The apple never falls far from the tree.

I've been harboring a craving for zucchini bread for at least a month.  Tonight I decided I'd waited long enough.  Hang homework!  I was going to bake.  So I did an online search for said bread, though I'm not totally sure why as I have at least thiry cookbooks.  Anyway, I googled "zucchini bread", and Paula Dean's recipe was the first of many results.  As usual, the name, Paula Dean, brought a smile to my face as the words "butter" and "fat" danced through my thoughts.  I quickly scanned the recipe. 
"Yum, nutmeg!  3 cups of sugar?! ...Where's the butter?!  Oh, Paula, why have you failed me?!"
Yes, apparently even the great Paula Dean uses oil like the rest of the world when making zucchini bread. 
The recipe still looked absolutely scruptious, so I decided to give it a shot anyway.
I brought my laptop into the kitchen and plunked it on the counter--no wasting paper for this girl.  I started measuring ingredients into my happy green mixing bowl.  (Well, I measured as much as a dump and pour cook like me can measure.  I DID use a measuring cup, Allison.  It is the first time I've made this recipe, after all.) 
"Hmmmm. I wonder what whole wheat flour will do to this recipe?"  A half cup of white flour was saved as a half cup of whole wheat flour immediately went into the bowl. 
Then I got to "baking soda" and realized I had none in the house.  No problem, I had baking powder.  However, having never had the chance to perform this substitution in any way but "baking powder to soda", I thought I'd better look it up.  Apparently, baking soda is four times stronger than baking powder, so I had to add eight teaspoons of the powder to the mix.  However, the advice-givers also warned that any acids included in the recipe had to be taken out as they were there to activate baking soda.  Baking powder doesn't need extra acid.  So out went the "lemon juice".  No problem, right?  A drop of lemon extract would give the flavor.  Well, I discovered I was also out of lemon extract.  Bummer, no butter, no lemons.  This recipe was beginning to sound less and less cool.
My wits quickly returned from their brief vacation, and I decided almond extract would make this zucchini bread extra-delicious in lemon flavoring's absence.  In went the almond extract. 
And then it occurred to me: I was an inch from the top of my green bowl, and I hadn't added any wet ingredients.  Oh drat!  So I went to the only bowl I had that would do the job: the Big Blue Bowl.  The Big Blue Bowl handled my dry ingredients with plenty of room to spare, so I moved on to the wet ingredients.  Aha! The green bowl was still needed.

The green bowl became home to the great "Tower of Zucchini", and as I added eggs and oil I decided they made a great moat for the Tower, though the Tower quickly settled out and down.  The moat gave no protection to the Tower as my spatuala descended from above.  The wet ingredients went into the dry ingredients. 
"Lovely, now for some loaf pans," I said outloud.  But then I remebered; I don't have loaf pans. Ahhhh!  "What am I going to do now?"
Zucchini cake.  I made two beautiful golden rounds of zucchini cake.  After fifty minutes in the oven, they came out perfectly!  I set them on top of the stove while I got out a cooling rack.  I began to smell something burning.  NOOO!!!!  I had left a burner on after making a disasterously messy tuna melt!  One of my beautiful cakes now had a burned bottom.  I scooped it off the burner and onto the cooling rack praying my nose was lying to me.  It wasn't.  Oh well.  I still had one perfect, delicious zucchini cake.

Now for the eating part.  Yum.  I love zucchini bread, though I think I'll use less nutmeg next time, and perhaps the slight salty flavor is from the extra baking powder.

So in the midst of the "Great Zucchini Bread Adventure" I kept thinking of my mom.  She taught me to cook and bake.  She gave me my love of all things edible (except melons and liver) and made cooking seem fun and adventurous.  She's also the reason I didn't really measure and substitute things like whole wheat flour for white for the fun of it.  She's the reason that, instead of panicking, I substituted baking powder for baking soda, almond for lemon, and cake pans for loaf pans.  She's the kind of person who would taste something she'd just made and say, "This is good, but I think next time I'll put in more garlic." 
One of my mom's trademark quips to my family about a meal has always been, "I followed the recipe this time, and I didn't  substitute anything, either.  ...  Oh, except ______.  Oh yeah, and ______.  And _____, and _____."  Then we'd laugh and eat.  The food was always delicious, and my mother and I can probably count on two hands each the number of times we've followed a recipe exactly.