Zucchini Bread / Spice Cake

This is what happens when you’re used to buying at the store, where you can actually see the quantity you’re buying, yet give in to the convenience of shopping for groceries online: you end up with 10, large zucchini / courgettes. So, what to do? Well, some of them will be used later, of course, but today’s baking adventure was to double up the recipe below to make 4 loaves of zucchini bread!

Garam Masala Zucchini Bread 1.2
Garam Masala Zucchini Bread 1.1
  • 6 Tbsp ground flax seeds whisked into 1/2 Cup + 1 Tbsp warm water
  • 1/2 cup oil
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 1 Tbsp vanilla extract
  • 2.5 cups grated zucchini
  • 3 cups AP flour
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 Tbsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1.5 Tbsp of your favorite spice blend
  1. Grease 2 loaf pans
  2. Preheat oven to 350°F / 180°C
  3. Blend flax, oil, sugar, and vanilla
  4. Add zucchini and mix
  5. Sift dry ingredients
  6. Add dry to wet and mix just to combine
  7. Divide between prepped pans
  8. Bake for 45-50 minutes (a toothpick should come out clean)

Delicious stuff, and a great excuse to both use up any excess zucchini you have around, and to use up those coarser bits of your spice blend.

-D & T

Note: the pictures above are from another batch, 2 years ago.

Savory Spice Blend

Now, this isn’t a recipe, per se, but merely a list of things that we like to throw together, to make what we call Popcorn Salt (although it contains no salt). It should more properly be called Tofu Rub, because that’s where it finds its most common application in our kitchen, although we’ve also been known to throw it into a savory cornbread (you know: veggie sausages in the batter, some nice chili on the bottom).

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  • Rosemary
  • Cumin
  • White Peppercorn
  • Sichuan Peppercorn
  • Celery Seed
  • Yellow Mustard Seed
  • Brown Mustard Seed
  • Allspice
  • Dill Seed
  • Sage
  • Thyme
  • Oregano
  • Caraway Seed
  • Onion Powder
  • Garlic Powder
  • Nutritional Yeast
  • Chipotle Powder

In the past, we’d made enough to fit into a little spice jar, but grew tired of having to always make new. That’s why you’ll see the many layers of the same ingredient: D. knows the ratios pretty well for doing a single batch, but this was at least a triple batch. So, he had to go through the spices twice.

Not pictured here are the onion and garlic powders, the chipotle powder, and the nutritional yeast. The yeast gets blended, but separately and mixed in. The onion and garlic powders are just added and mixed in, as is the chipotle powder.

This stuff will really spice up just about anything – make your own mix up, balancing out the spices as you think you’d like them, and give it a try!

-D & T

Light Reading?

By way of some light reading, I picked up Gordon Dickson’s novel Dorsai! Now, I know the book was published in 1959, so I didn’t expect for it to be particularly … progressive in its thinking about women. And, being Military Science Fiction, I knew that it was even less likely to treat female characters with any decency. I was unprepared.

“It is Woman’s ancient heritage to appreciate something without the need to know.”

“Surely you see that the oldest and greatest of the female instincts is to find and conserve the strength of the strongest male she can discover. And the ultimate conservation is to bear his children.”

Oh, so woefully unprepared.

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It’s a problem, really, which hasn’t really been addressed even in modern science fiction novels: women tend to be woefully presented, weak, oversexualized, simply props for the manly men who actually have the adventure. Why should this be? It’s not as if the readers want female characters to be so mistreated. Do these authors believe that readers expect this? Do these authors believe this about women in real life? Or are these authors just as sexist as their characters?

I know, there are exceptions to this behavior – but they are exceptions, rather than the norm.

So much for light reading. Back to Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and / or Bruno Latour. Definitely not light reading.

-D

Who Owns Your Information?

