatile is a good way to cut food costs.  This is a good time when less is more.  If you have less variety you can buy more of it in bulk and save a lot of money,   Packaging is expensive.  I keep a small amount of dry buttermilk.  Real buttermilk is a good ingredient in baked items, but buying liquid buttermilk is just nit practical.  Amazon had dry buttermilk, local. In a plastic bag for far less than the box in the grocery store.  That’s when saving the wide mouth jars you have instead of putting them in the recycle.  We also got a big canister of chicken bouillon.  The cost was drastically lower than buying the little jars at Winco.  It is good anytime you need chicken stock.  That happens a lot when you are scratch cooking.  We try to make stock, but that doesn’t always happen.

If you buy something that doesn’t spoil in bulk once, you can mark that off your list.  It simplifies your grocery shopping,   Bit by bit you find yourself buying dairy, perishables, and a rotation meat.  You are scratch cooking efficiently and cutting your time and money a lot.  And you are not eating out of a box or bag and are controlling salt, sugar, trans fats, hydrogenated oils, HFCS, and gmo s .and the food dyes.