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Thursday, July 26, 2007

The Morning News

posted by on July 26 at 7:43 AM

In firings: 9/11 wingnut Ward Churchill sacked.

In Congress: House votes to ban permanent bases in Iraq.

In contempt: Bolten and Miers will face charges.

In hypocrisy: US ambassador says Iran isn’t doing enough to deal with Iraq.

In desperate straits: Army orders surge in recruitment program.

In bummers: Obesity “socially contagious,” according to study.

In justice
: Judge orders Sudan to pay $8 million to USS Cole victims’ families.

In the Ukraine: Massive poison cloud after train derails.


Only in Texas
: Creationist appointed to head state school board.

In idiocy: Long-time light rail critic says light rail is bad for the environment. Guess what transportation alternative he likes? Buses.

In freakishness: Mutatos!

In deliciousness: Recipe of the Day

Zucchini Bread (Photo and recipe from 101 Cookbooks)

zucchinibreadrecipe_072-1.jpg

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups chopped walnuts, plus a few to sprinkle on top
1/3 cup poppy seeds (optional)
zest of two lemons (optional)
1/2 cup crystalized ginger, finely chopped (optional)

1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
3 large (preferably organic) eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla

3 cups grated zucchini (about 3 medium), skins on, squeeze some of the moisture out and then fluff it up again before using

3 cups whole wheat pastry flour or all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 tablespoon curry powder (optional)

Special equipment: two 1 pound loaf pans (5 x 9 inches)

Preheat your oven to 350°F. Butter the two loaf pans, dust them with a bit of flour and set aside.

In a small bowl combine the walnuts, poppy seeds, lemon zest, and ginger. Set aside.

In a mixer, beat the butter until fluffy. Add the sugars and beat again until mixture comes together and is no longer crumbly. Add the eggs one at a time mixing well and scraping down the sides of the bowl between each addition. Stir in the vanilla and then the zucchini (low speed if you are using a mixer).

In a separate bowl, combine the whole wheat pastry flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and curry powder. Add these dry ingredients to the wet ingredients in two batches, stirring between each addition.

By hand, fold in the walnut, poppy seed, lemon zest, and crystalized ginger mixture. Save a bit of this to sprinkle on the tops of the zucchini loaves before baking for a bit of texture. Avoid over-mixing the batter, it should be thick and moist, not unlike a butter cream frosting.

Divide the batter equally between the two loaf pans. Make sure it is level in the pans, by running a spatula over the top of each loaf. Bake for about 40-45 minutes on a middle oven rack. Remove from the oven and cool the zucchini bread in pan for about ten minutes. Turn out onto wire racks to finish cooling.

Makes 2 loaves.

RSS icon Comments

1

The anti-affirmative action guy is Ward Connerly. Ward Churchill is a garden variety "9/11: America Deserved It" guy.

FWIW

Posted by Ummm | July 26, 2007 7:53 AM
2

Will in Seattle,

You'll love this one:

"When Are Republicans Going to Come Clean and Admit They Hate Democracy?

Republicans used to be more honest and admit they were anti-democratic. They would insist that "the United States isn't a democracy, it's a republic". Now they mouth the word 'democracy' with every hypocritical breath. Just as David Vitter and Ted Haggard preach "family values" and homophobia right before they head for the nearest whorehouse or gay bar, Republican words and actions are severely disconnected.

I always had to laugh during the Cold War when Republicans talked about the 'dangers of appeasement' and 'the lessons of World War II'. Because the 'appeasers' in the years leading up to World War II were mainly right-wing Republicans, and the reason they were appeasing Germany is because they were pro-Nazi. Right up until we entered the war Hitler had strong support from the American right. Virtually all of America's billionaires at that time--Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, Hunt--were Nazi sympathizers, and a great many of those Republicans touting the 'lessons of World War II' felt we were fighting on the wrong side in that war."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-slater/when-are-republicans-goin_b_57799.html

Posted by Original Andrew | July 26, 2007 8:17 AM
3

your link to the "In contempt: Bolten and Miers will face charges." item is wrong.

Posted by anners | July 26, 2007 8:19 AM
4

I'm going to make this zucchini bread with my godson tonight! Thanks for the recipe.

Posted by Michigan Matt | July 26, 2007 8:20 AM
5

Oh dear. I knew this vegetarian thing would devolve into hippie bread at some point.

Posted by It's Mark Mitchell | July 26, 2007 8:21 AM
6

What #1 said...ECB you've got your Wards really badly confused...but in a peculiarly ironic way.

Posted by gnossos | July 26, 2007 8:47 AM
7

4 words: Chocolate Zucchini Bread. Yum!

