Turducken Cordon Bleu

Turducken Cordon Bleu

A traditional Turducken is a duck, stuck inside a chicken, stuck inside a turkey. There are complicated ways to de-bone the birds to get them to fit. In my version we will use Skinless, boneless breasts of chicken, turkey, and duck, rolled together Cordon Bleu style. Since it is holiday time I had no problem finding boneless chicken breasts, and turkey breasts in the grocery. They key was that I was able to find frozen duck breasts in te section where frozen ducks and geese were. Again, I think it was a holiday thing.

So, you take your breast meat. Put a breast on a cutting board, cover in plastic wrap. Take a rolling pin, and pound the breast down to about 1/4 inch thickness. You will need to make a couple of decisions here. because of the size of the breasts I had I decided to put chicken on teh outside and cut the larger turkey breast in half for layer 2. In retrospect, the turkey breasts were larger and I perhaps should have kept them whole and pounded the down large, and used them as outside. Be careful with your duck, it will be small and it will not take a lot of pounding.

When you have your meat pounded out you are ready to assemble. I chose to chop up a small amount of broccoli flowerettes and nuke them in the microwave. I used them and the traditional slice of swiss cheese and ham for the inside. I placed the chicken layer on a clean cutting board, put a layer of turkey breast, then duck, then swiss, then ham, then, broccoli. Roll it up carefully and pin the roll with tooth picks (I actually used some wooden shish-ka-bob sticks from summer barbecue). Season with salt and pepper to taste as you assemble.

Dredge your roll carefully in flour. Shake off excess. Dunk in an egg wash, finish with a roll in seasoned bread crumbs. Place rolled and breaded turducken in a pyrex baking dish tha has been coated in Pam. Place a generous ounce of butter on each roll. Place in 375 degree oven for 45 mins to an hour testing with a meat thermometer to 160 degrees.

I made a white sauce with chicken broth, white wine and cream, that I should have thickened with a roux of flour and butter, as it turned out a bit too thin. Upon plating the dish, pour over th white sauce garnishing with parsley flakes.

Reconciling Pink: The Bellweather for the Future?

So, I am glad to say that in my reading of Daniel Pink's, A Whole New Mind, he dealt rather quickly with my concerns posted last week. While I can identify myself as an ubber-left brain, concrete sequential step-by-step process geek, there does seem to be room in Pink's brave new world for me. In all seriousness, it took Pink about 10 pages to dispel my concerns. His central concept is that that moving forward we will need a whole mind, using both right and left halves. The "knowledge worker" economy dominated by left brain skills is eroding. As the economy changes and skills that traditionally require left brain organization and management are routinized and computerized, can moved anywhere in the globe, and done by a cheaper work force, we (as in the the western/USA dominated we) better be ready to capitalize on our right brain thinking skills.

A couple of thoughts come to mind. First, is not traditional teaching a pretty left brained dominated activity? Can traditional teaching be outsourced through the 'Net? I think so. Anybody have kids doing online enrichment Math through John's Hopkins or Stanford? I do. My biology teaching wife is looking hard at MIT Open Courseware and Yale Open Courseware for her advanced classes. Is Pink really radical? If you think hard, what parts of your job could be outsourced? Does Discovery Streaming, outsource a piece of the Library Media specialist's job w/ selecting and delivering video material? I am looking at purchasing Study Island for 3/4 grade testing remediation. I certainly can have my network and servers monitored from afar. Certainly someone smarter than me about networks can do patches and upgrades in the overnight hours? It is happening around the edges in education, but it is there.

Second, here is what I think could be a bellweather that Pink's ideas are gaining formal acceptance. My darling youngest daughter is just out the door to set up for her school's Winter Concert. She is a band weenie. In my kind and fatherly way I remind her often that all this band stuff won't help her hit a change up or understand the Vietnam War, and I can't believe it is ANOTHER night with the pep band at the basketball game. In truth I am awfully proud of her and deeply grateful to her young energetic band teacher who has given her gifts that I could not hope to do (although I could do without the 3 hour concert on this sunny winter Saturday afternoon).

