Gil's Thrilling (And Filling) Blog
Follow the Culinary Ruminations of New Mexico's Sesquipedalian Sybarite. 1061 Restaurant Reviews, More Than 9500 Visitor Comments…And Counting!
I think a rotisserie is like a really morbid ferris wheel for chickens. It’s a strange piece of machinery. We will take the chicken, kill it, impale it and then rotate it. And I’ll be damned if I’m not hungry because spinning chicken carcasses make my mouth water. I like dizzy chicken. – Mitch Hedberg Comedian Mitch Hedberg may have meant it in a funny vein, but it’s no joke that Americans are finding rotisserie chickens not only sexy and…
Creator! You who give life to all things and who has made men that they may live happy and multiply. Multiply also the fruits of the earth, the potatoes and other food that you have That men may not suffer from hunger and misery. ~Traditional Incan Prayer As recently as 2010, Albuquerque–which rightfully takes great pride in its acceptance of cultural and culinary diversity–did not have a single Peruvian restaurant. Fast forward three years to March, 2013 and there are…
Early in 2013, the National Restaurant Association took the pulse of more than 1,800 professional chefs and nearly 200 professional bartenders with its annual “What’s Hot” culinary survey designed to predict restaurant menu trends for the coming year. Considered the definitive forecast of culinary inclinations, the survey’s “Ethnic Cuisines and Flavors” category was topped by Peruvian cuisine which is not only hot, it’s cool. It’s hip, swanky and trendy. It’s so “happening” that even New Mexico, which is sometimes years…
Americans spent several billion dollars a year on products touting their ability to provide fresh breath. Ultrabrite toothpaste promises to “give your mouth sex appeal” while Colgate’s Oxygen toothpaste’s slogan is “Pure, Fresh, Clean.” Fresh breath is so important to our culture that we even insist our pets have it. Milk Bone Dog Biscuits pledge to “freshen breath naturally” so of course, we buy that product in bulk for our four-legged children. Fresh breath, it seems, translates (at least on…
In 2004, The Economist (a British weekly news publication) proclaimed that “Peru can lay claim to one of the world’s dozen or so great cuisines.” In 2005, Bon Appetit declared Peruvian “the next hot cuisine,” extolling its “vibrant ceviches, crispy, spiced rotisserie chickens and packed-with-flavor empanadas” then encapsulating its declaration with “this is one cuisine we could eat every day.” A year later, at the world’s premier gastronomic forum, the International Summit of Gastronomy, Lima (the coastal nation’s capital city)…