Her grand prize as winner is her very own Food Network series. “Aarti Party” premieres at at 12 p.m. EDT Aug. 22 and is set for a six-episode run. The half-hour program features Sequeira energetically taking classic American dishes and sprucing them up with an old world Indian twist.

Sequeira has a wholly endearing, warm, almost familiar presence on screen. As if she was born to do it. She knows her stuff in regard to the dishes she’s preparing, and she delivers it like a loveable best friend. She’s casual, bubbly and fun, all in a totally different way than, say, a Rachael Ray or a Giada De Laurentiis.

Born in Bombay, India, Sequeira was raised in Dubai and studied journalism at Northwestern University. While in college, she covered the political beat and actually lived in Washington, D.C., to do it, reporting back to Northwestern between semesters. After graduation, she got hired on at CNN as a producer.

By 2007, she earned her professional cooking certificate from The New School of Cooking in Culver City, Calif., and started the cooking blog and online variety show that eventually would lead her to her very own series on the Food Network.

“It was really out of frustration. I wasn’t liking my job in journalism, and it just wasn’t fulfilling. That’s why I started the blog in the first place,” Sequeira recalls. Her cooking blog was a fusion of how-to featurettes spiked with sketch comedy and variety-show aspects. She says her love of being in front of the camera comes from her years of journalism training and the thought of her husband, Brendan McNamara.

McNamara is a documentary filmmaker as well as a cameraman for “Aarti Party.”

“All I have to do is think of my husband when I’m in front of the camera, and that just automatically puts me at ease and makes me feel comfortable,” reveals Sequeira.

Of course, she wouldn’t be hosting “Aarti Party” on cable television had she not impressed culinary juggernauts like Bobby Flay and Cat Cora on “Next Food Network Star.” I asked her what was scarier than serving a meal to Flay and subsequently getting immediate critical feedback.

“Well, at least I’m not in Iraq. At least I’m not covering Hurricane Katrina. So, not that scary in context. I did a good job of keeping my perspective, it’s only food.”

The new “Aarti Party” features Sequeira solo in a kitchen, cooking, chatting and charming her way into your appetite. For Sequeira, speaking to a camera in an empty kitchen feels natural. “I just feel at ease. I feel like I was created to do my own TV show, and I spent so many years not fulfilling my dreams. Now I finally get to.”

Her show blends Indian flair with classic, traditional American dishes. She says there’s a “common misconception that all Indian food is spicy. It’s not as spicy as you think.”

“Furthermore,” she continues, “Indian food isn’t that labor intensive, and you don’t have to invest in a bunch of different spices. You probably have most of what you need in your spice rack already.”

In her inaugural episode, she tackles an American staple, the sloppy joe. “There’s nothing intimidating about a sloppy joe, and it’s so easy,” says Sequeira. Her adorably charming presence on screen makes it easy for the viewer to immediately focus and pay attention to her fetching, casual style.

The first season of “Aarti Party” is a six-episode run, and Aarti hopes “that people love it. If they do, we’ll get a second season. But, until then, I’m just testing fun recipes and coming up with clever new dishes and ideas.”

“24 Hour Restaurant Battle”

Also coming soon to the Food Network, D.C. residents Chris Alvear and Francisco Pliego duke it out, head to head, against a couple of authentic Texas barbecue experts in the Aug. 25 episode of “24 Hour Restaurant Battle.”

The show pits two-person teams of aspiring restaurateurs against each other in a race against the clock. Teams have 24 hours to conceive, plan and open their own restaurants for one night of service. The duos get a $4,000 budget and just 24 hours to create a menu, shop for ingredients, stage a dining area, train a staff and actually cook and prepare the food.

By the time guests are seated, host Scott Conant (chef and owner of New York’s Faustina at The Cooper Square Hotel) and his panel of judges will critique the taste, the atmosphere and the marketability of the complete product. Judges choose a winning team that gets $10,000 toward realizing their dreams of opening their own restaurants.

Both D.C. locals, Alvear and Pliego had unsuccessful personal and business relationships with each other. The one-time partners specialized in importing artifacts and Mexican folk art before appearing on the “Battle.” They are pitted against Sara and Mitchell, former owners of a successful Texas barbecue stand.

Armed with a dream and four grand, Alvear and Pliego set out for supplies and decorations. The concept they designed is called Lulubah, authentic Mexican food with a splash of Latin fusion.

One of the many drawbacks to the small window of time is the quality of ingredients. Contestants have to rely on grocery stores and small vendors instead of specialty distributors for fresh produce, meats and components. “That was one of the major obstacles,” says Pliego. “We really had to compromise on ingredients.”

