It's been another brutally hot and dry weekend here in Flyover Land. For dinner tonight, I decided to try my hand at barbequeing fish...salmon to be precise. The results were spectacular, to put it unhumbly. Missus BH made a simple marinade of fresh basil from our herb garden, olive oil, and kosher salt. I grilled the fillets over indirect heat with a few mesquite chips to add a bit of smokey flavor. We rounded out the feast with fresh-baked bread, broccoli, and basmati rice with mango chutney. Unbelievably tasty!

To go along with the meal, I concocted an impromptu tropical cocktail I call Sweat o' the Gecko, that I served in my very favorite tiki mug, the Gecko Tangaroa, which tends to form condensation on the outside when you fill it with a chilled libation. Here's the recipe, if you care to attempt to duplicate it:

1 1/2 oz. fresh lime juice (never canned, you Philistines!)
3 oz. fresh-squeezed orange juice
3 oz. unsweetened pineapple juice
1/2 oz. Creme de Banana
1/2 oz. Kalani coconut liqueur
1/4 oz. Trader Vic's Macadamia Nut liqueur
1 oz. 10 Cane Rum
1 oz. Appleton Estate Rum
1 oz. Whaler's Dark Rum

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with 1 cup of crushed ice, and shake until frost forms on the outside of the shaker. Pour into Gecko Tangeroa mug half-filled with crushed ice, and garnish with fresh mint.

Bottoms up!

Posted by MrBaliHai at 5:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Derrick Bostrom blogs about his grandparent's crap: a set of beautiful old menus from various restaurants in Phoenix, Arizona, and fond memories of dining at Guggy's.

[Link: Menu Collection, Part Two]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 7:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Swanky posted these nice scans of his latest find, an old drink menu from the Aku Aku in Las Vegas. Y'know, I'd sure like some dude in a turban to bring me a Mai Tai and a fruit platter right about now.

[Link: Aku Aku Las Vegas Drink Menu]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 2:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A couple of menus from the long-defunct Trader Vic's in Havana, Cuba appeared recently on eBay. One of them sold for a whopping $75. There's nothing particularly rare about these menus, since the restaurant chain printed thousands of them as souvenirs, but these particular menus all had a note on them, ostensibly written by "Trader" Vic Bergeron himself, that reads:

"No more fine Cuban rum since that stinker Fidel Castro took over - but we've a helluva lot of menus" - Vic

[Link: Trader Vic's Menu][via Swanky]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 4:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

...or else I'm not puttin' enough alcohol in 'em.

Thanks, matrushkaka!

Posted by MrBaliHai at 7:47 PM | Permalink

Check out this nifty Tiki Central thread on tiki imagery in rock and burlesque posters.

[Link: Tiki Rock Poster Eye Candy Gallery, pg. 2, pg. 3]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 7:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

By an amazingly serendipitous coincidence, I found the following souvenir photograph at a local antique emporium this morning (click for full-size image). As you'll recall from the Wikipedia entry I linked to in my earlier Zombie cocktail post [Link], the Beachcomber's famous cocktail acheived mass popularity at the New York 1939 World's Fair [Link]. Well, here's a snazzily dressed couple hoisting said libation at the aforementioned fair!

The name on the front cover refers to legendary Broadway producer, owner of the Copacabana nightclub, and several Beachcomber restaurants, Monte Proser [Link].

Posted by MrBaliHai at 12:01 PM | Permalink

The legendary and mysterious Zombie cocktail was invented by Don the Beachcomber in the 1930s, ostensibly to cure a businessman's hangover. Kaiser Penguin took 6 Zombie recipes and put them all to the taste test. Hopefully not all on the same day, because depending on whose recipe you pick, a single Zombie can contain as much as 7 1/2 oz. of alcohol! The winner? Well, you can go ahead and read the post, but it's the same version I mix up occasionally down in the Hai'deaway when I know that I'm not going to be going anywhere for 24 hours or so.

There's another Zombie recipe that claims to be a Beachcomber original, and it's listed on page 56 of Hawai'i: Tropical Rum Drinks and Cuisine, written posthumously in 2001 by Don's last wife, Phoebe. It's got some very exotic ingredients like 30-year old Cuban and Jamaican rum, Falernum, and Absinthe (!), so I don't think I'm going to be mixin' one up in the old cocktail shaker any time soon.

[Link: Zombie Recipe Comparison]
[Link: Zombie cocktail Wikipedia entry]
[Link: Don the Beachcomber Sahara Hotel Menu]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 7:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I was fortunate enough to view a small portion of the Musée du Quai Branly's huge collection of masks, tikis, moais, and other Objets d'Oceanic Art, like the very creepy skull reliquary pictured above, when I visited the Louvre 3 years ago. The Musée's catalogue is indexed and viewable on their website, checking in at a staggering 300,000 objects.

Their search engine is in French only, so if vous ne parlez pas français, you may have to experiment a bit to figure out how to use it, but believe me, it's worth it. I suggest entering "Oceania" in the search box, then clicking on Lancer la recherche to get started.

[Link: Musée du Quai Branly][via Ramage]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 4:31 PM | Permalink

I just finished reading the hardcover copy of Thor Heyerdahl's Aku-Aku that I picked up in Vegas last week. Fantastic book, and a worthy successor to Kon-Tiki. It's too bad modern genetics has proved that Heyerdahl was dead wrong about Polynesians being descendants of the ancient Peruvians, but nevertheless, it's a great adventure story. I hope that I can visit Rapa Nui someday, and see the mysterious Moai for myself

I loved the old color photographs in this book, particularly the sequence that shows the raising of a Moai back onto its original pedestal. Here are 34 pages of photos from the book, scanned for your viewing pleasure.

[Link: Aku-Aku Image Gallery]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)