Friendship and Zucchini Bread

At the end of a long stretch of holiday engagements, social obligations and drinking binges, my friend Jen and I caught up with each other for a couple of days during her visit to Chicago this Christmas. The last thing we wanted to do was hit up our neighborhood hipster bars and go out drinking - she was still recovering from an epic Christmas hangover, and I was in no better shape from a whiskey fueled high school reunion over the weekend. Time for us to detox a little and take it easy.

Chicago has been locked in an arctic freeze and covered with snow since last week, so it was pretty clear that we weren't going to skateboard downtown or go on a long bike ride. We've always bonded over food, so I figured the best way to spend our short amount of time together would be to come in from the cold and hang out in my kitchen in our socks around a warm oven. Between the busyness of our past couple of weeks, we planned our intense baking session.

Jen's vegan, and has been influencing my eating habits for the better in the many years that I've known her. We'd feed ourselves between extreme adventures on wheels, and I learned how to transit out of a thoughtless processed food lifestyle with fresher and more natural alternatives. Introducing good healthy food into your diet reaps exponential benefits for your life all around. We work hard and play hard physically - the ability to cycle dozens of miles every day, and skate a bowl for hours upon hours demands that you eat your vitamins.

In some sub-zero windy moments rushing around during the holidays, I daydreamed about this zucchini bread we would be baking. It would be savory enough to keep it from becoming just another annoyingly cloying pastry. The delicate flavor of the squash would bake so nicely and keep the bread moist, while the cinnamon and nutmeg would make my house glow with the smell of spices. I'd cut it into slices and toast them, and offset the warm chewiness of the zucchini bread with a drizzle of almond butter. Yum!

Jen came over and set up her music player to trade music with me while we prepped and got the ingredients in place for our project. We caught up on each other's states of minds, as we've done many times during our hangout sessions throughout the years - from cabin rooftops in Colorado where we splayed out in a valley inhabited by a she-bear, to alleyway gardens in Lincoln Park in the summertime - we've shared so many exquisite brief pauses in the chaotic tornadoes of our everyday existences and treated ourselves to a few fine things that have made those moments even more delightful. This very thing is truly what these holidays are supposed to be about, and I felt so fortunate to have caught up with Jen before she headed back to Denver.

There is not a more wholesome and honest way to spend time with a friend. I believe that baking is a wildly creative endeavor, an alchemy of passion. We zoned out on the work it took to grate the zucchini and put love into mixing the sugar and the spices. Here is the recipe that we followed. It's made with applesauce and flaxseeds, and simple enough that we could put absolute care into every ingredient.

We triumphed in our efforts and swooned over the outcome, as we knew we would. The almond butter on toasted zucchini bread slices was as amazing as I imagined it would be, especially with some vanilla soymilk. Like many divine things that manifest into my life I finally understood that I had dreamt it to ensure it would become real, because it was going to be so fantastic.