Chocolate Zucchini Bread Recipe

I don’t know about you, but I definitely needed that three-day weekend.

I went to bed way early on Friday night.

Then I spent Saturday working on updating my portfolio page (still under construction, so I’m not linking yet).

I’m going to overhaul my main site (chimesdesign.com) so it’s just links to my portfolio, resumé, social media outlets, and obviously, this blog. The portfolio that’s currently there was updated in 2010, and I’m putting together an updated one in a format that I can keep updated quite easily. Stay tuned. And no, I’m not changing jobs or anything. I just realized that it would be easier to do freelance work if I had a more updated and easy-to-find portfolio! 

Saturday afternoon I went for a walk/run/jog (4 mins running slowly, 2 mins walking, repeat).

I ended up running through the sprinklers because the football field in the middle of the track that I went to was getting some much-needed watering. SO MUCH FUN.

And then I packed up my little buddy and drove to Minnesota for the weekend to spend time with the BF and his family, and a little bit with Amanda as well.

“derp.”

But, I spent a good portion of last week figuring out how to make this bread.

Now that I’ve got it perfected, I’m going to share the recipe with you.

If you know me at all, you know that fad diets annoy me. Paleo is the biggest offender right now. It bothers me that people are all “let’s eat what the cavemen ate!” and then hack a flippin’ pizza crust recipe…because cavemen ALWAYS ordered pizza?

HOWEVER, I now owe some props to Paleo hackers because their recipes make it easy for me to hack my own allergy-friendly foods. Paleo hackers have done most of the work for me already. I guess I’ll give Paleo pizza and ice cream a pass … for now.

I came up with this zucchini bread when my coworker gave me a bunch of zucchini because her garden is bursting at the seams with the stuff.

So I made a few batches of this Chocolate Zucchini bread. I looked at about 5 paleo recipes and combined what I liked into one delicious bread. I’ve also been loving the Purely Twins’ latest obsession with plantains. They, too, are trying to heal their gut (but I think for different reasons — they don’t seem to have food allergies). So I’ve been following their recipes closely to see if I can adopt anything that they’ve been doing. They have been using plantains to make breads and pancakes, so I thought a plantain would be a good substitute for the nut butter that most of the paleo recipes used.

NOTE: if your batter is really wet (should be thicker than pancake batter but not a dough), then you could add additional cocoa, protein, flax, or flour. I made this a second time and used WAY too much flax though, which made for a dangerously tasty bread — if you know what I mean.

I didn’t run the numbers on this one because I don’t count calories or any of that jazz anymore (see: my intuitive eating journey), but it’s low fat, lower sugar (especially if you use stevia and omit the chocolate bar), and is high fiber and/or protein depending on what you mix in for your dry ingredients. But most importantly, it’s a great way to sneak in your veggies and enjoy chocolate too.

What did you do this weekend? Do fad diets irk you? If so, which ones?