It struck me that while there are many seemingly comprehensive lists of titles for the canon of Great Books in the western tradition, I have yet to see a satisfactory one for music. There are plenty of listicles (and albums) of supposed greatest works, but the criteria used to create such lists are often disappointing to say the least.
For example, this one has only two composers (J S Bach and Vivaldi) before the classical era, and a disproportionate emphasis on twentieth century works–not to mention that both those “old” composers are still post-baroque harmonic revolution. One radio station compiled 400 greatest works of the past 400 years, but we know that the canon of western music extends long beyond this arbitrary cut-off. Their list’s inclusion of Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium as well as one work by Hildegard von Bingen gives one hope, until realizing they also include the 90s pseudo-classical hit “Time to Say Goodbye.”
Surely the world can do better than this! And surely we can make a list more reflective of the past 1,000 years of music at least. Both music and the Great Books have traditions long, long before the enlightenment–let the lists reflect that!
What works would you add to canon of western music?
Josquin Desprez, one of the Renaissance’s greatest composers
This recipe is from the Wall Street Journal (May 31st, 2018) and chef Katianna Hong. The lemon and thyme combination takes center stage as the chicken and croutons are bathed in a marinade made by blending copious amounts of lemon juice and fresh thyme along with shallots. It’s quick, too, as long as you don’t have to send your husband scrambling to the store for missing ingredients, as I did! Apologies in advance for the lack of good photos! I didn’t plan ahead to blog this one, but decided to go ahead and post it after several people asked for the recipe! 🙂
A little toasted at the edges, mais delicieux!
I would make two edits/clarifications to the recipe next time I make it: 1. Make sure the croutons are not under the chicken, as this will make them soggy. The ones nestled around the chicken were perfect. I reflected this change below. 2. Consider making the marinade paste thinner with either more olive oil, or perhaps a splash of a nice dry white wine. The original recipe implies that it is supposed to be very liquid, so perhaps there was simply a transcription error in the WSJ? It was certainly delicious, but the finished product could have an even better texture if the marinade were thinner. You don’t want too much liquid as you want the croutons to dry out while roasting, but a little more certainly won’t hurt. I’d aim for adding another 1/4-1/2 cup of liquid in the marinade.
Lemon Thyme Chicken and Bread Roast
Total time: 45 minutes
Serves: 4
6 Bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs (I’d be more inclined to go boneless)
Salt
1 1/2 lemons, zested and juiced (zest before juicing to save yourself frustration!) PLUS 1/2 lemon cut into thin rounds
1/4 cup olive oil (or more–see notes above recipe)
3 whole shallots, roughly chopped
Leaves from 20 sprigs of thyme, plus 8 sprigs for garnish while baking. (but who’s counting?)
3 Tbs butter
6 cups crusty bread, diced
1/4 cup chicken stock
6 garlic cloves, skin on (yes, that means no awkward garlic peeling attempts)
Preheat oven to 450 degrees and generously season chicken with salt.
Blend lemon zest, juice, olive oil, shallots, and thyme leaves until smooth.
Toss chicken in the blended marinade, and let sit 15 minutes to 24 hours. (obviously refrigerate if leaving more than 15 or so minutes)
Just before going into the oven. The original recipe called for 6 thighs, but I found it was barely enough marinade for 4!
Arrange chicken in buttered cast iron skillet or baking dish, and nestle bread around chicken. Pour chicken stock over bread, and top off with remaining marinade. Make sure chicken is well-soaked. Tuck the whole garlic, lemon rounds, and thyme sprigs hither and thither around the chicken.
Roast about 25 minutes (I think mine took longer?), until bread is crisped and chicken is nicely browned and internal temp is 165 degrees. WSJ recommends loosening bread with spatula and then serving straight from pan.
Open a bottle of French rosé, toss a light green salad with a swish of olive oil, dash of vinegar, and teaspoon of mustard, and Bon appétit!
*When we study the Great Books, we aren’t studying certain ideas so that we might be able to regurgitate them and map out a nice history of philosophy. We’re studying the Great Books so that we might imitate the authors of this great conversation. (Or, in some cases, so that we might avoid their flaws.) Reading the great books is not an apprenticeship in cool ideas, it is a apprenticeship of mimetic virtue, under history’s greatest men and women.
Saint Augustine in His Study, by Botticelli. We should want to be like Augustine, not just understand his ideas.
Of course there is much overlap, and mastery of certain concepts is not a negligible goal. But if mere mastery of concepts is our priority, rather than what I’ve heard Andrew Kern refer to as an education in virtue, then our education makes us no better than very intelligent computers.
*Thoughts inspired by Dr. Christopher Schlect’s lecture, “Assessing Teachers, Assessing Ourselves,” from the 2018 ACCS Conference: Repairing the Ruins.
Once again, I utterly failed at snagging photos of this recipe, so you’ll have to make do with a hasty partial shot of the assembled dinner including the cabbage in question. To be honest, this is one of my more approximate from-memory recipes as I didn’t realize how delicious and worth-saving it would be till after I had thrown it together with the odd jumble of ingredients I had on hand!
I served it with simple boiled potatoes, bison wieners and a Greek lamb sausage that happened to be on sale at Whole Foods. While none of the ingredients were exactly traditional and the cabbage isn’t technically pickled like choucroute/sauerkraut, it made a delicious hearty dinner reminiscent of the Alsatian Choucroute Garnie I grew up loving in France! Don’t forget the butter and mustard on the table when you serve it!