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Just a bit of food for thought, as you go about your increasingly-online lives: what happens to your personal information if your online service goes bankrupt? In at least one case, things have turned out all right, but only after “Creditors of XY Magazine claimed that the magazine’s subscriber base and its readers’ personal information was an asset that they were entitled to in a bankruptcy proceeding.” (See Bankruptcy Proceeding Threatens Readers’ Privacy for the full article.) In this particular case, because the magazine had a privacy policy which stated that they would protect its users’ personal details and never share them, the users were protected (fortunately for them, as the magazine’s market was young, gay males, at least some of whom hadn’t gone public with the fact).

What does that mean to you, though, when you routinely enter your private information, ticking the box which says, “I have read and agreed to the terms of service?” Well, let’s consider what you’ve signed away, if you have a FaceHook account (as do half a billion others), shall we?

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According to their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, are your personal photos protected? Your “notes”? If they go bankrupt, since you’ve agreed (in the T.O.S.) to them sub-licensing your content – without paying you – I’d suspect not.

Further, they explicitly state, “By using Facebook, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States.” So, all of you in the US, you’re already there. What does that mean to the rest of the world, though? Well, it means that they are not subject to, for example, The UK Data Protection Act, which means that they are not required to destroy your information should you decide to leave them.

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Should you be worried? Well, is the company earning any money?

This doesn’t just apply to FaceHook, of course. It also applies to any number of companies out there, any number of which may decide to sell some of their assets, should they run into trouble, just as XY Magazine did.

I realize that not everybody is bothered by this – it’s become just the way things are – but I wonder whether the world wouldn’t be a better place if all of our information were safeguarded by law, rather than simply by caveat emptor, because the buyers do not read the privacy policies, and are not being aware.

-D

August 25, In Retrospect

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Yet some more photos from 2,000, taken in Skagway, Alaska. I think Skagway was my favorite of the whole trip, just because it was so much smaller, and we got a chance to get away from the other tourists. We’ve not been on a cruise since, and doubt that we will, if only because hanging out witn 2,000 other tourists doesn’t let you see that much of the way things really are.

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And, after a long patch of not taking pictures on August 25, here are two taken while we’ve been in Glasgow. These aren’t from the same year – the orchids were in 2009, and the sweet-potato bread from 2008. Funny to think that we’ve already been in this current flat for a whole year, and, despite its foibles, we really do like it here.

-D

August 24, In Retrospect

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Funny: the only pictures we’ve taken (apparently) on August 24 were way back in 2,000, on our cruise to Alaska. I doubt that’s the truth, really – I think that that’s the day the film was developed, because these pictures are from Juneau, yet some pictures which are from the 25th are from Skagway, which we visited prior to Juneau, as I recall.

Wish we’d been shooting high-resolution digital, way back then. Alas, we were shooting “APS” format film, and have since lost the camera somewhere.

-D

Popular Photos

It’s always interesting to us just what people find interesting, in our photos. Below are the photos which have received the most views, from left to right. The first has become popular because it’s been discussed on Sociological Images, the second because it’s mentioned at The Fresh Loaf, but the next two? We can’t figure out why the Kohlrabi picture would be popular whatsoever. The Masala one is the only one to which we return, again and again, because it lists out the ingredients for making our own version of Garam Masala.

Virgin Active Loaves2m Kohlrabi 1.2 Masala 1.1

We’ve long since topped 20,000 photos, up on Flickr. We sincerely hope that you’re enjoying them.

-D&T

Links

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A bit fewer links this week, as I’ve actually managed to stick with the schedule and get these out on a Friday evening, rather than hoarding them until there are too many to really process. I hope that you enjoy them, and have time to peruse them over the weekend! An article not in the links, because it was shared with me, is Jon Carroll’s article, in which he puts a spotlight onto some of the location privacy issues brought about by FaceHook’s recent move to encourage users to share their geolocation with the world. It’s worth a read, I think, particularly if you’re not aware of the issue of geolocation privacy.

Enjoy!
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