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This hearty ragout is perfect for a cold fall or winter day, and delicious served over mashed potatoes.

Chicken Ragout Ingredients

• 4 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves, cut into 1 inch cubes
• 1/4 cup all purpose flour
• Kosher salt and black pepper to taste
• 2 tbsp unsalted butter
• 1/3 cup smoked bacon, thickly sliced and diced 1/2 inch wide
• 1/4 pounds brown or white button mushrooms, quartered
• 1 cup pearl onions, whole and peeled
• 1/2 cup dry white wine
• 1/2 tsp fresh thyme leaves or substitute 1/8 tsp dried
• 1.5 cups chicken or beef broth
• 1 tbsp unsalted butter, chilled

Chicken Ragout Instructions

1. Combine the flour with the salt and pepper to season. Add the chicken to the flour and toss to coat. Shake off the excess and set aside.
2. Heat a pan large enough to hold all the ingredients over medium high heat. When the pan is hot add the butter and when the butter has melted and is foaming add the chicken cubes. Brown the chicken on all sides, reducing the heat if the bottom of the pan starts to brown too quickly (which should take 4-6 minutes).
3. Remove the chicken with a slotted spoon and hold in a warm place. Pour off all the excess grease and add the bacon. Cook until the bacon has rendered some of its fat and is starting to crisp. Add the mushrooms and onions and toss to coat with the bacon fat. Cook until the mushrooms are a light golden brown and the onions have started to color.
4. Deglaze the pan with the white wine and cook over high heat until the wine is completely reduced, scraping the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon.

I'm always curious about technology products and product launches, but an interesting thing happened recently with the launch of the latest Google Phone (i.e. the Nexus One).

Release date prediction market on Hubdub

I created a Google Nexus One Release Date market on Hubdub. Hubdub is a play-money prediction market system, a wisdom-of-the-crowds tool to help gather ideas about the outcome of a specific event. The market was created on December 15th and almost immediately it was showing a 94% likelihood of release in the first quarter of 2010.

When will the Google Phone (Nexus One) be available to consumers

Hubdub lets people make predictions on a question and when they do so they choose whether that prediction will be public or private. In the case of this market there is currently over $18,000 of play-money at stake and just over $3,300 of those positions are public. So 80% of the play-money is hidden, but the effect of those positions is totally public. While hiding their identity is possible the world still can quite easily see the sentiments of the people involved: early 2010!

You may be wondering what's going on with IKEA in Colorado. I know I am. I was in Los Angeles for Thanksgiving this year and visited an IKEA out there and was reminded how nice it is to have high quality, reasonably priced household items within driving distance.

According to this article in the Denver Business Journal

"This is a very complicated project, and will take some time," said Joseph Roth, spokesman for IKEA Group’s U.S. headquarters near Philadelphia. "There’s still no time frame for groundbreaking or opening, but we are committed to the project and moving forward."

Once a construction timetable is fixed, the store will take 18 months to build, according to Roth.

Last week was the amazing Do It With Drupal conference and Angela Byron wanted some updated contributor statistics for her presentation. So, I analyzed the commit messages for Drupal core to find who has been helping out and once again the process and the data are getting better and better.

This time I'm using direct database information from the cvs commit log tables and using PHP to parse it which means that it's easier to create rules for fixing usernames or eliminating bad data. I also pulled in company information from groups.drupal.org to get a rough sense of which companies, as a group, are contributing the most to Drupal core. AND, thanks to Dreditor the commit messages are getting cleaner and include information about the person who has done reviews on patches.

Remember, none of this data is really perfectly accurate, but it gives us a tangible sense of what is going on.

Attached are a CSV file and an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet with the data. They show the uid of the user from groups.drupal.org, their name, their organization (if they specified one), the number of times they were mentioned as an author of a patch, the number of times they were mentioned as a reviewer of a patch, and the commit ID where they were mentioned. The commit ID is useful when chasing down bad data so that I can improve the parser. So, if you find a problem please let me know the CID value so I can improve the parser. There's a chance that this could eventually make it onto drupal.org itself, but I'd like to improve the process first to understand whether or not that makes sense.

Enough with the process - it's time to name names!

Top 10 patch contributors to Drupal 7 core

Greg and I have been obsessed with tasty and healthy sweet potatoes lately, and have incorporated it into the unlikeliest of places...like breakfast pancakes!