Bronto Open House

This evening, I went to an open house for Bronto Software, which is located at the American Tobacco Campus, in Durham. Bronto provides software for direct email marketing. As Adam Covati (@covati) explained, above, they make sending mass e-mails easier as well as providing detailed statistics on which users are reading the e-mail and how they are interacting with it. Once this information is available, it's possible to target changes to specific sets of recipients. Depending on the audience, it's sometimes difficult to understand how or if a message is being received and Bronto's tools provided a lot of insight into this. While those of us who work in higher-education may constantly hear that college-aged kids don't read e-mail, e-mail is apparently much more effective as an advertising and sales tool than print or telemarketing.

I enjoyed looking around their new offices, running into a few fellow bloggers and meeting the Bronto staff. DJ (@djwaldow), above, is watching an entertaining video of himself giving a tour of the offices.

I am also now the proud owner of an inflatable brontosaurus, a very nice and large coffee cup and a temporary tattoo. They have sophisticated swag selection skills.

Six Plates Blogging : Bacon and Eggs

While I sometimes enjoy dining at Six Plates Wine Bar alone, it's always a treat to share a cheese plate. This time we had, from left to right, aged Gouda, Mahon and Rogue River Smokey Blue. The blue, of course, was my favorite, particularly with honey.

My friend chose the pan seared tuna with apple and fennel farro and passionfruit caviar. What I tasted was excellent.

I had Six Plates Bacon and Eggs. It had Cane Creek pork belly, a fried quail egg and "breakfast" potatoes. The pork tasted like something between bacon and pork roast and the potatoes were simply amazing. Owner Matthew Beeson seemed disappointed that I didn't eat more of the house made ketchup, which he thought was "like crack", but I thought it was all perfect the way it was.

For dessert, my friend had an olive plate and I'll have to consider sharing one of these sometime, because my olive epiphany has turned into more of an olive obsession. In addition to several different kinds of olives, it had pimentos and lupini beans.

Finally, I had the flight of three small scoops of sorbet, but I, once again, chose three scoops of passionfruit, because it is exquisite.

Four Square Blogging : Pre-Appetizer

I forgot to include this photo in my previous post about Four Square. This was a complimentary pre-appetizer of hummus on some kind of chip. I thought it was both adorable and elegant. Of course, it was tasty, too.

Four Square

I've been remiss in bringing you all the details of my dining life. It's been over a couple of weeks since I went to Four Square, which, as always, was a wonderful experience. I went there with a couple of friends, just two days before I received my new camera. So, these photos were taken with my old camera and you'll just have to endure. My Hippest Friend had the baked Stump Sound oysters with yukon gold potatoes on whole wheat blinis and smoked char roe. It looks good to me, and, as you can see, he was eager to try it.

I had a bowl of the Orange Cranberry Bean and Housemade Bacon soup. It was very good, but somehow I was thinking that it would have cranberries in it instead of having cranberry beans in it. I was craving fruit and I thought cranberries and bacon would go well together. I enjoyed it, though.

For my entree, I had grilled mahi mahi with stir fried soba noodles, red kuri squash, green mango with coriander, coconut-shellfish emulsion and lime pickles. I think I ordered this mainly because of the mangos and they weren't very prominent in the dish, but there were some. Overall, it was very good and perfectly prepared.

One of my friends had pan seared scallops with roasted apple and foie gras bread pudding, braised celery, saba and a creamy chestnut sauce. That was absolutely fantastic and I would definitely order that if I had another opportunity.

That friend was on a roll, because he also ordered the almond cake with olive oil ice cream, coriander-honey croquant and an orange-cava sauce. He described it as the "sleeper hit dessert of the year".

I had a dessert special, tangerine "but not so tangeriney" smores. Aside from the fact that the top half was camera shy and kept trying to escape before I could photograph it, it was a delightful dessert. This photo was taken after I had reassembled it twice, so it may not be quite the presentation that was originally intended, but it's pretty close. I like tangerines and I was still in the mood for fruit at that point, so I was happy. The cookies were almost like granola bars and the tangerine marshmallows were subtly flavored.

In addition to getting our own desserts, we all shared a bowl of sorbet and ice cream. We got chocolate mint chip, blood orange sorbet and brown sugar ice cream. These were served with a madeleine cookie and were delicious.

I believe this was the fourth time I'd been to Four Square, but I hadn't been there in many years. It's in a quaint and potentially romantic four square house with tables that are spread far enough apart to allow conversation. The service is exceptionally attentive and Chef Shane Ingram came to our table to introduce himself. It's a perfect place for a special occasion or when you feel like splurging on a leisurely evening out.

