Here are some things that I enjoy.

What most people want in a roast chicken is crispy skin and succulent meat. Is it too much to ask? They want the leg to be done cooking before the breast gets tough; they want the skin to be as dry and crackly as possible while everywhere else should be moist and tender. Roasting a chicken is the attempt to achieve all of these contradictory elements in one place, and to do so with a limited number of variables: heat, time, salt. I love the challenge, the concept, the simplicity of roasting a whole bird. But I recently made a dish that in some ways made the whole chicken-roasting problem moot.

That's because cooking a butterflied whole chicken "under a brick" gives you that crispy skin, succulent meat, and takes half the time as roasting. I'd heard of this process, but was reminded while reading a series of posts on Grocery Guy, who adapted it from the kitchen of Marlow & Sons in Brooklyn. He recommends halving the chicken and carefully carving all the meat off to achieve perfect boneless presentation. But I also read that you can simply cut out the chicken's backbone, which allows it to flatten (called "spatchcocking"). Into a heavy heated skillet it goes skin side down, then you put as much weight on top as possible--if not literally a couple bricks wrapped in tin foil, then another skillet with all the cans you can safely stack in it. The skin crisps to a glorious brown under all that weight in its own rendered fat and juices--rather than drying in the oven's air as it would during roasting. The meat stays moist. The taste is fantastic. I'm a convert.

Brick Chicken

- serves 3-4 -

Ingredients

1 small chicken, no more than 3.5 pounds
Selection of chopped fresh herbs (marjoram and rosemary are good)
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
1 lemon

Procedure

1. Rinse your chicken and dry it very well. Wearing latex gloves, spatchcock the chicken, which involves cutting out the backbone (not the breastbone) with a sharp knife or heavy kitchen scissors. Once the backbone is removed, turn the chicken over and press down on the breastbone gently until the chicken flattens out (you might hear some cracking). Alternatively, your butcher would be happy to do this for you.

2. Salt the chicken liberally and press the herbs onto its skin, and perhaps some lemon zest if you feel fancy. Heat an oven-safe heavy skillet (it must be a heavy skillet—cast iron is perfect, nonstick won't work) over medium-high heat with a decent coating of oil. When the oil is almost smoking, carefully lay the chicken into the skillet so that it fits snugly. Tuck the legs in if possible. Weight it using either bricks wrapped in tin foil, or a second skillet filled with cans. The second skillet must have a large bottom so that all of the chicken skin is pressed against the hot surface; otherwise, you'll have super-crispy skin only in the center.

3. Turn the heat to medium-low (there should be an insistent popping noise throughout) and cook for about 20 minutes. In the meantime, preheat the oven to 375°F. After 20 minutes, check on the chicken skin: it should be bronze and golden. Be careful that it doesn't all stick to the pan when you do: a wooden spoon scraping can help you lift it from the pan still attached to the chicken. If not crispy, increase the heat and cook another 5-10 minutes until it is.

4. Flip the chicken over so that it's skin-side up and cook in the oven an additional 10-15 minutes, or until the juices run clear or the thigh meat is a safe temperature. I like to make a quick sauce in the skillet after removing the chicken to rest with the juice of one lemon.

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Roosevelt Avenue in Queens has always been one of our favorite strips: middle-aged-lesbian dance parties at Bum Bum! Baby-doll night at Flamingo! We like to eat there too, and apparently so does Good magazine which, we hear, will name “la Roosie” one of America’s best food streets. Their picks: El Sitio, Unidentified Flying Chicken, Krystal’s, Zabb Queens, and the Arepa Lady. The feature will be found here in the coming week (others, such as a writer’s attempt to bag a deer in suburban L.A., are up now); in the meantime Metromix and AM New York have joint-published a Joshua M. Bernstein piece in which he hits ten places on Roosevelt and spends just ten bucks — culminating in an ill-fated attempt to eat a fertilized duck embryo raw. If you want to try one of these without gagging, hit up Elvie’s Turo-Turo.

