Rainy Day Baking

It is a damp rainy day. The perfect day for doing some baking. Somehow I just can't bring myself to bake in hot weather. Nothing says just eat a salad like hot days of summer. So as soon as we get a cool day I am happy settle in and get some baking done. The first thing I needed to tackle was zucchini bread. I had two rather large zucchinis that I had brought back from my mother's house a few weeks ago. They had been hanging on in the refrigerator waiting to be made into bread. So this morning I started my day with a bicep workout called grating the zucchini. I had enough for three loaves. Two of which will be heading into the freezer.

The next item that needed to be dealt with was the over abundance of cherry tomatoes. I took these pictures of Alexa picking some a few days ago. She looks like she is lost in there doesn't she?

These things are extremely sweet, but there are so many we are not able to keep up with eating them. I did a little recipe hunt on line (prompted by a conversation with my sister Cherie) and decided to roast and freeze them. We had about three quarts from picking this week.

I first had to slice them all in half. This is a lot of slicing.

I then decided to mix in some olive oil, garlic, salt, and pepper. I poured it all onto a cookie sheet covered in foil and baked them at 220 for about 45 minutes to an hour.

They tasted yummy! I am hoping that this preserves some of the really great taste to fresh tomatoes well into the winter when all you can buy are the ones that have no flavor.

Lastly I moved on to muffins. I have to go back to work this week, so the kids are headed to daycare and preschool. I knew the switch to early mornings again would make breakfast a bit of a struggle. I decided to to have some blueberry muffins on hand to put in lunch boxes. I keep them in the freezer and  toss one in each lunch box the night before. That way they are all thawed out by morning and the kids can have a mid morning snack when they get hungry.

In the end my counter looked like this...

Yes, I know the loaf of bread on the right has pieces missing. I got hungry.