Roast beast, roast roots, and a baked pilaf

We recently made this dish for dinner and I couldn’t find a recipe for exactly what I was looking for anywhere, so I’m posting what we made here in order to help anyone else who is wondering how to roast a whole chicken and make a baked rice pilaf at the same time. After doing some research (i.e. lazily searching online) I found a pilaf recipe that did at least have roughly the same temperatures and timings as the roast chicken recipe I’ve been following. What follows is a rough mashing together of those two recipes.

Chicken, root vegetables and pilaf, ready to go in the oven

Ingredients

For the chicken:

• 1 whole chicken (3 1/2 to 4 1/2 pounds), giblets removed and discarded
• 1 tablespoon kosher salt or 1 1/2 teaspoons table salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon ground black pepper

For the pilaf:

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 leek, white and green parts thinly sliced (about 1 cup)
• 10 ounces sliced mushrooms (about 3 1/2 cups)
• 2 garlic cloves, minced (about 2 tsp)
• 1 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme
• 1 1⁄2 cups wild rice
• 1⁄4 cup madeira wine
• 1 tablespoon low sodium soy sauce
• 3 cups low sodium vegetable broth
• 1 cup water
  
• 1⁄2 cup frozen peas
• 1⁄4 cup pine nuts

For the root veg

• 1-3 glugs of olive oil
• A couple handfuls of root vegetables in large cubes: potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, whatever you got on hand/need to get rid of
  
• 1/2 onion, roughly chopped
• a couple whole garlic cloves, trimmed
  
• salt, pepper, garlic powder and paprika to taste

Instructions

1. Mix the non-chicken ingredients for the chicken together and prepare the chicken per the Cook’s Illustrated instructions (cut 4 one inch holes in the skin; use your fingers or a wooden spoon to separate the skin from the meat; put that rub on and dry out in fridge overnight).  WARNING: this needs to be done the day before.
2. In a medium mixing bowl, put all the ingredients for the root veg and toss to coat with oil and spices.
3. Pre-heat oven to 450 degrees F.
4. In a dutch oven over medium heat, cook leeks until soft (~5 mins).
5. Add mushrooms and brown (~7 mins).
6. Add garlic and thyme, stirring, cook 1 min.
7. Add rice, wine, soy sauce, stirring the whole time.  Simmer until almost all the liquid is absorbed.
8. Add broth and water. Simmer while you set up the next step.
9. Jenga time!  Place round, high walled baking dish in the center of a baking pan.  Surround the dish with your root veg.  Carefully transfer the contents of the dutch oven to the baking dish.  Put your chicken on a V-rack and balance it on top of the baking dish.  Put in oven.  This will be difficult to move, so I suggest doing as much of the balancing as you can on the oven’s actual rack.
10. Roast 25 minutes.
11. Give rice and root veg a stir.  Carefully flip chicken and roast another 15-25 minutes.
    
12. Raise temp to 500 degrees F, and roast until the skin is crisp and golden brown, ~20 minutes.
13. The chicken and veg should be done now.  Remove the chicken and allow to rest for 20 minutes.  If your rice is still too wet, return the baking dish to the oven and continue baking while the chicken rests, checking occasionally.
    

Trying something a little different: Out of Context Episode 00

So! It has been a while since I last wrote anything here. Not for any one particular reason. But I’d like to be doing more writing, and as I figure out what that looks like (here or otherwise), I’m going to experiment with a format I see a lot in newsletters (and the occasional blog). It’s going to be a bit of mostly stream of consciousness and some sections with and about the various media I’m keeping up with. I read A LOT of newsletters (okay, I probably ignore more than I actually read, but cut me some slack). Please let me know what you think. I’ve been kicking around the idea of a newsletter along these lines, and if it starts to feel like that format is more appropriate I may switch over. There’s something more…intimate, I guess, about the newsletter form that lends itself to this kind of thing. I think it has to do with the opt-in nature of newsletters. Sure, you may opt-in to reading my blog through an RSS reader or somesuch, but you haven’t entrusted me with your e-mail. That’s a pretty big deal!

Newsletter roundup

Things that I found interesting or noteworthy in the numerous newsletters I follow.