Rum Raisin Banana Bread

My Most Faithful Reader read about Marcellina's banana bread on Eschaton and her recipe is based on Nigella's recipe. My MFR then decided to soak some non-sulfured white raisins in rum, to prepare one of the main ingredients. Once I found out that she'd been soaking them, I offered to make the bread. Not long after that, a bunch of bananas appeared on my kitchen counter and their brown spots began to indicate how I would be spending my Saturday afternoon.

I used the US version of Nigella's recipe, which appeared along with the raisins. Like most banana bread recipes. it was comparatively easy. Marcellina also has her own varation of the recipe, which I'll have to try at some point. Both recipes actually recommend that you boil the raisins and let them sit for an hour. The raisins I had been provided had already soaked up most of the rum, so I didn't think that step was necessary.

It turned out to be delicious. The raisins add a moist tartness and the overall texture is excellent. I sliced one of the loaves and froze all the slices individually, so I'm looking forward to having something good for breakfast for the next few weeks.

New Sitar India Palace Location

Today I got to try out the new Sitar location on Chapel Hill Boulevard. As far as I could tell, the food tasted exactly the same, which was very good. The decor was fresh and new as their renovations almost completely obliterated any traces of the Lonestar Steakhouse, with the exception of the back porch area.

One exciting thing is that they apparently have a drive-through-window. I absolutely love drive-throughs and will be sure to take advantage of it soon.

According to Bull City Rising's post, their old location will continue to remain open, but it will concentrate on catering.

Blu Blogging : Special Oyster Night

Tonight Blu Seafood and Bar had a special oyster night with all kinds of wonderful oyster dishes. They offered seven different kinds of raw oysters, which could be ordered individually. I got nine Lockwood Folly oysters from North Carolina. I also got one each of Malpeques, from the Chesapeake Bay region, Chef's Creek and Kumamoto, both of which were from Washington State. I thought the Chef's Creek oyster, pictured above, was the best tasting. It also had a beautiful shell, with undulating edges.

This Kumamoto oyster was gorgeous, too. It was also delicious.

Tonight they had both Oysters Casino and Rockefeller. I ordered the Casino, which had bread crumbs, bacon, butter and shallots. They were very good.

I also got an order of fried oysters with horseradish cream sauce. I've shown this to you before, but their oysters are just magnifiscent and I have a new camera.

Vit Goal Tofu

I recently went to Vit Goal Tofu with a bunch of co-workers, which was a real treat. It's a Korean restaurant and from what I understood from my friends, Hugh and Anastasia, (I can use their names, because they're already famous.) who lived there for a year, it's fairly authentic. We started off with some non-caffeinated barley tea, which comes with the meal.
We also ordered some ginseng wine, baekseju, and My Little Pony Whisperer offered her full glass as a model. I had just a taste of it, but I thought it was quite good.

MLPW had japchae with beef and it looked very good, particularly the green noodles.

Assorted side dishes also came with our meal, including three types of kim chee (cabbage, daikon radish and cucumber), salad and potatoes. I particularly liked the cucumber kim chee. All were pretty mild.
I had the seafood tofu soup, which was delicious. The soft tofu was lovely and it had two whole shrimp (the heads and eyes were no extra charge), clams and oysters. The clams were the best, but I seem to be getting fonder of clams all the time. This photo was after MLPW had stolen a spoonful while I was trying to take the picture. No, I didn't stab her with my fork, but I did consider it. You can actually see a video of what the soup was like as soon it was served. It remained hot, temperature-wise, throughout most of the meal, but it wasn't overly spicy, despite my requesting "medium". Overall, it was very nice.

Hugh is very tall, so he was able to provide the satellite view of our table during the meal. I am definitely looking forward to going back soon, because there are a lot of interesting sounding things on the menu that I want to try.

Town Hall Grill Blogging : Early Bird Dinner

A bunch of us from ScienceOnline09 met at the Town Hall Grill for the Early Bird Dinner. We had a limited menu, which forced me to branch out and order something other than their wonderful fried oysters, which was a good thing. We all started out with a fantastic salad. It had a light coating of vinaigrette dressing. Some of the other conference attendees didn't think there was enough dressing, but I thought it was just right. The salad had surprisingly good tomatoes for winter, cucumbers, pitted kalamata olives, greens and fresh mozarella. Excellent. In fact, this was my favorite portion of the meal.

Our possible entrees included a NY Strip, a poblano chile, mussels and snapper and roasted chicken. As you can see, I picked the mussels and snapper. I love mussels, so they are hard to pass up, but the snapper was very good. The tomato sauce and vegetables were also good. I intended to take half of this home to eat at work the next day, but I decided to eat all of it instead.

