Zucchini Bread

Our weekly CSA share fills our fridge with root vegetables, summer squash, berries, and deliciously fresh eggs. The wide variety of produce we get creates a weekly challenge of sorts: how to use all of this food. It has inspired great pizza, a batch of golden beet muffins, crêpes made with the eggs and pastry flour from our share, carrot pancakes, and vegetable salads of every shape and size.
When our share delivered a bounty of zucchini my sister took to making zucchini pasta for lunch - peeling off thin strips of zucchini and topping it with a drizzle of olive oil and some nutritional yeast. She only used the outer layer of the zucchini for the pasta, so before long the leftover zucchinis began to pile up in our vegetable drawer.

With a bag filled with naked zucchinis sitting neglected in the fridge, it seemed like a good time to make zucchini bread. It worked out well because I had been sitting on my hands, just waiting to make a batch of zucchini bread since the spring.
Rewind three months to the night my sister returned from the co-op with a small loaf of zucchini bread made by a local gluten-free bakery. It was deliciously moist, not too sweet, and was made with buckwheat - among other gluten-free flours - giving the loaf a pronounced earthy, slightly bitter, nutty flavor. The buckwheat worked well in the zucchini bread - it blanketed the other flavors without strangling them, giving it a level of sophistication and complexity that set it apart from other zucchini breads and made it truly irresistible. The loaf disappeared far too quickly, leaving me with nothing to do but dream of making a zucchini bread that could fill its place.
So, without further ado: a vegan, gluten-free (provided your oats are confirmed gluten-free) zucchini bread that is rich in flavor and texture, and has just enough buckwheat flour to remind you that this is not your grandmother's zucchini bread.
Unless she makes her's with buckwheat flour too - in that case, hats off to her!

Raspberry Rhubarb Crisp

There is a small restaurant in our town that makes delicious, hearty meals. The buffet steams with Indian curries and vegetable stews, wild rice casseroles layered with melted cheese and warm slices of baked sweet potato clinging to their toasted skins. Once you've filled your plate with a colorful array of foods you reach the counter, and as you hand the waitress your plate to be weighed, you'll notice all of the beautiful baked goods. Thumbprints filled with raspberry jam, a chocolate bundt cake dusted with powdered sugar, and apricot muffins with grandiose tops.

There is often one giant crisp filled with seasonal fresh fruits sitting on the counter. When you decide to try some, they'll fill a wide soup cup to the brim and heat it in the microwave. Once it's warm a waiter will bring it over to your table and you'll dive in with a spoon, scooping out a warm mouthful of berries with a sprinkling of oats. The berries are tart and sweet, and so velvety they will seem to just melt away in your mouth.... Suddenly you'll realize how little you have left and you'll try to savor the last few bites. When you reach the bottom you'll fervently scrape the last traces of filling from the dish, licking the spoon clean. And when you've finished you'll ask yourself why you don't eat crisps more often.