So, here is the thing. At her school when calculating GPA (yes, save the comments, it IS an outdated, left brain notion) all of the art, Theater, and music classes carry less "weight" than advanced classes in the traditional academic areas. My kiddo works damn hard at her music. She is not great, but applies herself hard and puts in extra, extra time for that program. She gets less "credit" for her A's in band then she does for the B+ in history. Her left brained older sister (Ms. Honors, who can bang out an "A" paper faster than you can type Google, but over thinks anything practical into a pile of mush) figured it out during her time at the school. If you stayed in band, you faced the possibility that your GPA would slip or more correctly others in the top tier would edge by you as they took non-band courses to keep the GPA up. All the top kids dumped band after sophomore year and took. extra math so they could take AP Physics as they battled it out for the top three slots in class rank.

If Pink's proposition is to take hold for education would not the first sign be that all art/music/design courses carry the same weight as traditional left brain, read it, study it, spit it back academics?

More when I know it.

Left Brain vs Right Brain

Today I will "attend" a softball clinic. I get to sit upstairs in the parent gallery for 3-4 hours while my daughter squats and catches for some very high quality pitchers who aspire to go on to the major college level. She also aspires to a college softball career, and if she learns to hit rise ball and change up as well as she catches them her aspirations will move forward. It is winter in NewEngland. It is the season of softball improvement.

Besides playing on the free WiFi, I am bringing Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind, in anticipation of the DEN webinar later this week. While Pink is referred to as a seminal work for all things 2.0, I have not had the chance to read it, and really I should.

The proposition as I understand it is that with the Internet putting pure information at your fingertips, it is less important to have a vast reservoir of knowledge in your head, you can aways just get it from the 'Net. The critical skill is how you can creatively put the pieces together. Recall level thinking will sink into the background, giving way to folks who can think abstractly and creatively. Thus the left brain vs right brain split.

Right now as I await Mr. Pink's opportunity to educate me, I am having problems with this analysis. Perhaps it is that I am a successful left brain thinker. A product of the educational systems of 35 years ago, you could pound stuff into my head and it would stick. I have tons of arcane factoids tucked away in my head (and to my horror they seem to be leaking away slowly as I age). My family won't play Trivial Pursuit with me, I rarely lose. I recognize that it is just a type of knowledge that stays with me. Stuff that others forget especially in certain subjects, just sticks in my head. I am a left brain master.

I love history. When this whole technology thing fizzles out, I would love to return to teaching high school history. I would love a a class of really bright kids who were into it as much as me. We would read meaty textbooks, historical non-fiction and primary sources. We would write essays and papers and stuff information into our heads for the pure joy of stuffing information into our heads, and people would think we were smart.

OK, my bias is revealed. I hope that I will be able to do Daniel Pink justice with that mindset going in. In this rush to right brain dominance, is there not room for the left brain thinker? Does not a large reservoir of information in your head, rather than a few clicks away, allow for context in your thinking? If you have a broad liberal mind (in the educational sense of that term) doesn't it provide a knowledge base you can immediately to apply to the situation at hand? If you have a good information base in your head, it can help you provide context and meaning to new information. Is that not still valuable?

My understanding of the process of early reading tells me that a large lexicon of internal information helps young readers. Perhaps the most important thing that parents can do to increase reading skills for the very young is not to buy Hooked on Phonics, but to pull the kid onto your lap and read together, everyday. When you are searching for that unknown word, your ability to decode the word phonetically is important, but the more context you can bring the better. It is how close reading works.

In the classroom, it is the classic error of your kids seeing the word S-O-C-R-A-T-E-S and saying it, SO-crates, rather than SOCK-rah-tease. If you have information in your head about the Greeks, even with the incorrect phonetic pronunciation the rest of the text provides the context to get it right. You could read forever about old SO-crates (as I have had students do) and just think it was some old Greek guy without connecting the passage to that very special philosopher and teacher.

There are others beside Pink who have the right brain perspective. I have had the chance to hear Will Richardson speak twice in recent months. His remarks challenged me to think more about these ideas and where I stand. I thank him. I still feel very half-baked in my thinking on so many School 2.0 ideas and topics. Pink and Richardson make me uncomfortable, and that is good. These days I feel that I do not know what I know, but I sure know more than before they challenged me. And as always, I get to write and podcast more when I know it.

Let's see what Daniel Pink brings to the conversation. Have a good week everybody.

Testing for the Coolcatteacher.

This a new post for Vicki Davis (coolcatteacher) who asked via Twitter for folks to tag the FEED from their blogs in twitter. I think I did that correctly. However, I thought that if I posted, she would know for sure.