Issue 009: All You Can Eat [Good]
Dollar Grub: Roosevelt Ave. [Metromix NY]
Related: Riding the V Line: Guinea Pig on Roosevelt Avenue

Adorable but questionable projects from kids. Thanks to Laura.

About a year ago, Village Voice restaurant critic Robert Sietsema attended a taping of Iron Chef America at the Food Network's Chelsea studios. Thanks to a friend's invite, the Food Network had no idea he was watching and waiting to blow the cover off the whole phony operation once the episode finally aired. Now Sietsema is here to report that the series is “more bogus than even I had imagined.”

How bogus is it? Well, for starters, what’s edited to look like “extreme urgency” on TV, with chefs hustling to finish up to five dishes in under an hour, is in reality just “drones going about their appointed tasks with well-tested recipes.” Sietsema confirms the chefs aren’t actually sweating it because they know what the “secret ingredient” is going to be in advance and are thus able to plan out what they’re going to cook.

Once the dull cooking round ends, Sietsema is shocked to see that the judging doesn't start immediately while the food is still fresh, but actually takes two hours to shoot. So guess how these slick Hollywood types pull it off – they have the sous chefs cook new versions of the dishes all over again during the judging process! Sietsema also thinks it’s bogus how Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto pulled an expensive white truffle out of his pocket and grated it over one dish; challenger Fortunato Nicotra of Felidia had no such advantage, and lost big-time to Morimoto.

The whole 3,330-word exposé is enough to disillusion you with the entire TV game show industry. Let’s just hope Sietsema never goes to an American Gladiator taping and ruins that with his muckraking – some of us still need heroes to believe in. How shocked are you to hear Iron Chef America’s a hoax?

Photo by Liz Johnson, who had a better time behind the scenes.

Christina Matzke at the University of Bonn in Germany and Damien Challet of the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy, used a mathematical model to show that shower temperature becomes increasingly sensitive to small changes in hot-water flow as the number of users increases. Thus in a youth hostel, for example, the showers often fluctuate between scalding hot and ice cold during heavy use.

The YUI Team just released version 2.5.0 of the library. We’ve added six new components — Layout Manager, Uploader (multi-file upload engine combining Flash and JavaScript), Resize Utility, ImageCropper, Cookie Utility and a ProfilerViewer Control that works in tandem with the YUI Profiler. This release also contains major improvements to the DataTable Control and new Dual-Thumb Slider functionality in the Slider Control. Here are the highlights:

• DataTable Control: Jenny Han Donnelly has been joined by Luke Smith for this development cycle, and we’re all thrilled with what they’ve produced. DataTable in 2.5.0 gets a more robust markup structure that allows greater control over all aspects of the table. This release also includes major performance enhancements, improvements to the fixed-header implementation for vertical scrolling, built-in support for horizontal scrollling, an all-new Paginator class, support for drag-and-drop column reordering, and a new set of column APIs with hooks for showing, hiding, adding and removing columns.
  
  DataTable has been one of YUI’s most popular and important components since its debut, and this is its strongest release yet. If you have existing DataTable implementations that you want to upgrade, take a look at the new User’s Guide, as it has some detailed notes about API changes. The DataTable examples roster is another nice place to check out the new code in action.
• Layout Manager: Dav Glass has a lot for you to enjoy in 2.5.0, but top billing goes to his new Layout Manager. Layout Manager eases development of multipane UIs that take up either the full viewport or the full canvas of any block-level element. Layout Units within a layout are resizeable, collapsible, removable and swappable; transitions between expanded and collapsed states have built-in animation support. Whether you’re creating a full-screen application like Yahoo! Mail or a rich multi-pane pop-up, Layout Manager is a great place to start.
• Uploader: If you’ve ever built a UI for uploading files via a browser, you know what the big pain points are: One file at a time, no easy way to track upload progress, no programmatic access to file metadata, etc. The new YUI Uploader addresses these issues and others, allowing for the creation of more powerful, intuitive, and responsive file upload experiences. Allen Rabinovich of the ASTRA Library team did the legwork on this one, and it’s the same code that underlies the Flickr Uploader. Uploader is our second JavaScript/Flash hybrid control (following on the heels of the Charts Control in 2.4.0).
  