Posted by B.D. | July 26, 2007 8:47 AM
8

There are about forty more interesting things you can do with zucchini than bread (cake, really).

Posted by Fnarf | July 26, 2007 8:47 AM
9

Agreed with Fnarf. Zucchini stuffed with bulgar wheat, tomatoes, sauteed onions, and parsley topped with a warm yogurt-garlic sauce, for instance. (Lebanese recipe)

Posted by B.D. | July 26, 2007 8:55 AM
10

@8 and 9--

Yes, yes, of course. But my 6-year-old godson will eat zucchini bread.

Posted by Matt in Michigan | July 26, 2007 9:08 AM
11

#6 - Truly

And what's with calling Bundy's argument idiocy? I don't agree with him, but he tried to make a rational argument based on his take of the data. The best you can come up with in response is to call him names? Weak...

Posted by elrider | July 26, 2007 9:10 AM
12

Well, not *only* in Texas. Kansas has done crap like that, too. We need to just give up on the -as states.

Posted by Orv | July 26, 2007 9:27 AM
13

Zucchini bread = hippy bread? They've been making zucchini bread ever since they realized that that weed will take over your garden and grow its fruit like no one's business.

Fnarf, it's really a big muffin, not a cake or bread. And while you can do more interesting things with it, you can't do anything more interesting that also solves the problem of what to do with all that goddamn zucchini in the first place.

Posted by Matt from Denver | July 26, 2007 9:29 AM
14

#6 - The reasons are endless. To me buses don't give any environmental benefit because for anyone to actually use buses we need nothing short of bus corridors. The only decent info in that paper is that I am not for tunnels anymore.

Gee... what form of transportation doesn't require much street space OR tunnels? Oh that's right Sound Transit and their bitch the Seattle Times combined to kill off the rational, sane transportation system with half truths and propaganda.

Posted by chill pill | July 26, 2007 9:34 AM
15

Oh yeah - and you bike freaks I'm glad you do what you do but it's hilly and rainy here. The numbers bad-asses that do brave Seattle commuting via bike are always going to be smaller then other parts of the world.

Posted by chill pill | July 26, 2007 9:38 AM
16

#13

You need a zucchini prevention policy. Snap off the blossoms and cook them as described earlier this week.

Posted by elrider | July 26, 2007 9:44 AM
17

Ukraine. Not THE Ukraine. Ukraine.

Nasdarovya.

Posted by Ziggity | July 26, 2007 9:45 AM
18

yayyyyyy for ward churchill being fired. what an embarassment.

Posted by aarons | July 26, 2007 9:47 AM
19

Matt from Denver: OK, it's a muffin. Muffins are for people who hate food. They're a million times worse than even cake. In fact, I would go so far as to say that nothing on the earth is as bad as a muffin.

Posted by Fnarf | July 26, 2007 10:17 AM
20

Fnarf, I'm glad my childhood wasn't anything like yours, as only some muffin trauma can account for a pleasure-denying attitude such as yours. Feel free to send me any zucchini bread that comes your way.

@ 16, I've done squash blossom recipes before and while they're delicious they're also an enormous pain in the ass. Picking, washing and drying all those blossoms takes so much time it's hardly worth the effort. But thanks for the suggestion.

Posted by Matt from Denver | July 26, 2007 11:14 AM
21

Erica,

If you read the article, you would have noted that what Emory Bundy calls "the best possible transportation mode" is the same one that you and I often use to get to work: the bicycle. He uses it, too.

This makes him an idiot?

Posted by JohnCToddJr | July 26, 2007 11:33 AM
22

@2 - thanks, but the fact that Rove is going to have to speak under OATH is what has me excited today, plus the US AG going down on criminal charges ...

Posted by Will in Seattle | July 26, 2007 11:49 AM
23

Will in Seattle @ 22,

Sorry, neither will happen since we have a "Justice" Department that's as corrupt and contemptuous of the rule of law as the criminals they're supposed to be prosecuting.

In the old days, we might have had people who would put their country and Constitution before their party and political power, but those folks are long gone.

Posted by Original Andrew | July 26, 2007 12:12 PM
24

i couldn't deal with the veggie artist's website long enough to figure out his point. aren't those veggies just what actual vegetables look like when not sorted out to be sold in stores to people who freak out if their peppers aren't "pepper-shaped"? his intro page was kind of internet-conspiracy theory level gobbeldy-gook. (is "gobbeldy-gook" one of those weird secret racist terms or not?)

Posted by erin | July 26, 2007 12:35 PM
25

LOL @1,6 ... yet another display of ECB's respect for detail.

