Some weekends it is tough to cook a dish that I can turn into a recipe. For example, my favorite dish I made on Sunday, rigatoni pasta with beef shanks. This required braising the beef shanks for three hours with aromatic vegetables and beef stock. Then straining and reducing the resulting sauce; adding a little tomato paste, seasonings, cooking the pasta, shredding the meat and mixing it all together. The result was a fantastic dish but it took four hours to prepare. My most whimsical dish of the weekend was to make green eggs Saturday morning. Not difficult, just add green dye to beaten eggs and cook either as scrambled or baked eggs. I did my flat and served with cheese in a sandwich. The most interesting dish which I will continue to work on was pancakes with pistachio nuts and bacon. The resulting pancake was light with a salty chewy crunch. Finally, I made ham and turkey salads and served on crackers garnished with either a slice of tomato or dill pickle. I prefer chicken salad to turkey but I had turkey on hand. Since the other ingredients are all the same, I am providing you with a Chicken Salad recipe. The Ham Salad recipe is almost the same but does not use herbes de province. Also, sometimes I will use chopped boiled eggs as well. In any case, the recipes of the week are Chicken Salad and Ham Salad. Enjoy!

Playing Chicken with Video

It is clear that video conferencing is growing in importance in the market and it seems Avaya has determined it cannot engage that market with its current portfolio. Therefore, last week Avaya announced the purchase of RADVISION to either replace or complement its Flare video offering. Of course, the purchase of RADVISION for $250 million pales in comparison to the Cisco $3.3 billion purchase of Tandberg. As for the game of chicken, as these two competitors run head long into each other, is the market big enough to support them and others attempting to stake out market share.

Vidyo, ooVoo, Skype, Polycom, ShoreTel and others are all battling it out to deliver video conferencing either as a desktop offering or major telepresence conference rooms. Everyone is betting that the market will grow and justify the investments being made. Infonetics has forecasted the global market to reach $5 billion by 2015. Gartner, for the same period, is forecasting $8.6 billion. Whether either number is reached, Wainhouse Research forecasts 20% or greater growth for the foreseeable future and that is enough to get a whole bunch of guys playing chicken.