Zucchini banana blueberry lemon muffins

What You Need for 24 Muffins:
Wet ingredients
2 large, very ripe bananas
2 cups grated zucchini (about 2 small zucchini)
.5 c vegetable oil (or canola or melted coconut oil)
.5 c unsweetened applesauce
1 c sugar
2 Tablespoons vanilla extract
zest from 2 lemons
Dry ingredients
3 c all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons powdered ginger
1.5 teaspoons baking soda
1.5 teaspoons table salt
1.5 c blueberries

What You Need to Do:
Preheat oven to 350*
Line muffin tins with festive cupcake wrappers and give them a quick mist with your favorite non-stick spray (mine is a Target brand coconut oil spray).
Peel your bananas, throw the peels away, and put bananas into a large mixing bowl.
Mash bananas with a fork, pastry cutter, avocado masher, potato smasher, or your hands if you’re a complete anarchist. Whatever makes you happy. Just get a majority of the large lumps out.
Add applesauce, oil, sugar, vanilla and lemon zest.
Mix well.

In a second bowl, mix together the flour, ginger, baking soda and salt.
Add approximately half the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix until combined.
Toss the blueberries in the remaining dry ingredients to coat.
Add the blueberries and remaining dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and stir gently until no visible flour is left.

Using a .25 c measuring cup or this handy-dandy scoop, fill prepared muffin tins.
Bake for 22 minutes. I suspect my oven runs slightly hot, so you may need a few additional minutes if you don’t have a raging heatbeast.
Let cool in the pan for 5-10 minutes before turning out onto a cooling rack until completely cooled you want to eat muffins.

A note: This recipe halves very easily, should you not need/want 24 muffins. But they also freeze well, which is a strong endorsement for making “too many” muffins.

How Long is This Going to Take Me?
Less than an hour, unless you grate your zucchini with a comically tiny grater. Which I did, because I didn’t feel like taking .005 seconds to grab the food processor/I needed this to double as an arm workout today.

Is it Even a Food Blog if There Isn’t a Story?
Here we go:
A few years back, I was accused of inventing zucchini bread. After “accidentally” buying somewhere in the range of 15 pounds of zucchini at the farmers’ market, I spent an entire week baking zucchini breads/muffins and bringing them into the office, where the general consensus was “overbuy squash more often.” There was one outlier, who was initially VERY suspicious of zucchini in a non-savory application and called her mother to see if she’d ever heard of zucchini bread, because how was this a thing? Eventually, there was acceptance that zucchini bread was, in fact, a thing. A DELICIOUS thing, dammit.

(AP, I will think of googling “zucchini bread” as proof it exists every time I make zucchini bread until I die. I adore you for dozens of reasons, but this is admittedly a huge one.)