Mashed Potatoes with where is the IP?

As usual, I ate well this weekend. I did forget to mention that two weeks ago I made my first corned beef from scratch. I found the recipe I used a bit curious in that it mentioned 3 hours cooking time and did not note in the summary the ten days of pickling or brining required. In any event, I may never buy corned beef again, it was excellent!

This weekend, I went to a restaurant for lunch. As a foodie, I find I like two kinds of food; very cheap, like Burger King's whopper or very expensive like the French Room in downtown Dallas. I find all those chains and restaurants in the middle to be more often disappointing than a good dining experience. However, I needed to find such a restaurant to take guest to in couple of weeks. The obvious choices, steak, Tex-Mex and BBQ were not on my list. A) The best steak houses are very expensive, Tex-Mex is so been there and done that, and C) I make better BBQ than most places in the city. I spent a bit of time on the web looking at places and remembered that there was new restaurant in the area serving gourmet Mexican food I wanted to try. So, I went to Masaryk, Modern Mexican Kitchen in the Addison Circle. It was very good and well worth the trip. The food and location were both winners and if someone wanted Tex-Mex, they could get a bit of that as well. I had the chef's sampler consisting of Ceviche, Sopes with spicy pork loin, Huaraches with pulled pork and Taquitos with shredded chicken. It seemed the best way to gauge the chef's imagination and use of spices. It proved to be a good choice.

On Sunday, we had grilled steaks with asparagus, a classic iceberg wedge with homemade blue cheese dressing, cherry tomatoes and diced apple-smoke bacon, and Mashed Potatoes with Parmesan Cheese and Chives. The latter I had never had before and decided to make because I couldn't use blue cheese, I was tired of garlic mashed potatoes and I wanted to see how the combination would work. They will definitely join my other versions of mashed potatoes. They were really good and are the recipe choice of the day. So, please enjoy Mashed Potatoes with Parmesan Cheese and Chives.

Where is the IP?

What is going on out there with regard to happenings in IP Communications? I see so little interesting news and events. Perhaps it's the summer but the well of information is drying up. There is a little news on the purchase of Nortel's assets, a pending battle with RIM and some mixed earnings reports from some of our venerable IP Ecosystem members, Level 3 (bad news), Sonus (better news) and Acme Packet (great news). However, finding interesting news is really tough. With that in mind, I offer to you and interesting discussion on Hosted VoIP verses Premise Based VoIP. It is between Eric Thomas, CEO of FreedomVOICE and me, David Byrd. I hope you enjoy it and the two additional segments to follow.