Gil's Thrilling (And Filling) Blog
Follow the Culinary Ruminations of New Mexico's Sesquipedalian Sybarite. 1137 Restaurant Reviews, More Than 10,600 Visitor Comments…And Counting!
After years of toiling as a quality engineer in a pressure cooker environment in which the happiest time of day was usually 5PM, Charlene McBain has truly found her happy place. It’s a cozy little …
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In the 60s and early 70s, movies and television programs would have you believe all spies were hard-drinking, fast-driving, woman-chasing playboys as good with their fists as they were with a gun. They were worldly, …
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In 1960, Albuquerque’s population reached 201,189, more than doubling the city’s tally from the 1950 census. The start of a new decade began an era of expansion, a construction boom in which the burgeoning city …
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“Are you going to explain how to pronounce “bosque?,” my Kim asked when she espied me working on this review. Though her Spanish vocabulary is rather limited, she pronounces the five or six hundred Spanish …
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Before permanent signage was mounted, a tethered banner in front of K’Lynn’s Southern & Cajun Fusion in Rio Rancho listed a few of the delicious treasures available in the tiny restaurant: “catfish, BBQ, gumbo, po …
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Don Shirley: “How is that?” Tony Lip: “Salty.” Don Shirley: “Have you ever considered becoming a food critic?” Tony Lip: “Nah, not really. Why? Is there money in it?” Don Shirley: “I’m just saying you …
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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 …
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Tim “The Toolman” Taylor just didn’t get the concept of “low-and-slow.” During barbecue week on Taylor’s “Tool Time” television show, his buddies from NASA told him the secret to quickly igniting a grill was to …
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My dad taught me very early on that all people have inherent worth and dignity and are deserving of respect and kindness. A lifelong educator, he had a knack for reaching students deemed incorrigible or …
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“Eating slowly is good for the stomach; plowing deeply is good for the fields.” ~Vietnamese Proverb Imagine if the village of Hatch was granted a trademark that awarded it exclusive rights to the name “chile.” …
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Shortly before 6AM. on July 16, 1945, some of the world’s most brilliant minds ushered in the nuclear age with the detonation of the first atomic bomb, an occasion which later prompted Los Alamos Laboratory …
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Even though New Mexico’s license plates have been graced with the sobriquet “Land of Enchantment” since 1941, it didn’t become the state’s official nickname until 1999. For much longer than that, the more derisive epithet …
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“No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.” …
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Who among us hasn’t learned at least one thing about Thai culinary heritage from The Big Bang Theory? In a 2011 episode, for example, we learned that according to Thai tradition the last morsel of …
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Legendary American chef, author and television personality Julia Child was often exasperated with what she perceived as American’s propensity for culinary laziness, once commenting that “the trend in the U.S.A. was toward speed and the …
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Caffeine is my shepherd; I shall not doze. It maketh me to wake in green pastures: It leadeth me beyond the sleeping masses. It restoreth my buzz: It leadeth me in the paths of consciousness …
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My friend Schuyler jokes that because the diet of my formative years was mostly beans, chile and tortillas as well as chile, tortillas and beans, I’ve developed an insatiable curiosity and appetite for anything that …
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My brother Mario–seven years younger, much better looking and quite a bit smarter–and I have shared many memorable firsts. There was the time I taught him how to drive on our dad’s 1965 standard transmission …
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Culinary history is in dispute as to the origin of the term “hot dog” to describe frankfurters, a cooked sausage named for the city of Frankfurt, Germany. Some historians mistakenly credit a newspaper cartoonist for …
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In retrospect, the monsters and bogeymen who frightened impressionable children of my generation were pretty lame. Perhaps the most lame of them all was Frankenstein, a lumbering behemoth who walked around with his arms outstretched …
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Reclusive American poet Emily Dickinson insisted a light exists in spring that’s not present at any other time of year. If you’ve ever spent a winter in the Northern Hemisphere at a latitude of 42° …
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“Ah, but after the sunset, the dusk and the twilight, when shadows of night start to fall. They roll back the sidewalk precisely at ten and people who live there are not seen again.” ~John …
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Several ominous scenarios went through my mind when Ana told me, “I’m sorry. We don’t accept credit cards.” Would I be asked to wash dishes for a couple of hours to pay for my meal? …
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“It was Kansas City but it was North Carolina I wanted; whole hog smoked low and slow over fruit woods and doused liberally with a vinegar-based sauce. It was North Carolina but it was Texas …
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When writer Jeffrey Steingarten was named food critic for Vogue in 1998, he made it his quest to overcome any distaste he may have had for certain foods. Chief among the foods he disliked were …
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In the 1970s and 1980s, Reese’s Peanut Butter cups commercials consisted of a series of vignettes. Each vignette depicted the collision of two daydreamers–one eating peanut butter and the other eating chocolate. The peanut butter eater …
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The phoenix of ancient Egyptian mythology was a sacred firebird of beautiful red and gold plumage said to live for centuries. At the end of its life, the phoenix built itself a nest of cinnamon …
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Whether it’s movies, Uber drivers or restaurants, human beings seem to predisposed to take stock in rankings and ratings. Be it a one- to four-star rating method or any other numerical or graphical rating system, …
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“Texas. It’s Like A Whole Other Country.” That slogan, conceived by the Texas Tourism Department, appeared on television commercials, billboards, advertisements and even license plates. It was such a hit that the Texas Department of …
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Roswell, New Mexico is a stodgy conservative town where sidewalks are rolled up early. Change comes to the state’s fifth largest city as slowly as the twangy, lazy cadence of a Texas drawl. So does …
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Hawkeye Pierce had a very unique (and very sarcastic) take on the Korean War: “I just don’t know why they’re shooting at us. All we want to do is bring them democracy and white bread. …
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Old-timers whose opinions I respect consistently rate Mary & Tito’s as Albuquerque’s best restaurant for New Mexican food, a restaurant that has been pleasing the most savvy and indoctrinated palates alike since 1963. It takes …
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In this age of “fake news,” biased media slants and unabashed tell-alls, the one recent headline which has pleased me most comes from Bloomberg. Splashed in bold typeface was the eye-catching lead “Mom-and-Pop Joints Are …
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Garduños just can’t seem to keep up with the Joneses, at least in terms of familial propagation. The 2010 United States Census indicates more than a million instances (1,425,470 to be precise) of the surname …
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According to the United States Census Bureau, by 2016 the Asian American population–including those of multiracial, Hispanic and Latino ancestry–had reached nearly 21 million, constituting about six-percent of the Fruited Plain’s total population. As the …
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“Is there a sound on Earth as joyous as the pat-pat-pat from a Salvadoran kitchen, the gentle rhythm of a cook slapping together a pupusa that just happens to be yours?” ~Jonathan Gold Pulitzer Prize-Winning …
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