Zucchini ideas? Anyone? Please?

It finally rained! We've now had rain TWICE since we moved to Olympia. I know there'll be a lot more starting in fall, but I was pretty happy to have a rainy day this week.

We got corn on the cob and watermelon in the CSA box this week. : ) We were very excited about both of those. Less excited, though, about more zucchini. Who even likes the stuff? Does anyone out there have ideas on how to use it in something other than zucchini bread (with or without chocolate)?  Zucchini pickels were a bust. Steve googled 'what to do with zucchini' and came up with a recipe for zucchini and onion 'pie'...and it looks pretty good, but was just ok.  Certainly not good enough to make again without tweaking a bunch of things (like less zucchini and more...anything else...for the filling, which totally defeats the purpose).  I've taken our surplus zucchini and grated it, then put it in the freezer. The only other thing I can think of is a big batch of spaghetti sauce with grated zucchini in it along with a bunch of other veggies.

 The watermelon was YELLOW inside!  Whoa, cool.  It is really good too.

Weird potatoes

When I got home from work one day this week, there was a loaf of bread on the counter. We rarely buy sliced bread unless we're going camping and want to make pudgie pies, so I asked Steve why he'd gotten it:
Steve: "It was a demo item at the store."
Me: "Oh, was so good you bought a loaf?"
Steve: "No, they were giving away whole loaves as the demo."
Me: "Oooooookay. That's kinda weird."
Steve: "Yep. But now we have a free loaf of bread."

Has anyone ever see that happen?? Weird, right?

In other news, our CSA veggies this week were excellent. I brought the cucumbers into work to share, since we have a ton. Swiss chard, lettuce, zucchini, summer squash, red and white onion, garlic, slicing cucumber, pickling cucumber, cherry tomatoes, green bell pepper, carrots, a sprig of rosemary, and crazy weird potatoes.

Here's the potatoes. I thought they were ginger roots at first because they were so knobby. I had no idea potatoes could grow like that.

And lastly, this week I finally finished the last of my new-job training requirements...the online class on how to identify, avoid, and if necessary, report sexual harassment in the workplace. It was a fine class, really, and I think in general it's important training. But there were several hilarious examples (which I think weren't supposed to be funny).  You'll be happy to know I scored 100% on the exam. But this question on the test made me laugh out loud, so enjoy:

Impulse week

Monday night I got a text from a Juneau friend - she was in Seattle for the week and were we free to meet for dinner some night? Why, yes! We were! We headed up to meet her on Tuesday night...1 hr 45 min each way since she was staying in the Ballard area, a bit long for just dinner, but worth it.  Good company, good Mexican food.

Friday night I got home from work and asked Steve if he was up for a drive and a hike. It was HOT outside - low 90s - and heading up to Mt. Rainier sounded like a perfect way to get a break from the heat. So in record time (~8 minutes) we loaded up dinner snacks, cameras, hiking shoes, and a map and headed out. It's less than 2 hours to Mt. Rainier National Park entrance from our house, and just a bit more to get to the Paradise visitor center and some great hiking.

We headed up the path from the Paradise parking lot. Our plan was to hike until we found a scenic view, hang out a bit, then head back before it got too dark to see the path. Turns out we had plenty of time for a nice 2 hour hike (RT) and caught some great sunset light.  As an added bonus, it was a great cardio workout since we climbed 800 feet according to the GPS!  The only downside to our late start is that we didn't get home until after 11 pm and almost hit a deer on the way back.