From dining-room design to the menu, every aspect of preparation seemed rushed and stressful. “On a scale of one to 10, it was about a 12 on the stress meter,” remembers Alvear. Francisco mainly built the menu and cooked the food; while Alvear focused on “front of house” design and guest relations.

Getting the menu and design right is only half the battle; the real challenge comes in the form of hungry patrons. And, when the doors opened, customers could choose from the barbecue in the adjoining room or Alvear and Pliego’s Luluhbah, which saw a majority of the traffic.

The judges seemed to love the menu and restaurant-space design, but they took issue with the preparation technique of the chile rellenos. Pliego admits, “I took a shortcut with the chile rellenos, but I don’t regret it. If I had more time, they would’ve been perfect.”

According to Alvear, none of what the duo accomplished could have been done without cooperation: “You can’t do anything in 24 hours without true teamwork and true hard work together.”

The pair came into the competition with years of friendship behind them and left with many ahead of them. Alvear says, “Francisco and I will know each other when we’re in rocking chairs together, but, no, we will not run a business together.”

For Alvear, the show “was about following our dreams and doing it alongside a close friend, we’d even climb Mt. Everest together.” Pliego said he was impressed with what they accomplished in 24 hours: “Imagine what we could do in 48 or 72 hours. We can do anything.”

Ultimately, Alvear would love his own show on the Food Network. He’s currently the maitre d’ at ZENTAN, located in Donovan House in Thomas Circle, where famed Susur Lee is top chef.

Pliego dreams of someday running his own hotel and restaurant in Mexico. He cooks at Jaleo for award-winning restaurateur José Andrés’ ThinkFoodGroup.

“24 Hour Restaurant Battle” airs on the Food Network at 10 p.m. EDT Aug. 25.

FarmVille has changed how ou open giftable mystery gifts and eggs! You no longer have to put them on your farm to open them! They will open automatically from the giftbox when you click the “use” button. The item is then put straight into the giftbox.

Jenny McCarthy had been ‘singled out’ just a few months before she found new love with boyfriend Jason Toohey, a fitness model who lives in Las Vegas.

The former MTV hostess and actress has been dating Toohey for two months. Jenny McCarthy split from her longtime love, actor Jim Carrey, this past April after five years together. After the breakup, McCarthy said her primary focus was “change and growth.” Has her broken heart mended already, or is her new model boyfriend just a rebound fling?

Only time will tell. According to Jason Toohey’s bio on a bodybuilding website, the hunky model describes himself as a male fitness model, actor, and stunt performer. Toohey lives in Las Vegas, where he performs as a pirate at the Treasure Island casino. He’s also reported to be the founder of Eyedews, an undereye mask treatment.

Jenny McCarthy is reportedly shacking up with her pirate love in Sin City while her own home in Los Angeles in under construction. Is it too much, too soon for the actress and former Playboy model? Either way, it’s nice to see the single mom having fun again after her much-publicized breakup with Carrey. If you’re going to have a rebound guy, isn’t a sexy pirate the best way to go?

Source: Huffington Post, The Hollywood Gossip ]]> http://braindk.net/uncategorized/jenny-mccarthys-new-boyfriend-actress.html/feed 0 http://braindk.net/uncategorized/beyondchron-san-franciscos-alternative.html http://braindk.net/uncategorized/beyondchron-san-franciscos-alternative.html#comments Sat, 14 Aug 2010 01:35:01 +0000 admin http://braindk.net/?p=354 If you’re broke this weekend and can’t afford the $75 a day ticket for the Outside Lands festival in Golden Gate Park, check out the San Jose Jazz festival that kicks off tonight with George Clinton and Parliament and Funkadelic and wraps up Sunday with Tower of Power. With tickets going for $15 a day, the three day festival celebrating its 21st year is one of the best bargains on the concert scene. In addition to George Clinton and Tower of Power, this year’s festival features singer Nnenna Freelon, Maceo Parker, John Handy and a thousand other Jazz, Blues, Latin, Salsa and Funk artists performing on ten stages, 14 bars and lounges in downtown San Jose tonight, tomorrow and Sunday.The San Jose Jazz Festival is one of the nation’s largest Jazz Festivals created in 1989 to showcase South Bay Jazz artists. The festival grew quickly and soon became known as “The World’s Largest Free Jazz Festival” attracting more than a hundred thousand music fans to downtown San Jose.

