My favorite fruit from the garden!

Botanically speaking a fruit is the part of a plant that contains the seed. With this definition in mind we could call something from the garden a fruit if we eat the part with the seed. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and green beans would be examples of fruit. Lettuce, celery, radishes and carrots would then be vegetables.

These are not the definitions we use in cooking or when eating however. Luckily this whole mess was cleared up in 1893 when the United States Supreme Court declared the tomato a vegetable instead of a fruit. In that case, they wisely gave us our current definitions of fruits and vegetables. They said a vegetable is something we eat with lunch or dinner and a fruit was something sweet that was generally eaten as dessert.

So with the Supreme Court's definition in mind, the fruits we are growing this year in our garden are strawberries, watermelon and cantaloupe. We also have apple and peach trees and blueberry bushes but none of these are my favorite garden fruits.

My absolute favorite fruit from the garden, by the Supreme Court's definition, is......

 

 

Zucchini!

That's right, zucchini. I know zucchini is a squash which is a vegetable, but my dessert last night was sweet and delicious and made from zucchini.

My wife and daughters made the best zucchini bread ever! They used a fantastic Amish recipe. Maybe I can get the recipe from them to share with you in a future post.

For now I will have to tell you how to make it by explaining in great detail what they did and by showing you step by step pictures. Pay close attention now.

First they cut and grated the zucchini:

Then they mixed in some sort of ingredients and put in the zucchini. They proceeded to mix the batter up some more and put it in bread pans:

Then they put the pans in the oven at some temperature for some amount of time.

See? Its easy. If you do it exactly like I have explained it to you, you will have tasty Amish zucchini bread.

When I got home, my wife cut me a big piece and served it on one of our old fashioned Amish plates.

And this is what it looked like after I did my part:

I was happy to pitch in.

So there you have it. My favorite fruit from the garden.

Comments

[August 08, 2007 at 10:00 PM]

made some myself the other week with students, not having the chocolate chips which it called for, I had a student grate up two blocks of unsweetened baking chocolate..... tasty.

and for the supreme court taking the time to declare what is a vegetable... I have to share this story with my students and friends.

[August 08, 2007 at 11:04 PM]

That's wonderful. I love to see garden blogs with recepie ideas. I made a 'yellow squash pie' last week. I used yellow straightneck squash and made a sort of a... well.. pie! popular in the Southern USA.

[February 22, 2008 at 10:00 PM]

I made zucchini bread too. I also made zucchini brownies and I just love the fact that kids don't know they are eating vegetables or fruit in your case.