• Resize Utility: Layout Manager is built upon a new YUI utility, Resize. Dav’s Resize Utility formalizes the support that YUI Drag & Drop has long provided in example form and makes it easier for you to make any block-level element resizeable. Resizing can be implemented directly (the resized element resizes in real time during the interaction) or by proxy (a proxy element visualizes the interaction until its conclusion, at which time the resized element snaps to its new size).
• ImageCropper Control: The Resize Utility makes a lot of things easier — and one of those is the implementation of an ImageCropper interface, which Dav built out on top of Resize for 2.5.0. Take a look at the examples and be sure to check out the support Dav provided for modifier keys in this very desktop-like UI control.
• Cookie Utility: When he’s not busy writing books or working on My Yahoo!, Nicholas C. Zakas is cranking out new code for YUI. In 2.5.0, he contributes the Cookie Utility, a simple but powerful component that helps you get maximum mileage out of your limited cookie space. Because browsers limit the number of cookies you can set per domain (and because that limitation can sneak up on you if you manage a large site with many subdomains), the Cookie Utility supports "sub-cookies." Sub-cookies pack multiple name-value pairs under the umbrella of a single cookie, expanding the number of data points that you can store in cookie space.
• ProfilerViewer Control: 2.4.0 saw the release of Nicholas’s Profiler, a headless, cross-browser kit for profiling JavaScript functions. To make it easier to access and interpret the data that Profiler collects, we’ve added a ProfilerViewer Control in 2.5.0 that sits on top of Profiler and visulizes its accrued data. ProfilerViewer leverages the Charts Control and the DataTable Control. Taken together, Profiler and ProfilerViewer provide another arrow in the development quiver that includes tools like Firebug’s integrated profiling interface.
  
  
• Slider Control with Dual Thumb Support: Supporting dual-thumb interactions in our Slider Control has been on our list for awhile, and Luke took the opportunity to get this out to you in 2.5.0. Sliders are “finite range controls”; dual-thumb sliders allow you specify a sub-range within the control’s larger range. The classic use case for dual-thumb sliders is on shopping sites, where such controls can allow users to filter results based on price range. Check out the User’s Guide, example, and the new Slider Cheatsheet (which has a second page dedicated to dual-thumb implementations).
• We’re using this release to promote the following components from beta to GA status: ColorPicker Control, Get Utility (for cross-domain, dynamic loading of script and CSS files), JSON Utility, ImageLoader Utility, and YUI Test Utility. These promotions reflect the maturity of those components and their very low bug traffic. As always, we’re releasing all new-for-2.5.0 components under the beta moniker, and we’re looking forward to your feedback on those once you get a chance to try them out.
• Full details on the release, including a rollup of the changelog for all components and a bug/feature manifest, are available in Georgiann Puckett’s update to the YUI developer forum this morning.

One More Thing…

YUI now ships with more than 270 examples, many of which are accompanied by full tutorials to help you get started using YUI. And while individual examples are good, we’ve gotten a number of requests to create an über example, one that pulls in and makes use of a wide range of YUI components in a single sample application — while still being YUI-centric and not littered with noisy implementation logic.

The incomparably prolific Dav Glass rose to the challenge for 2.5.0 with a complex, multi-component example that uses Layout Manager as its basis and Yahoo Mail as its inspiration.

Let’s Celebrate!

We’re excited to get 2.5.0 out the door and, as luck would have it, we’ve got a fantastic excuse to celebrate. YUI’s (and the Yahoo Pattern Library’s) second anniversary party is coming up next week (February 26, 5 p.m., Sunnyvale), and we’d love to have you join us. Sign up on Upcoming to let us know you’ll be stopping by at Yahoo! HQ for some beer and general revelry. We look forward to showing off some of the stuff you all have been doing with YUI in the past two years and we’ll talk a bit about where Patterns and YUI are headed from here.

