Cheesy bacon zucchini bread

Last week I made a savory cake with zucchini. It turned out pretty well, even though I made the recipe up. Using the internet, I searched for savory cakes and found a few recipes. Many of them were too complicated for what I wanted to do, and others used ingredients that I didn't have on hand. So I fudged it. Here is (roughly) what I did. It made two standard loaves.

The zucchini and cheese make the cake very moist.

Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Butter two standard loaf pans and put them in the fridge.

Grate two medium-sized zucchini. I used the fine blade in my food processor. Salt them lightly and let them disgorge excess liquid in a sieve. After about ten minutes, squeeze the squash gently in your hands to remove more liquid. Set aside.

I used 200 grams of lardons fumés, lightly sautéed, but not browned. In the US, if you can't get smoked slab bacon, use traditional bacon. Cook it lightly but don't let it get crispy. Then cut it up into large bits with a knife. You could also use chunks of leftover ham, chicken, or even pork roast.

I also had a hunk of Gruyère in the fridge. It was just over 100 grams. I grated that up. Any hard, grate-able cheese will work here, from Swiss to Jack to Cheddar. Whatever you like. I saw a couple recipes that used chopped up goat cheese and I would have done that, but I didn't have any goat cheese on hand.

For the batter, lightly beat six eggs in a bowl, then add 2 cups of flour, two teaspoons of baking powder, eight tablespoons of vegetable oil, and a cup of milk. Next, add the cheese, the bacon, and zucchini to the batter along with salt and pepper and mix it up well.

Pour the batter into the buttered loaf pans and bake them for about an hour. You know they're done when you do the wooden-skewer-comes-out-clean test. Then let them cool before turning them out of the pans.

And there you have it. These cakes are good sliced or cut into small cubes and served with before dinner drinks. I sliced one and put the other in the freezer for later.