Weekday breakfasts are a complicated matter.

I am not the sort of person who can have cereal, oatmeal, or toast every single day of the year, as great as they are for folks like me who are married to their computers. Sure, I’ll go through week-long spells of eating one of the aforementioned foods. But then I get bored and move on to the next, and the next, until the cycle repeats itself.  Every once in a while (too often, actually), I’ll break down and buy a bagel. But alas, one can’t do that every single day, especially with the amount of cream cheese New York bagel shops typically slather on.

Lately, I’ve gotten back into baking. And hopefully this will solve my breakfast dilemma. My goal is to bake at least one new (healthy-ish) breakfast item a week that can last me 3 or 4 mornings. Then maybe cereal and oatmeal won’t seem so boring after all.

First up is zucchini bread, something we’ve adored in the US since the 1960s. I had been craving zucchini bread since Saturday, when my friend Amy told me she made a loaf to get her vegetable-phobic husband to eat something green. (He ended up loving it.) And I had been wanting to try out a bookmarked zucchini bread recipe from The American Century Cookbook. The author got the recipe in the 1970s from an Illinois woman she interviewed for Family Circle magazine. “This was my first encounter with zucchini bread but by no means my last,” the author wrote. “I have been offered zucchini bread recipes by cooks from all over the country but have yet to find a finer one.”