Bama-365

A Traditional Greek Country Salad

Add comment August 25th, 2007

Horiatiki Salata

INGREDIENTS:
serves 4

* 1 kg (1000 g) hard salad tomatoes
* 1 medium sized red onion
* 1 green bell pepper
* 1 cucumber
* ab. 80 g Kalamata black olives
* ab. 180 g Feta Cheese, diced, sliced or crumbled
* dried oregano
* 80 g (80 ml) olive oil
* red wine vinegar (or lemon juice) and salt to taste

METHOD:
1. Cut the tomatoes in segments and the cucumber in slices.
2. Arrange on a plate and season with salt to taste.
3. Add the onion and the green pepper cut in thin rings.
4. Add dried oregano, the Feta Cheese and olives.
5. Pour the olive oil and vinegar to taste over the salad. Too much vinegar makes the salad too sour.

If you should ever find yourselves in the Greek countryside or on any of the beatiful islands of Greece, seek out the Greek Country Salad.

My husband and I visited Greece in 1993, and again in 1995. There, in small in size taverns we found the most delicious “Horiatiki salatas” for our lunches or snacks.

Why does this salad tastes so good in Greece?

The Greek olive oil - probably the best in the world.
The olives of Kalamata - smooth and with a meatlike taste.
Feta Cheese - the most popular cheese in Greece; an excellent accompaniment to this salad.
Oregano - a low bush, which grows throughout all Greece; tastes more like oregano than most oreganos. This herb is used extensively in Greek cooking.
The vegetables - onions sweet in taste; perfect tomatoes, cucumbers and bell peppers. I don´t know why, but for some reason vegetables taste better in Greece than they do elsewhere.

However, when the vegetables are in season, everyone can make an awesome Greek Country Salad - whereever you are. There are other quality olive types and good olive oils. Try to find a Feta cheese which has a rich and creamy taste and a mildly salty edge.

Enjoy!

Inspiron Notebook Product Delays

Add comment August 25th, 2007

Thanks to all of our customers who  continue to wait for your orders despite the delays. We apologize for the frustration that they have caused all of you. I know that many of you have seen the blog posts about the XPS M1330 delays, but many customers are asking for details behind the Inspiron delays.  I wanted to spend a few minutes to try to address some of the fundamental issues we’re dealing with.

Regardless of what product we’re talking about, generally speaking there are two things that dictate when we will ship your order: 1) the order date and 2) parts availability. There are other variables that factor into this, but in general, we expect to ship products in the order they were received when we have the components to build your system.

Speaking of components, many of you have asked which ones are delaying your orders. The reason that’s not a simple question to answer is that the supply picture changes frequently. Once we are aware that  a component is in short supply and will add time to your estimated ship date, we try to indicate that on the configurator in Dell.com to give you an indication of further potential delays.  Here’s an example screenshot here:

To date, color options are the main source of delay on Inspiron notebooks. Basic colors like black are easier to produce. Premium colors and finishes like we use on the Inspiron models introduce complexity into the process, and that’s holding things up. Just as Alex mentioned in his post about colors on the M1330, producing smaller quantities is not the issue—it’s mainly an issue of scale. We’ll continue to work directly with suppliers to ultimately increase our production on color notebooks. Besides scale, we are also focused on maintaining the levels of quality we established when we designed these notebooks. In other words, we’re not going to relax our quality standards to ship more products.

While premium colors are the main reason for delay of our Inspiron notebooks, displays are a secondary reason—some screen sizes are in short supply.

As long as we have lots of customers waiting for systems like we do now, we have some tough work ahead of us. I can assure you that people at all levels in many departments across the company are working around the clock to resolve all the issues preventing us from shipping your systems. Beyond that, we have added dedicated sales and support resources in the United States and around the world specifically to address the customer experience issues that these delays cause. We also understand that shipping your system is key, and we’ll continue to work to do that.

Thanks again to all of you who continue to wait for your orders. We appreciate your patience and your business.