The New York Times:

Microsoft has begun to make preparations to proceed with a proxy fight against Yahoo as it seeks to gain control of the Internet company, people briefed on the matter said on Tuesday.

The Rusty Knot, soon

So, how's about we go ahead and blow your minds now? Ken Friedman (Spotted Pig, John Dory) and Taavo Somer (Freemans, Bowery Hotel) have teamed up on a bar and restaurant. The king of the hottest restaurant on the East Side and the guy behind April Bloomfield's west side sizzler are doing a collab. Truth. Located in the former West Space at 425 West Street, the place is going to be called, we think, The Rusty Knot, complete with a nautical dive bar motif, designed by Somer, the guy who brought us such atmospheric gems as Freemans and the Bowery Hotel. A bowl of gnudi's toss from the Spotted Pig,— actually, a rickshaw ride away, if Friedman's promises of gratis rides between the venues pan out — it's Friedman's second West Village project, and something of a shocking twist, since we were expecting the John Dory to be his next big thing.

From a West Village correspondent who got a look at Rusty Knot space this past weekend:

Was inside the old West space last night, and it looks like it's almost ready for prime time, though it still has the West decals on the outside. It definitely has a nautical vibe with boat steering wheels, and a lot of wood, like an old ship. The furniture reminded me of something that you might have at a lake house upstate, kind of summer camp meets Adirondacks. There is a pool table, and a jukebox, but not sure if that is permanent or not. The space is small, so will definitely get crowded fast.

Oh, before we forget. The chef originally slated to helm the kitchen? Does the name Ilan Hall ring a bell? Dude was in the running, but was ultimately was told to pack his knives. As for who is cheffing the place, who's agreed to helm one of the few dining rooms in NY that might refuse service to the Bruni, we shall see.
· Unconfirmed Exclusive: Friedman Teaming with Freemans in Former West Space [~E~]

If all hedgehogs look this cute while eating, witnessing an an army of them eating hedgehog treats at the same time could result in death by onslaught of cuteness. With my brain frozen in a permanent state of "aw," I could barely move while watching this guy chomp on his orange nubbin for 41 seconds.

Stare at the hedgehog after the jump. Don't miss the tongue flicking action at the end. [via Cute Overload]

Cute Hedgehog Eating

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Dan Frommer:

Amazon’s S3 Web-storage-on-demand service has won a lot of mindshare in the Web 2.0/startup world. Which means when the service breaks down, as it did this morning, you’re going to hear a lot about it. Users are complaining that parts of Twitter and Tumblr — graphics, for example — are down.

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Starting point map and destination point map viewed side by side on the MTA Trip Planner website.

Anyone trying to plot the best subway route to serve their departure and destination points has long since given up on the MTA website, which for years has mostly confined itself to below-ground mapping and shown a remarkable disregard for how the subway actually corresponds with the street level. Sites such as Hopstop and OnNYturf have sprung up to fill the void with integrated mapping, but now they’ve got competition from some new improvements on the NYC Transit website.

Believe it or not, the MTA site – the Charlie Brown of municipal websites – finally did something right for a change. Trip Planner is now a much more user-friendly way of mapping your trip from point to point, with a variety of routes and options that enable you to minimize transfers, walking distance or avoid the bus. There is a map with multiple views (2D, 3D, hybrid) for each route plotted, total travel time estimates and walking directions.

Here’s a common scenario: You and your crew are striking out at Mansion just like when it was Crobar, but your boy at The Box says it’s totally on. Thing is, your H2 is currently getting mad pimped at a body shop in Hoboken and these aggro cab drivers won’t let all six of you pile in, and now these crybabies you call friends are starting to whine about going home. Don’t sweat it, brah – just log onto Trip Planner with your B. Berry and plot the best route, depicted above. Bam! The beat goes on in less than 45 minutes, and you’re the big hero. (Thanks MTA!)

There are still some things that could use tweaking; for one thing it doesn’t seem possible to see the map of your entire trip in one view – you have to click back and forth between the departure and destination maps. But still, by NYC Transit standards this is quite a leap into the 21st century.

[Via Second Avenue Sagas.]