For dessert, we all had the chocolate ganache cake. This thin slice of chocolate decadence really packed a punch, because it was like eating a chocolate truffle. I took about 3/4 of it home and shared it with the Most Faithful Readers.

Science Online 09

I recently attended the ScienceOnline09 conference, formerly known as the NC Science Blogging Conference. Once again, Anton Zuiker and Bora Zivkovic did a phenomenal job organizing the event, which was hosted by Sigma Xi, in RTP. On Thursday night, the festivities started with an Early Bird dinner at the Town Hall Grill, which I will cover in a separate post. Friday's activities included a coffee cupping at Counter Culture Coffee and lab tours, which I did not attend, since I had to work. Friday night, the Women in Science and Engineering had a networking event that included a talk by Rebecca Skloot on her research concerning the origin of HeLa cells, unknowingly donated by Henrietta Lacks in the 50s.

Saturday and Sunday consisted of a day and a half of sessions, which were primarily discussions in a slight "unconference" fashion. I was thrilled that this year there were two sessions on how science relates to art and scientific illustration. Glendon Mellow, pictured above, did a great job leading two of those sessions. There have been so many technological advances in the ten years since I actively painted scientific illustrations, so learning about some of the techniques and possibilities was certainly inspiring.

I attended multiple sessions on writing and writing for hire and was particularly fascinated by Henry Gee's description of life as a senior editor at Nature. I will never have the academic qualifications for such a position, but just knowing more about how such an esteemed journal functions was certainly educational.

That only barely scratches the surface of the variety of things about which I learned. There were four concurrent sessions, so it was often hard to choose which one I wanted to attend. Other sessions I picked included sessions on Open Access, using Wikipedia for annotating genes and and nature blogging. The conference offered a beautiful selection of opportunities to learn.

Photos from ScienceOnline09 on Flickr.
Blog posts from ScienceOnline09.
Tweets from ScienceOnline09.

Blu Blogging : New Dessert Menu

What dessert is this? Where was this photo taken? Ok, ok. I didn't actually plan this juxtaposition with my previous post, but I do find it amusing. This is Blu Seafood and Bar's newest dessert offering. It's delicious. It's a banana spring roll with ice cream and toasted pecans, chocolate and caramel sauces. This may be my favorite dessert that they've had so far. They've also added the apple strudel that I tried as a special once before.

Mystery Meal

OK, let's have a little fun. What dessert is this? In which restaurant was this photo taken?

Mount Fuji Blogging : Loving Thursday Nights

I've really been enjoying the 1/2 price sushi at Mount Fuji on Thursday nights. The nicest thing is that it's really half off, rather than buy-one-get-one free, so you can mix rolls and nigiri. The quality has been awesome, too. The scallops have been exquisite, in particular. They've also added a huge new roll menu, which includes a San Fran roll that is equivalent to the Sunset roll at Sushi Love, but the lemon slices are underneath the salmon. Tonight I also tried octopus and giant clam, which were the two wrapped in bands of seaweed. They were good, but I didn't like them as much as the other things.

All of the sushi on the plate cost $28.29, before tax. That's a steal, if you ask me.

End of the Rainbow

Early this evening, I got a call from Google Earth Evangelist, who said that there was a rainbow outside. She did warn me that it was raining some, but I immediately rushed out and there it was. My photos, as usual, don't do it justice, since it wasn't food, and I suspect it had faded some since she called me. It was still cool, though. I found it amusing that it looked as if at end of the rainbow there was not a pot of gold, but Duke's coal pile.

In fact, the rainbow was huge. It was particularly nifty looking at all this, because the chapel carillon was playing and it was extremely windy.

Meanwhile, the sky was pretty spectacular behind me, too.

Around this time, or perhaps shortly before, a whole bunch of people saw this rainbow or other rainbows and they tweeted about it. John Rees collected all the tweets that linked to a bunch of amazing rainbow photos so you can see them, too.

Mocha Cake

When I was a kid, my Most Faithful Reader's mocha cake was The Best Cake, in my opinion. I would constantly beg her to make it and occasionally she would. I never understood why she wouldn't make it more often. I made it twice right after I started cooking. I didn't feel like making it again until several years later. I finally understood. It's a pain.

It's really good, though.

