I am dead tired today, and It’s all I can do to keep my eyelids from drooping down over my eyes and obscuring the view of my laptop screen. You see, I haven’t been sleeping very well, and I have a lot of reasons for feeling like I’m one word away from collapse.

First off, there’s the constant drip, drip, drip from the big hole in my bedroom ceiling where water continues to come in with each nightly storm. Each time I hear it, I’m reminded of our building management’s incompetence and inability to fix anything – in fact they usually just exacerbate the issue – and the whole ordeal makes me violently angry. We’ve had this leak for over a year and these clowns still can’t fix it. And the dripping keeps me awake for hours. There’s also my rude ground floor neighbor who fancies himself a younger version of Hugh Hefner and has taken to throwing obnoxious parties at 2 AM in his illegal, ground-floor hot tub on weeknights. 

So what do I lie awake thinking about? Good, exciting things, for starters: The first day of my International Bread Baking class on July 6th, our recent engagement (I’ll shut up about it, I promise), and my friend Scott coming in from Prague for a visit on Friday, just for some examples.

But I’ve also been under stress, and I’m beginning to feel the brunt of that as well. Getting student loans in order hasn’t been an easy process, and my new frenemy Salle Mae, without whom cooking school would not be possible, sure hasn’t made things easy or affordable. Then there’s all the little errands that have had to happen; getting a replacement social security card (lost) and license (expired when I turned 30), having tests for TB and Hepetitis A (needles, next to snakes are my biggest fear) so my doctor can sign off  when I go back tomorrow with the official form, trying hard to secure some freelance marketing work to stay afloat, and worrying that it’s not going to happen, not to mention still working on the full-time marketing gig that is still mine for the next few weeks.

Maybe it’s no coincidence that I started thinking a lot about the things that my grandmother baked for us when we were kids, as her baking was the ultimate comfort food for all of her grandchildren. I called up my mom the other day and ask her to go through grammy’s recipe box to look for some of my old favorites, and I named this zucchini bread specifically. She found two different versions, which I have combined into one for blog purposes. There were no instructions on the index card, just the ingredients inscribed with pencil in my grandmother’s delicate handwriting and the cooking time and temperature. She knows the technique by heart, so she’s never had a need to write down baking instructions.

I was skeptical about the oil in the bread recipes, mostly because I flat out don’t like canola oil. Sure, you get a moist crumb, but what’s the point when it’s at the expense of taste? I always detect an off flavor using it (or at least, I imagine it), but perhaps that is because of the absence of flavor that comes with using butter. The bread was very good, but in the future I’ll go with my gut and sub in butter. I encourage you to do the same. Perhaps it was for the best that my bread wasn’t as good as I remember it (or at any rate, I’ve developed higher standards for cooking fat) because I only ate a little slice. If I had made it with butter I would have risked devouring the whole loaf in a stressful fit, and that’s not a great idea, given that my mom and I were just considering wedding-wear choices on the phone last night (shoot, I did it again).

Zuchini Bread Recipe
Adapted from Grammy Hall’s recipe box

3 eggs

2 cups of granulated sugar

1 cup canola oil

3 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon cinnamon

3/4 cup sweetened, shredded flake coconut

3 cups grated zucchini

1 teaspoon vanilla

optional: 3/4 cup chopped walnuts or semi-sweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease and flour the bottoms and sides of two bread loaf pans and set aside.

In a bowl, sift together flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and cinnamon and set aside.

Place the eggs, and oil in the bowl of a stand mixer (or, you may also use a hand mixer or do it the old fashioned way) and beat on medium for about 30 seconds. Add the dry ingredients in three equal additions, scraping down the sides and mixer paddle with each addition, beating until just combined. Add the coconut, zucchini, and vanilla (and the walnuts/chocolate chips, if you desire) and beat until just combined. Pour the mixture in equal amounts into the bread pans. Bake for approximately 1 hour, or until the top is golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Cool in the pan for 15 minutes, then turn out onto a cooling rack. Allow the bread to cool completely before cutting. Keeps for 3-4 days wrapped in foil, or up to a month in the freezer wrapped in multiple layers of plastic wrap.