• 4 cups chicken broth
• 2 cups water
• 2 cooked, boneless chicken breast halves - shredded (actually I always use rotisserie chicken because it is easier and tastes better)
• 1 (4.5oz) package of quick cooking long grain and wild rice with seasoning packet (I use Uncle Ben's)
• 0.5 tsp salt
• 0.5 tsp pepper
• 0.75 cup all purpose flour
• 0.5 stick butter
• 1.5 cups heavy cream
• 0.5 cup milk

In a large pot over medium heat combine broth, water, and chicken. Bring just to boiling, then stir in rice (without the seasoning packet). Cover and remove from heat

In a small bowl combine salt, pepper, and flour. In a medium saucepan over medium heat melt butter. Stir in contents of seasoning packet until the mixture is bubbly.Reduce heat to low then stir in flour mixture by tablespoons to form a roux. Whisk in cream, a little at a time, until fully incorporated and smooth.

It has already been a few years since this site has seen any kind of update (or much content for that matter). Every time I start this I think to myself keep it simple and by the time I'm done I have a style sheet longer than the constitution. Well that still may be the case, but at least this time I didn't write it.

As a huge fan of JQuery and the related user interface elements of JQueryUI , I decided to start off by only using these components. If the resulting layout was not to my liking then I would begin adding my own CSS. What happened next was a near miracle.

First I deleted my style sheet and removed all style markings from my templates. Then went through and updated the layout using YUI3's grids, strolled through the templates adding only the standard classes that come with JQueryUI, and added a few extra style helpers here and there for padding and margins. POOF Instant web site.

My style sheet remains empty which is about as low maintenance as you can get.

There are still a few items that need some attention. What fun would it be to get it all done at once?

I did have enough time to rollup all the css files into one in accordance with one of Google's Let's make the web faster tips. So instead of making 4 or 5 separate requests for files there is just one. Even if the files are cached the browser will still ask "Has the file changed?" which takes an additional round trip. Less round trips makes the page load faster.

For rolling up the files I created a really simplistic Makefile to help me out. In the Makefile I use Yahoo's YUI Compressor to minimize the files. It simply removes the comments and white spaces squashing everything into a big one line file. Less bytes! Here's the quick Makefile

yuic=java -jar ~/prod/lib/yuicompressor-2.4.2.jar -v

css/thesergents-combined.css: css/reset.css css/base.css css/grids.css css/pygments.css css/thesergents.css
    cat css/reset.css css/base.css css/grids.css css/pygments.css \
    css/jquery-ui-1.8.9.custom.css \
    css/thesergents.css | ${yuic} --type css -o css/thesergents-combined.css

clean:
    rm -f css/thesergents-combined.css

Not perfect, but it works.