• 2 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 cup softened butter
• 5 eggs, separated, whites beaten
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 3 cups flour
• 4 teaspoons cocoa powder
• 5 tablespoons strong coffee
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 teaspoons vanilla

Cream the sugar and butter. Add the egg yolks, buttermilk, coffee and vanilla. To make the coffee, dissolve as many spoonfuls of instant coffee into a cup of hot water water as you possibly can. or until you get bored. Mix together flour, cocoa and baking soda and then mix into the wet ingredients. Your electric mixer is your friend. Fold in beaten egg whites. Note that you should be using a big bowl, so you don't have to move everything to a larger bowl. Plan ahead.

Pour into two round cake pans and bake at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes. Remove from pans. Let cool.

Icing

• 1/2 cup butter
• 2 teaspoons cocoa
• 3 tablespoons of that obscenely strong coffee substance
• 1 box of powdered sugar

This icing recipe just barely (and I mean barely) covers the cake, including icing between the layers. You might want make more. You can always double the recipe and eat what you don't use for dinner.

Busy Making Jewelry

I made a lot of jewelry during the holiday break, which was a refreshing activity. It was fun making this choker.

I didn't notice until I photographed this that the black tubular beads are extremely dark red. Fortunately, you can't tell unless you hold them up to bright light (or photograph them, apparently).

This is the longest necklace I've ever made and I'm really happy with how it turned out. It looks good either doubled up or as a single strand. I was aiming for flamboyant, but still classy, and I think it worked out just fine.

Once the gifts were finished, I made myself some bracelets. I tried out my new experiment of weaving two strands together. The one the left is made of labradorite, so it has aurora borealis-like flashes if the light hits it just right. When I first made that bracelet, I had just finished it completely when I discovered that the clasp was defective and I had to completely re-do it. I'm amazed that's never happened to me before, but you can bet I'll be checking them carefully beforehand from now on.

Taverna Nikos Blogging : New Year's Eve

The Most Faithful Readers and I celebrated the new year early last night, at Taverna Nikos. They had some spectacular specials and I'd been drooling just at the thought of them for weeks.
My 2nd MFR and I started out by sharing a bowl of lobster bisque. It was absolutely full of small pieces of lobster. It was extremely good.

For his entree, my 2nd MFR had a half lobster, which had been cooked in tomatoes, herbs, red wine and brandy and was served with linguine. The few pieces I tried were delicious. My MFR, of course, had her traditional serving of calamari.

I had the slow roasted black pepper and honey encrusted duck breast in a sun dried fig and Mavrodaphne port wine sauce with chestnut risotto, cauliflower, zucchini, carrots and broccoli. I love duck and it's even better combined with slices of fig. The duck and its accoutrements were simply perfect.

Finally, we tried the Galaktoboureko, which was a subtlely-flavored lemon custard, topped with layers phyllo pastry on the top and bottom. I liked it, but I still like the bougatsa, the banana-filled pastry, the best.

We left many hours too early to see the belly dancing and participate in the champagne toast, but I'm sure it was a fun and memorable party. Happy New Year!

Blu Blogging : Chocolate Cabernet Tart

Tonight Blu Seafood and Bar offered an ever so smooth and rich chocolate Cabernet tart. It was perfectly petite, but completely satisfying with dark chocolate ganache on a sugar dough crust. I did not share and I did not feel guilty. In fact, not only had I eaten a healthy meal prior to dessert, but I did my part to combat global warming by only eating raw seafood.

Homemade PIzza Crust

A couple of days ago, I made a pizza, which I shared with my Most Faithful Readers. Making pizza crust is surprisingly easy, particularly after you've made it a few times.

• 1 package yeast
• 1 cup warm water
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 2 tablespoons canola or olive oil (olive results in crispier dough)
• 2 1/2 cups flour

Dump most of the flour into your mixing bowl (preferably in a stand mixer). Dissolve the yeast and the sugar in the warm water. Dump that in, start mixing and add the oil. Add the rest of the flour and the salt. You may have to add just a little bit more flour if the dough is extremely sticky after mixing a while. Let it rise a little.

I've been putting all my yeast dough in a cold oven, turning it on the default temperature for two minutes and then turning my oven off. It gets to approximately 120F in that length of time. My house is just too cold for dough to rise otherwise and this method works beautifully every time.

Spread out the dough on a greased cookie sheet. The dough was very cooperative this time, but I was very patient with it. You may not be so lucky.

For this pizza, I spread out olive oil as the base and then topped it with (drained) marinated artichokes, kalamata olives, sliced onions and mozarella. I also like using pesto, pre-cooked shrimp and bacon. Of course, you can use tomato sauce and traditional toppings, if you have them.

Bake at 475F for 10-11 minutes. I baked this one for 10 minutes, but it probably could have used 11. Yes, that's a lot of olives.

It was good! Like any other pizza, the leftovers are always good, too.