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Too stupid to cook

Michael Ruhlman writes that with all of the prepackaged food and simple recipes in a box that are available, people start to believe that they’re too stupid to cook. He goes on to outline the world’s most difficult roasted chicken recipe, which I’ve reproduced.

Turn your oven on high (450 if you have ventilation, 425 if not). Coat a 3 or 4 pound chicken with coarse kosher salt so that you have an appealing crust of salt (a tablespoon or so). Put the chicken in a pan, stick a lemon or some onion or any fruit or vegetable you have on hand into the cavity. Put the chicken in the oven. Go away for an hour. Watch some TV, play with the kids, read, have a cocktail, have sex. When an hour has passed, take the chicken out of the oven and put it on the stove top or on a trivet for 15 more minutes. Finito.

After you’ve finished with the chicken, you can throw the carcass in a pot (with a touch of vinegar to make the meat fall of the bone), add some carrots, celery, onion and salt, simmer it, and you’re left with stock. Then make some delicious soup.

Awesome things

The Book of Awesome

A recent interview with Neil Pasricha, author of 1000 Awesome Things, celebrating the release of The Book of Awesome.

His blog — some entries are nostalgic, reflective, but always positive — now gets about 40,000 visits a day, more than 11 million hits in total. His email box is regularly packed with readers’ messages, spilling out their woes and thanking him for lifting their spirits.

Neil was one of my editors at Golden Words years ago. He’s incredibly funny and well-deserving of the attention that the site has garnered. I hope the book sells really well, I’ll be picking up a copy when it makes it to this side of the pond, or next time I’m back in Canada. Congratulations Neil!

The Alice 100

The Alice 100 collection at UBC contains hundreds of editions of the Alice in Wonderland, as parodies, film productions, stills and other works by Caroll. This article discusses the collection, and the variety of artwork that it has inspired over the years.

In other Alice related news, the British Library has made the first edition of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground available in its entirety, and there’s a version of Alice for the iPad.

Our matryoshka universe

Every black hole contains another universe? It’s possible that our universe is actually sitting inside the black hole of another universe and the black holes in our universe may lead to alternate realities.

According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a tunnel between universes—a type of wormhole. The matter the black hole attracts doesn’t collapse into a single point, as has been predicted, but rather gushes out a “white hole” at the other end of the black one, the theory goes.