This week I decided to take stock of our basement deep freezer.  I wanted to be sure that we had eaten all of our delicious frozen veg, soups, pestos, sauces and jams from last harvest so I could plan out our storage for this year’s goods.  I had to laugh out load when I looked in the bottom drawer of the freezer to find it filled with bag upon bag of frozen shredded zucchini!  I was immediately reminded of the chapter entitled “Zucchini Larceny” in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle when she says, “July is the only time of year when country people lock [their] cars in the church parking lot, so people won’t put squash on the front seat.”  I was indeed still finding myself in this position of having an extreme over abundance of zucchini, even though we were far, far away from the month of July.

I struggle to throw any kind of food out, so I racked my brain for something that would utilize at least some of our zucchini stock.  And the idea came to me…chocolate chip zucchini muffins!  I could use a bunch of the zucchini I had stored, and also use my favorite Pampered Chef stoneware muffin pan 🙂

Like I so often do, I grabbed my two year old sous chef, and got to work.

Zucchini Chocolate Chip Muffins

3/4 cup  stone ground wheat flour

1 cup all purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup canola oil

juice of 1/2 a lemon

2 eggs

1 1/2 cups shredded zucchini (with excess water drained off)

5 oz chocolate chips

(A side note on my recipes:  I use all organic products.  And I use local products when available.)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Combine flour, salt, nutmeg, baking soda, cinnamon and sugar.  Combine eggs, oil, lemon juice and zucchini in a separate bowl.  Mix wet ingredients into dry. Then add the chocolate chips and pour into muffin pans.  Bake for 20-25 minutes. (Note:  I did bake these muffins in a stoneware pan, which often requires a longer cooking time than a metal muffin pan.)

Enjoy!