From Damien over at Technoccult, an interesting midrashic interpretation of Adam as intrinsically intersex and/or non-binary based on the use of a singular “they” to describe Adam and Eve at their inception.  He doesn’t go into too much detail so I did a little digging and found this article from Lillith that goes into a bit more detail.

From Rabbi Rosen and Tzedek Chicago, a piece about the use of “anti-Semitism” charges as a way to suppress Palestinian solidarity and criticism of Israel more generally. While I agree 100% that this tactic is oppressive and dangerous, I feel like the article is a little too dismissive of anti-Semitic sentiment on the Left. It exists, and not just in the conflation of Jews and Israel (see Chicago’s Dyke March BS from last year), or the “Jews as Globalist money-hoarders” mentioned in the article. One of the provisions in the bill under discussion defines applying a double standard to Israel as a form of anti-Semitism. Now, I’m not a lawyer or a policy-maker, so I defer to the experts here who are saying that’s too broad and will only be used to attack and suppress Palestinians and other critics of Israel. But that double standard is real, and maybe this is just the bubble I live in, but I see it coming mostly from the Left. That double-standard may not be a good legal test, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s rooted in anti-Semitism.

Open Tabs

I tend to leave tabs open.  A lot of tabs.  Here’s what’s currently sitting in a tab that I think might be interesting to other people.  Yes, I’m hoping this will help me actually read (and close!) them. 

• Many Roads, One Destination – A collection of technology roadmaps for Mycroft, a Free and Open Source smart home device that’s working on version 2 of their hardware.  I backed mark 2 on IndieGoGo and have been idly following them since.  I think they do a good job of balancing product offering and privacy, including offering the option to revoke your data from their machine learning models.
  
• The Automation Charade – Astra Taylor on who benefits from popular narratives around automation.
• Critical Algorithm Studies, A Reading List – From the Social Media Collective, what appears to be a very thorough reading list.
• Cultural Brokerage and Creative Performance in Multicultural Teams – an interesting paper looking at a few specific mechanisms at play on more diverse teams that “enhanced creative performance.”
• Bossy Chicago – A collection of women-owned businesses in Chicago.
• Empowering Entry-Level Developers with Mercedes Bernard – An interesting sounding episode from the Tech Done Right podcast.
  

And that’s pretty much what it’ll look like.  Got thoughts on this pilot episode of Out of Context?  Let me know in the comment please.  It’s cold out there, and we know it’ll get colder.  Hold your loved ones (and heated blankets) close.

Books read in April

Difficult Conversations (1st) – A quick read full of the kind of good advice that will be difficult to put into practice.  Like Getting Things Done, it feels like the way to get the most out of this book is to try out their techniques and then read it again.  Experience putting their recommendations into action will help bring out some of the nuance that gets glossed over in a first reading.  Come to think of it this is probably true of most self help books.

Equal Rites (17th) – Another Discworld novel. I know I’m coming to these late but I’m really enjoying them. I read one of this book’s sequels first (Lords and Ladies) so it was kind of interesting to go backwards in the development of the characters and setting. Like all of the Discworld books I’ve read so far it was a ton of fun and a quick read.

Design for the Real World (23rd) – I picked this up based on a Mike Monteiro talk from Webstock ’13 called “How Designers Destroyed the World“.  Who could ignore a talk with a title like that?  I’m really glad I did.  Papanek skewers (in, at times excruciating, detail) the entire design profession.  The thesis is pretty straightforward.  Designers have an outsized effect on the world we live in and to use it for anything but the greater good is an abuse of the skills required to be a designer.  He provides an interesting framework for evaluating whether a design is “good” enough and there are some great examples of good design as well as some hilarious and/or terrifying examples of bad design.  All in all though, there are probably just too many examples and there are some sections that feel pretty dated (the second edition was written in the 80’s).  (There are also some mind blowingly prescient parts too.)  If you’re involved at all in the design of anything (and that includes you, software people), I highly recommend this book, but don’t be afraid to skim sections that feel like a parade of design examples or product ideas. Probably the best book I’ve read this year.

Note: As of this post I’ll be using Amazon affiliate links.  If that bugs you, it’s pretty easy to circumvent.  I promise it’s not going to effect the content here.