The economic downturn hit the non-profit San Jose Jazz Society that produces the festival in 2006 when a reduction in sponsorship, grants and donations forced festival organizers to charge a $5 dollar fee, still a major bargain compared to ticket prices that are much more expensive for similar festivals such as JazzFest in New Orleans. The combination of a worsening economy and a loss of sponsors put the future of the festival in question, since festival organizers did not know until the very last minute whether sponsors would be willing to support the festival.

In addition to funding challenges that have forced the cancellation of festivals like the San Francisco Blues Festival, the North Beach Jazz Festival and the recently cancelled Healdsburg Jazz Festival, media consolidation has reduced press coverage of the festival, with many of the writers who in past years wrote articles and reviews about the festival no longer working with papers in San Francisco. In the post media consolidation world, promotion of concerts and festivals are often tied to advertising and promotional packages.

The San Jose Jazz Festival is being promoted on KBLX, KPIX and the San Jose Mercury News, the media sponsors of the festival. With the exception of an ad in the Chronicle’s pink section, there has been no articles or listings about the San Jose Jazz Festival in any commercial San Francisco media outlets other than the festival’s sponsors. This week the Outside Lands festival was featured on the cover of the Chronicle’s Sunday Pink Section, and there was a feature story in the Bay Guardian about Outside Lands. Several years ago the Chronicle, Examiner, Bay Guardian and the SF Weekly all ran stories and reviews on the San Jose Jazz Festival.

The weather forecast this weekend for Golden Gate Park calls for more of the chilly grey fog and clouds that has been hanging around San Francisco for the last month. If you already have a ticket for Outside Lands, or can afford the $150 two day ticket to see Al Green, Nas, Damian Marley, Phil Lesh and the other folks at Outside Lands, bring your parka and have a good time. If you’re singing the recession Blues and want to see a little sun this weekend, jump in the car or catch the train to the San Jose Jazz Festival. The ticket price, gas or train ticket for both Saturday and Sunday shows at the San Jose Jazz Festival will be less than a one day ticket at Outside Lands.

“I’ve been working seven-day weeks,” Levin said of his work on Ayeah Games Inc., a Boston social games startup he has founded, where he is developing a social game that will incorporate news-related and celebrity-related comments and sharing on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Levin has outsourced development of the game to Disruptor Beam, the Facebook game development studio co-founded by former GamerDNA co-founders Jon Radoff and Angela Bull. Investors in a seed round the startup has raised, which Levin declined to quantify, include angel investor and former Lotus CTO John Landry and former Sun Microsystems executive Janpieter Scheerder, who invested through Eureka Ventures, a California angel and advisor network.

“We will pioneer a new category called social reality,” Levin said, which mixes players’ social graph with real-time events. Players will be rewarded with points and leader-board status for the timeliness and influence of their tweets and Facebook posts, tied to specific events, issues and personalities. The company proposes to earn the bulk of its revenue from sales of virtual goods.

Like his investors, Levin has an enterprise software background. Venture-backed Black Duck makes software designed to help companies manage open-source software components. Long before Black Duck, in the early 1990s, Levin was a marketing manager at Microsoft Corp.

“I’ve been a gamer for years,” Levin said in an interview Tuesday, adding his favorite games are Microsoft Xbox console title “Halo” and Activision’s “Call of Duty.” “When I joined Microsoft, I thought I was joining the company that sells Flight Simulator,” he said.

Levin, who has been working alone on Ayeah since February, has just hired his first employee, director of marketing Liz Petersen. He said he believes Ayeah Games can do better than Facebook juggernauts like Farmville, Mafia Wars and Cafe World, by easing the transition from free pay to paid, and by providing more incentives to play the game long-term. Levin said his market research has shown players get bored with existing social game offerings.

“Social games are the new solitaire in the office,” said Levin, referring to the Microsoft desktop accessory that became one of the early workplace computer time sucks. “People play social games at work. Hopefully they’ll play it every time they see a newspaper.”

Note: Unreleased items have no official release date or guarantee that they will make it to the FarmVille Market.

FarmVille Unreleased Stone Path	FarmVille Unreleased Path	FarmVille Unreleased Sparrows	FarmVille Unreleased Meadow Grass
	FarmVille Unreleased Lush Green	FarmVille Unreleased Grape Trellis

A new limited edition New England tree, the Heirloom Apple Tree, has hit the FarmVille Market.

This limited edition Tree can be purchased for 10,000 coins during the next 10 days only.

This non-decorative tree is harvestable, meaning it will yield coins when harvested.

FarmVille Hearloom Apple