1 shallot, diced (you could replace both the pickled onion and the shallot with a diced medium onion of any type)
1 apple, diced (I used honeycrisp)
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1 cup honey
Salt and pepper
Cook bacon in dutch oven on medium high heat until bacon is cooked and fat rendered, then add cabbage, red onion, shallot, apple, vinegar, and honey. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Cook covered on high heat for about 10 minutes. Turn heat down to low and cook for an hour, until all ingredients are tender and flavorfully melded. Serve with boiled small potatoes and sausage (preferably something German). Make sure to provide butter, salt, and a robust dijon mustard on the table!
Slightly adapted from THIS yummy Smitten Kitchen Recipe! I thought I had pretty much everything on hand, but ended up having to improvise a bit. (Different kind of lentils, added barley, tomato soup for diced tomatoes, kefir for cream) It turned out great though and I would happily make it again exactly the same way! Matthew had thirds *and* snitched from my bowl. And Chaucer begged, though all he got was a pinch of cilantro from Matthew, which he did not find to his taste.
2-3 tbs olive oil
1 onion, diced
1/2 tsp cumin
1 in piece of fresh ginger, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp ground coriander
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp garam masala (try using a blend of these ingredients if you don’t have garam masala)
1 tsp chili powder (or more)
1 small (around 10 oz) can condensed tomato soup
1 tsp sea salt (I say more)
1/2 cup green lentils
1/2 cup barley
4 1/2 cups water
Butter
Plain Kefir
Cilantro, chopped
Sautée the onion and cumin 1-2 minutes in the oil, then add ginger and garlic and sautée another minute or two. Add other spices, stirring to coat onion thoroughly, and pour in tomato soup. Bring to simmer, then add water, lentils, and barley. Simmer 35-45 minutes. Once lentils and barley and tender, it’s just a matter of how much liquid you want and how much you want to flavors to concentrate. I let mine boil down quite a bit.
Dole into bowls, and melt a pat of butter in each bowl. Swirl in a good swig (2-3 tbs) of plain kefir, and springle cilantro on top. Serve with bollywood music and hearty bread (naan bread would be fun!).
AKA, leftover salad. I’m trying to refrain from listing quantities as “a couple handfuls of this or that.”
2 avocados, diced
1-2 cups cooked chicken (I had leftover rotisserie chicken)
1/2 cups olives, chopped (I used a kalmata/green blend)
1/4 cup pickled red onion (Raw red onions or even shallots could work if you don’t have an obscure ingredient like pickled onions leftover from an ambitious recipe Matthew tried last month)
1 cup cubed or crumbled sharp cheese bits, such as feta, kerrygold cheddar
Lemon juice to taste
Olive oil
A dash of red pepper flakes
Salt and pepper to taste
Toss all together! Use enough oil to moisten the ingredients. The avocado will smoosh around quite a bit, blending with the oil and lemon to make a thick sauce-like texture for everything to swim in. Which sounds disgusting, but it really isn’t.
Serve with pita bread and take better photos of it than I did.
I knew it was a success when Matthew tried to finish my plate after his own.
(I wrote this a little while back–January 31st, but didn’t have the blog up then, so I’m posting now just for a fun retrospective glimpse into last month.)
Last night of the Inferno Night Shift Month! It’s coming to a close as an unusually busy night. We planned a small potluck for the night team to finish off the month. I made Chicken and vegetable cream soup with homemade bread, and residents brought brownies etc. So far, it’s been a comparatively “black cloud” night. (“black cloud,” from what I understand, refers to these busy nights when incidents keep piling in. Matthew, however, seems to think tonight doesn’t qualify.) Matthew had a surgery soon after he arrived, so I held off on bringing dinner. Once I arrived, a smattering of us managed to sit down in the resident room and eat (though Matthew had to take a phone call most of the time)…and then a “full alert” trauma went off. Chopper incoming, mvc (multiple vehicle crash)…We recongregated later with a different smattering of residents and the attending, but another full-alert came in a short while later. But still, the residents got fed, Matthew liked the soup, and someone asked me “where do you get your bread?” (Yes, my vanity was immensely flattered).
It’s always such a funny mixture of feelings for me, coming in from the outside. The faces I feel like I’m still just starting to know, the halls that mislead me as soon as I stray off the beaten path, our little heart-to-hearts in the office interspersed with residents coming to chat of extubating and hernias and reading CT scans, quick tea dates at the coffee shop…then the loud beeping of pagers and another trauma rolls in and he hurries away, walking confidently through those swinging doors, back into his world of adrenaline and intense teamwork, racing the clock to save someone’s life with a scalpel and life support (or, conversely, come home with a yawning report of silly patients coming in with nothing wrong). When I’m hanging around the office, I often hear the chopper—the landing pad is just around the corner from his office—and always wonder if it’s for him, as he works just a few doors away, but a world apart. (*Cue melodramatic sigh*)
Sunset while running errands that evening…A terrible shot of dinner in the residents room.
I keep thinking of things I want to post about, and sometimes get as far as scribbling thoughts down, but then the days rolls by with so many other important to-do list items calling to me like vendors in a rug market that I don’t seem to ever find time to actually sit down and write for a bit. I’ve decided to get over my grand perfectionist scheme, however, and simply try to take a few minutes here and there a few days a week to at least post quick updates or recipes. That way even if I don’t sit down and hammer out my *obviously* deeply valuable thoughts on life in general, I’ll at least be putting something up to keep the fingers nimble, as it were.
This reminds me of the advice with which my husband keeps gently nudging me…as a procrastinator and somewhat of a perfectionist, it’s easy to put something off until, like Herodotus’ rare phoenix of the far east, that magic window of time appears in which I shall have time to sit down and fully tackle the task at hand all in one go with no other task accusing me of neglect. Housework, teaching prep or grading, thank you notes for the wedding, etc. etc. One of my goals for this year is to learn to work in increments. Like in the movie What About Bob, I need to work on my baby steps. And with that, I should go get started on today’s yet-unfinished tasks. With baby steps.
