z bread

I’m always trying to explain to J just how limited the midwestern palate was circa 1983. Dinty Moore beef stew, jell-o molds, casseroles; hard-shelled tacos were considered exotic. But he grew up in L.A. He doesn’t really understand.

I’m also always trying to explain to him my mother’s relationship to cooking, which has essentially remained non-existent for as long as I’ve known her. When her husband, Don, goes out of town, she gets most excited not about having that liberating extra room in the bed for a couple days, but about not having to “think about meals.” That’s an exact quote. She’ll probably be mad that I’m telling you this, but it’s true: she doesn’t like to cook. I’d even venture a step further: she doesn’t really like the kitchen to get much use at all.

This proved challenging to negotiate as a child. Somewhere along the way she—or maybe it was my stepdad Paul—coined the frequently-used phrase “Let’s just do a G.Y.O.” Get Your Own.

I’m not kidding.

Fortunately, we all survived. This wasn’t the great Irish famine or anything. We ate a lot of cheerios, relished fresh toast for dinner, and became rather proficient prep cooks on our own. I don’t hold it against her, at least not anymore. It makes for a good story, the one about growing up in the wilds of northern Michigan with a mother who never fed us.

But none of this is really, totally true.

She made at least two meals, or rather two dishes, again and again and again. For her, each of them constituted a meal of their own: strawberry shortcake (with ice cream, of course) and zucchini bread.

I’ve remained a devotee of all things strawberry. I’m wild about them, and in early summer, buy quart after quart, eating them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Even a bedtime snack. I don’t go in for the shortcake as much, but I eat the berries until they come out my ears.

The zucchini bread, though, never held the same appeal. So you can imagine my surprise this morning when I woke up to an intense craving for it. I was dying for that slightly metallic quick bread taste, and I also really wanted the sensation of grating all of that zucchini. I wanted the white flour and that white sugar that I rarely taste these days. I wanted to scrape the hot loaves out my old pans.

I dug out my trusty Bread Bible and set to grating.

And then I set to eating. A lot of eating.

I think it might be wrong, but it was lunch and dinner, a pre-walk snack and a post-walk snack, and now, a bedtime snack. Fortunately, I froze the second loaf, so it's officially off-limits, at least until it thaws.