I introduced a friend to the easy joy of roasting your own chicken this evening (which is something of a Crescat hobby-horse). I have concluded, I think, that contra both Amber and Raffi, my favorite seasoning is probably a vaguely obscene amount of rosemary with a quite obscene amount of chopped garlic, mushed up with some olive oil and then smeared copiously between skin and bird (some salt is involved too; so far as I am concerned, salt should be involved in pretty much everything).

Said friend came up with the clever idea of littering pieces of sliced onion in the pan to soak up the atmosphere, which were far tastier than the potatoes that are sometimes conscripted for the same job.

I don't think I managed to convince her that the chicken fat and oil mixture that pools in the bottom of the pan is really the best part of the whole ordeal, though (and I do admit that when it solidifies into a weird jelly in the refrigerator it's not one of the world's most appetizing-looking things.

At any rate, roast chicken and home-made pizza are probably the two easiest tricks in the kitchen I learned this year. More on the latter later.

UPDATE: The aforementioned friend points out that 5 cloves of garlic, even when the chicken is only a little over 2 pounds, can hardly be characterized as obscene. I will grant that it would have been possible to shove more garlic into the thing's skin, but it really was getting a bit difficult. Not to complain.

As others have noted, Jacob Levy has a piece up at The New Republic, defending (contra Angus Dwyer and Matt Yglesias) President Bush's condemnation of Yalta.

Last Saturday I managed to sneak off to Norwalk to the nearest Penzey's in order to fill a few vacancies (turmeric, ginger, good grey salt, &c.) While I was there, I came across one of their newly-hyped products-- spanish smoked paprika.

Like the Sol Kminkowo that Amber brought me from the Polish salt mines, the stuff purports to be "good on just about everything." I've only had it for a week, so I can't say for certain, but I'm pretty sure it is. It's got all that unidentifiable complexity and depth that normal bland paprika must have had back in the day before most Americans had really discovered ethnic food. Or flavor.

To be clear, this is no substitute for true-blue Hungarian paprika in dishes that call for that (goulash, chicken with artichoke hearts and potatoes, &c.). This is more of a sort of universal dash of tang, zest, verve, and punch. Yum. [Lunch = Trader Joe's extraordinarly inexpensive shell-on fresh-frozen shrimp tossed in 1 tbsp olive oil, one clove smushed garlic, 1 tsp lemon juice, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp smoked paprika, 1/4 tsp cayenne, broiled for about four and a half minutes. I confess that I had a strong temptation to lick the baking sheet.]

I am thinking of breaking off a separate subsection of our "food" category for "spices".

As predicted below, Michael Ross has been executed by the state of Connecticut.

Although unconvinced by the empirical claim that our current system of occasionally killing convicted murderers has any deterrent effect, I nonetheless think that people who commit heinous murders generally deserve to die.

The death penalty smacks of infallibility, to be sure, and that makes me uneasy. On the other hand, acting in the world almost always smacks of some degree of infallibility. We build solid structures, we entrench governmental systems, we reject certain options, paths, and forks forever.

And so, here. That states bother to retain their death penalty systems even though they are expensive, cumbersome, and so rarely employed as to be of little practical use has always struck me as rather odd, but not bad. Efficiency should not be the only goal of the criminal justice system.