Grilling lamb, and singeing the blogger

Four months after Julie Powell finished her lamb feast, I’m trying my own. Here it’s just me eating, but it’s a whole butterflied leg of lamb, rubbed with fresh rosemary, parsley, basil, and oregano from my garden, and done on the grill for (so claims The Joy of Cooking twelve minutes on a side. So for twenty-four minutes of non-rainy Seattle suburban bliss, I’m blogging from the patio on the new PowerBook, mint julep by my side…

…Sorry, I’m back. The fat on the back of the lamb had dripped down into the grill, which is a bit scary already, and so the grill was doing a reasonable imitation of The Towering Inferno. It was time to flip the lamb anyway, which I managed with something close to aplomb and something like 60% of the hairs on my hand intact. Mind, this is after the handy little spray bottle put out most of the flames. Man, it’s tough out here tonight.

(Twelve minutes later) The smaller portion of the lamb finished cooking in the prescribed 12 minutes a side, but the major part of the leg was about 15 degrees too cool. Hope this finishes in time to catch Alton Brown.

(After) Not bad, but would have been better with garlic. Still, it gives me hope that, through the magic of butterflying, everything can be grilled! Next up: wildebeest!

Question for the next year

Paul Krugman in the New York Times: “how can Congress or the public make informed votes if both are fed distorted information?” He’s writing about the trend of government agencies under this administration, in this instance the Treasury Department, to release incomplete information in a way that suppresses information that could put the Administration’s tax policies in a bad light.

The original article, by Martin Sullivan in Tax Notes, sounds like it would be a good read, except of course Tax Notes is behind a pay-wall. Another analysis by Robert Greenstein at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is good reading.

Once around the block

From the keiretsu:

  • Esta writes about the Episcopalian decision to ordain a gay bishop, and some subsequent fallout in that community: “The greater public sees a large proportion of believers being hateful, and the church wonders why its numbers are dwindling?” The interesting part of that process, in my opinion, is the way the allegations of child abuse and pornography sprung up in the eleventh hour, but were quickly defused. Makes you wonder…
  • Got an IM from Greg this morning confirming the arrival of my birthday gift, the first CD I burned using this machine. If anyone else is curious, I posted the play order over at Art of the Mix.
  • Flangy points out the one thing I didn’t in my update marathon last night: it rained here. Shortly after I put the sprinkler on our tomatoes. He also wishes for categorized RSS feeds. Unfortunately Manila doesn’t provide those out of the box, but there’s an RSS plugin available that I use to roll mine.