Posted by tsm | July 26, 2007 12:41 PM
26

Hey, what about that cute little cat the predicts death? It is all over yahoo. Imgine all those old folks saying... "Oh look at the cute little kitty coming up on my bed. WAIT!! CAT OF DEATH GET OFF ME!!!" I can see why Egyptians worshiped them now.

Posted by Cato the Meow Mewo | July 26, 2007 12:42 PM
27

Any native Northwesterner knows exactly what to do with enormous quantities of surplus zucchini. You leave it surreptiously on your neighbors' porches in brown paper sacks. When you run out of neighbors, you start doing the same thing in the break rooms at work.

Oh, and @7 - Chocolate Zucchini Bread is not four words. Chocolate Pot Zucchini Bread is, which explains a great deal.

Posted by Geni | July 26, 2007 4:12 PM
28

"Gee... what form of transportation doesn't require much street space OR tunnels? Oh that's right Sound Transit and their bitch the Seattle Times combined to kill off the rational, sane transportation system with half truths and propaganda. "

You have got to be kidding, right Chill Pill?

The Seattle Times has been editorializing and railing against Sound Transit since the day they discarded an alignment that went right by Seattle Times World Headquarters on Fairview years and years ago (opting instead for the dense populations of Capitol Hill).

Chill Pill, go back to the Times Editorial page in 2004 - after Sound Transit had broken ground and committed over a billion dollars in light rail contracts - and you can find the Times Editorial Board stating plainly that the project should STILL be stopped. Yeah, it sure is obvious the Times was in Sound Transit's back pocket. What an idiotic conspiracy theory...sounds like something half-sane Emory Bundy would come up with!

Besides Blethen, Ramsey and Vesely's hatred of rail transit, even Seattle Time transportation writer Mike Lindblom (who fawned over the Monorail, treating that project with kid gloves) has got into the propaganda act http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003788710_soundtransit14m.html .

It took the Tacoma News Tribune to out him. www.thenewstribune.com/opinion/story/112516.html

Posted by BigD | July 26, 2007 4:20 PM
29

For the record, Emory Bundy is an idiot.

Besides parroting Krazy Right Winger Kemper Freeman's lies about cars being just as efficient as transit (all the blue blood old money Seattle dinosaurs seem to hold this opinion), Bundy IS AN IDIOT because he always hides his real agenda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit

I mean, Bundy quit his job at the Bullitt Foundation to spend all his waking hours obsessing over new ways to kill light rail...but like most Snake Oil Salesmen, Bundy isn't about to tell you what he's actually FOR....but others have outed his weird ideas in the past:

--------

"Personal rapid transit is one technology that holds great promise for urban transit systems."
-Emory Bundy, Seattle political scientist.

--------

Light-rail foe has rival-rail link Conflicts?

May 19, 2002
David Quigg- The News Tribune

Since the 1980s, years before he emerged as a civic-minded general in the battle to kill light rail, Seattleite Emory Bundy has been a corporate officer of a fledgling transit company that touts itself as a low-cost alternative to light rail. This financial stake - in what the influential critic dismisses as a corporation with no product, no venture capital and no payroll - surprised longtime friends and foes alike last week.

Most wished he'd disclosed it all along. Then the public could judge its effect, if any, on his credibility as a critic, as a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit against light rail and as a dissident member of the official citizen committee that reviewed and endorsed the 1996 ballot measure that created Sound Transit.

Members of that committee say - and meeting notes and minutes confirm - Bundy didn't tell his fellow panel members about his stake in Pathfinder Systems Inc., a developer of so-called personal rapid transit, or PRT. Not on Feb. 8, 1996, when he talked up PRT at a committee meeting. Not on March 5, 1996, when he arranged for a business partner to brief the committee about the PRT concept.

The committee's chairman, Seattle attorney Dick Ford, said it "troubles me" to have been unaware of the business relationship. Other light-rail backers, including state transportation commissioner Aubrey Davis, also see Bundy's silence as problematic.....

-------

PATHFINDER SYSTEMS, INC.

UBI Number 601 506 329
Category Regular Corporation
Profit/Nonprofit Profit
Active/Inactive Inactive
State of Incorporation WA
Date of Incorporation 01/14/1986
License Expiration Date 01/31/2003
Registered Agent Information
Agent Name EMORY BUNDY
City SEATTLE
State WA
ZIP 98112

Posted by BigD | July 26, 2007 4:40 PM
30

I made that zuke bread recipe with my 6-year-old godson last night. It was a ton of fun, and he was totally into it the entire time. We skipped some of the more exotic ingredients, but if I make this again I'll definitely use the curry powder and nuts and stuff.

Posted by Michigan Matt | July 27, 2007 4:14 AM

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