Looks like we could use an open thread.
Saturday Dinner: Roasted Leg of Lamb With Root Vegetables
While TaMara made a return last night with her recipe exchange, I thought I’d go ahead and slip on the tiara, frilly apron, and matching oven mitts and get to work. For your gustatory pleasure, I proudly present a roasted bone out leg of lamb with root vegetables.
The recipe is really very basic, but quite delicious:
Ingredients:
1 Boneless Lamb Roast (in this case 4.5 lbs)
Kosher salt to taste
Freshly cracked black pepper to taste
Instructions:
Remove the lamb from the cryovac, remove the netting, rinse, and pat dry inside and out. Then salt and pepper the inside and outside of the lamb to taste. Let sit on the counter for an hour or so to bring the temperature of the lamb closer to room temperature. Preheat oven to 275. After an hour roll the lamb up, truss with twine tightly, and tie the twine off. Cover the bottom of a broiler pan with silver foil, then place the lamb roast onto the top of the broiler pan so the juices can run through the slits and be captured by the foil lined place. Roast until the internal temperature is 125-130 for rare or 135 for medium rare. When the internal temperature reaches your preference, remove from the oven, cover and let rest for 30 to 40 minutes. While the lamb is resting heat the oven to 500 degrees. After 30-40 minutes uncover the roast, place it back in the now 500 degree oven, and sear it for 15 minutes to crisp up the fat and make a nice, crispy crust. Remove from the oven after 15 minutes, move the roast to a cutting board, remove the twine, and slice.
(Salted and Peppered Lamb Ready for Twining)
(All Trussed Up and Nowhere to Go)
(Getting Read to Rest)
(Seared and Ready for Slicing)
Roasted root vegetables.
Ingredients
1 small bag Red heirloom potatoes
1 small bag Purple heirloom potatoes
8 stalks of celery
1 and 1/2 lbs of carrots chopped
Kosher salt to taste
Freshly cracked black pepper to taste
Minced garlic to taste
Instructions:
Rinse and then cut the potatoes in half and place in a large bowl. Rinse, trim the tops and bottoms, and then chop the celery into 1 inch pieces. Rinse, and if necessary (depending on what you’ve purchased) trim the tops from the carrots. Then chop into 1 inch pieces. Place the potatoes, celery, and carrots into a large bowl, drizzle with olive oil and toss. Then salt, pepper, and add the minced garlic to taste. Toss to coat the vegetables thoroughly and transfer to a roasting pan. Roast on the top rack of the oven while the lamb is roasting. When the lamb comes out to rest, leave the veggies in to finish as the oven heats to 500 degrees. When the lamb goes back in to sear, remove the vegetables and cover with foil until the lamb is seared, sliced, and ready for serving.
(Oiled, Seasoned, and Ready for Roasting)
And then enjoy!
Saturday Dinner: Roasted Leg of Lamb With Root VegetablesPost + Comments (162)
Open Thread: New Category — Trump Crime Cartel
The president will lie to us for years while picking fights on twitter and quietly telling his children which stocks to buy.
— Jon Lovett (@jonlovett) November 19, 2016
It’s gonna be in heavy rotation, if current reports are any guide. Paul Waldman, in the Washington Post, “Welcome to the Trump kleptocracy“:
“It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” Donald Trump said back in 2000 when he was contemplating a bid that he never followed through on. And while he didn’t actually turn a profit on his 2016 run, it’s looking more and more likely that being president is going to be very lucrative for Trump. By the time it’s over, he may even be worth as much as he has always claimed to be.
The words “conflict of interest” don’t begin to describe what the Trump administration is shaping up to look like — though there will be plenty of conflicts of interest with administration figures such as Rudy Giuliani, who made millions from foreign governments and corporations, some of which are hostile to the United States. But the real action is going to be in Trump’s own family.
Anti-nepotism laws prevent Trump from giving his family members jobs in the administration. But don’t think that’s going to stop them from being active participants in U.S. government decision-making, or using the fact that Trump is president to keep money flowing in. In fact, we could see the president enriching himself and his family on a scale that we normally associate with post-Soviet kleptocrats and Third World dictators.
For starters, Ivanka, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. are on the executive committee of Trump’s transition team, helping decide who gets hired for key positions and what the administration’s initial focus will be. We learned that someone on the transition team inquired about obtaining security clearances for the three so that they could see classified information (though the Trump team protested that the request did not come from Trump himself). Then there’s the matter of Ivanka Trump’s husband…
Kushner — whose knowledge of government is so minimal that he was apparently surprised to learn that the Obama staffers in the White House wouldn’t be staying on to serve President Trump — is shaping up as perhaps his father-in-law’s closest adviser. He won’t have an official position, yet he’ll be privy to some of the most sensitive intelligence secrets the government possesses…
Open Thread: New Category — Trump Crime CartelPost + Comments (132)
Is Our Media Learning?
By and large, fuck no. Figure out what is wrong here:
We’ll give the NY Times a “D” for effort:
Only the Guardian passes the test:
We are so well and truly fucked.
Yep, no problems here
From Jeff Masters at Wunderground:
Round-the-clock darkness usually forces a rapid growth in sea ice across the Arctic by November, but that process has been much slower than normal over the past month or so. There is now far less mid-November sea ice in the Arctic than in any other year since satellite records began in 1979. For the five-day average ending November 17, the difference in Arctic sea ice extent between this year and the next-lowest year (2012) was 582,000 square kilometers, an area about a third larger than California. It’s an especially dramatic example of the long-term decline in sea ice across the Arctic that’s been evident for upwards of 20 years….
In mid-November, temperatures across the high Arctic spiked to readings more typical of September, about 40°F above average for this time of year (see Figure 3 in our November 17 post). “Continued persistence of this pattern may significantly affect sea ice thickness into 2017,” tweeted Zach Labe (@Zlabe, University of California, Irvine) on Monday.
and down in Miami:
Hey guys, can we take a short break from Trump appointment stuff. Sea creatures are floating around Miami! Yikes!! ? https://t.co/0G2AGIPjKb
— Ana Navarro (@ananavarro) November 19, 2016
Yep, no problems at all are facing us or our futures!
College Football Open Thread
Check out this fat lazy bastard from last night:
I had to push him off the damned couch to get him to come to bed. If I hadn’t, as soon as my eyes closed he would be at the damned door bitching to get in.
Deep Thoughts
It’s almost like sending Pence to Hamilton would distract our media into an easy to cover a clickbaity culture wars topic instead of discussing at length the fact that Trump admitted he screwed all his Trump U students.