Gil's Thrilling (And Filling) Blog
Follow the Culinary Ruminations of New Mexico's Sesquipedalian Sybarite. 1,321 Restaurant Reviews, More Than 13,400 Visitor Comments…And Counting!
If you’ve noticed an almost inordinate number of recent visits on this blog to Mexican restaurants, credit much of that to Pati Jinich, ebullient host of the James Beard Award-winning and Emmy nominated PBS series Pati’s Mexican Table. Although we record the Saturday airing of Pati’s Mexican Table, we don’t usually watch it until Sunday…right before lunchtime. It’s no…
Bizarre Foods host Andrew Zimmern has nothing on my friend Ralph Guariglio. Zimmern who claims to love such “exotic cuisine” as fermented walrus anus probably wouldn’t touch some of the…er, interesting foods Ralph enjoyed during his travels for Intel. That’s especially true when Ralph traveled to Vietnam and The Philippines, all the while chronicling his adventures in “Captain Ralphie’s Travelogue.” …
You might think that the food truck industry is an ultra-competitive dog-eat-dog business in which purveyors aren’t very gracious when discussing fellow food truck operators. Considering how they often jockey for a limited number of spaces in heavily trafficked events and vie for consumer attention and dollars, you would think they’d denigrate their brethren. In an October 4th interview on…
As the eldest of six, I had the wonderful blessing of having spent more time with our dad than my siblings did. Dad was the embodiment of the term “gentle man,” a patient mentor and nurturing exemplar of how to be a father and friend. During our many outings, dad always had the radio tuned to KDCE, “The Station That’s…
“Nom nom.” It sounds innocent enough. Parents–yes, including parents of four-legged fur babies–utter it in baby talk intonations to get our children to eat something, especially when that something is “good for them” but doesn’t actually look or taste good. Nom nom was, of course, the favorite expression of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster as he ravenously devoured a plate or…
“Well, there’s not a taco big enough for a man like me That’s why I order two or three Let me give you a tip, just try a nacho chip It’s really good with bean dip.” ~Weird Al Yankovic – Taco Grande Philosophers and scholars have long pondered just what Rodin’s The Thinker was thinking about. Okay, some people were…
A few years ago if you told some of us we should follow a Mediterranean diet, we probably would have salivated at the prospect of having pizza and wine every day though we would have wondered how we could possibly lose weight on such an indulgent diet. Today, the Mediterranean diet is widely recognized by dieticians as one of the…
The Oxford Dictionary defines an adage as “a proverb or short statement expressing a general truth.” The adage “the apple does not fall far from the tree,” for example, means a child usually behaves in a similar way to his or her parents. Sometimes, however, an adage fails to live up to the truism it purports to express. One such example…
The Broadway musical Rent taught us that a year is comprised of “five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes.” Instead of measuring the length of a year “in daylights, sunsets, midnights, cups of coffee, inches, miles, laughter or strife,” Rent encouraged us to measure a year in life in seasons of love. Not surprisingly, Seasons of Love (a song…
Perhaps no mobile conveyance in the Land of Enchantment has ferried as many interesting people on as many colorful journeys as the “Road Hog,” the psychedelic bus which shuttled its passengers from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock to Llano Largo, New Mexico. The Road Hog’s 1969 arrival in Llano Largo heralded the start of the “summer of the hippie invasion” as The…
Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw has been credited with the aphorism “England and America are two countries separated by the same language.” My Kim and I had no idea just how different the Queen’s English is from the English spoken by the colonists until we were assigned to Royal Air Force Fairford. As part of the newcomers orientation, we were…
