It drives me crazy to throw something out. I find planned obsolescence revolting.
— Jonathan Miles
If everything is disposable or recyclable, how does that make us feel about ourselves and each other?
Wild geese have so much less fat than their domestic brethren that, as far as the kitchen is concerned, the two birds should be considered different species altogether - so much so that they require opposite roasting methods.
It's often said that doves provide valuable practice for duck season, but this strikes me as upside down. With their tiny profiles, wicked speed, and fighter-plane acrobatics, doves are more difficult to take down.
Dry rubs are as integral to downhome barbeque as smoke.
For me, there's something likable but not quite lovable about poached fish: the ultraclean flavor, the melt-away texture, the no-fat virtuousness.
For whatever reason, I encounter Canadian whiskey at hunting camps way more often than I do in restaurants, bars, or homes. Could be the lower price. Could be the mellow character, which lends itself to long hours of fireside sipping. Or it could just be tradition.
A Negroni demands your full, upright attention. It will not tolerate mindless swigging the way all those sweet summertime drinks do, which is just one reason no one has ever ordered one at a swim-up bar at a resort pool.
The angle we give the bathroom mirror is always meant to flatter.
So much magazine writing is playing to an empty room. You work like a plow horse, your words get printed on a half-million or more copies, and then it often just disappears into this national vacuum.
I was born in Cleveland, Ohio; raised primarily in Phoenix, Arizona; and, after running away from home in my teens to play music and bouncing around a bit, settled in Oxford, Mississippi, which I consider more my home than anywhere else in the world.
More often than not, punches underwhelm - too fizzy, too fruity, too sherbet-y, and/or too baroque, the flavors all muddled into the boozy equivalent of the water left over from cleaning watercolor brushes.
The greatest meal of my life involved a Triscuit.
Anyone who's ever read the lyrics of an already cherished song has most likely encountered that hollow sensation of something missing, the absence of certain emotional integers. It can be like viewing a loved one's X-rays.
Most of the time, comparing printed song lyrics with poems is like comparing recipes with food: that's to say, patently unfair.
Bermuda's beaches are justly famed for their pink sands, colored by the pulverized shells of single-celled organisms called foraminifera. When occupied by bikini-clad sunbathers, the beaches, with Victorian primness, appear to be blushing.
If you're trout fishing in the lochs of Scotland, your catch may end up like this: batter-crusted with that ubiquitous Scottish staple, oats; and served beside a generous mound of stovies, Scottish slang for stove-roasted potatoes.
I guess I'm old-fashioned.
Havana is one of the great cities of the world, sublimely tawdry yet stubbornly graceful, like tarnished chrome - a city, as a young Winston Churchill once wrote, where 'anything might happen.'
Of course, there's nothing wrong with deer burgers and venison chili, but with a little gusto, those stalwarts can go from satisfying to sublime.
A hot, deep bowl of venison chili is as close to manna from Heaven as you're likely to find in deer camp.
The rich flavors of duck meat have always attracted sweet, fruit-based sauces.
The enemy of successful long-term freezing is air. When air meets food, dehydration occurs, leading to freezer burn. With delicate proteins like fish, freezer burn can be downright fatal, ruining both texture and flavor.
Roasting fish that's encased inside a salt crust is a centuries-old method of ensuring moist, ultra-flavorful flesh.
I find airports to be purgatorial in many ways. I mean, even from the basics of the design: you know, this sort of - this muted gray and the fluorescent lights.
Novelists lie for a living - what is a novel, after all, but an assembly of fibs paradoxically meant to illustrate something true? - but generally see a distinction between lying on the page and lying off it.
I'm either proud or embarrassed to say that I never took a journalism class in my life.
The mint julep may be sacred in the South, but so is college football, and that doesn't stop us from enjoying it.
Anyone with a fondness for intricately flavored, carefully measured cocktails and entertaining at home knows how poorly the two mix.
The James Brown we saw tended to be the James Brown we chose to see: as the caped crusader of funk and soul, adored by millions, or as the face in a seemingly endless series of mug shots. The ways in which he appealed to and appalled different audiences made Brown a kind of national Rorschach test.
A banal poem is never more than a banal poem. A banal or trite lyric, however, can be - with the right vocal cords - brilliantly and shatteringly conveyed.
I once stumped Jimmy Buffett by calling him a saint.
You can't rent a car in Bermuda; about twenty miles long and two miles wide at its fattest, it deems itself too small for surplus traffic.
I first encountered fish jerky during a marlin tournament in Kona, Hawaii. It was steeped in the island flavors of ginger, soy, and pineapple.
Most of us seem to be buried under our own possessions, and it seems to be getting worse.
With the notable exceptions of rum drinks, black beans, fat brown cigars, the smiles of pretty girls, hot yellow sunlight, and fat men with guitars and bongos playing mambos, rumbas, and boleros late into the night, nothing in Cuba comes easily.
In the South, dove hunts do not draw quietly to a close. Sometimes, at the simplest end, a grill and cooler are hauled to the edge of the field, and the doves' breasts are grilled - usually swaddled in bacon, maybe with a jalapeno tucked inside - as the hunters tell and retell tales of the day's shooting.
Technically, fish can last up to half a year in a freezer, but their quality starts to slide after the first month.
After a solid day of fishing, I'm craving something hearty. That's where a jug of buttermilk comes in. Poaching fish in buttermilk yields the luscious texture and pure flavor, but with a more substantial richness and a poaching liquid you'll want to lap up with a spoon.
Ask any deer camp old-timer for a foolproof recipe, and you're likely to encounter a lot of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup. There is a reason for that: Mushrooms plus cream plus game meat adds up to a perfect trinity of flavors.
Not long ago, in an excruciatingly remote village in the Australian Outback, I was startled to see a bartender in a cowboy hat measuring out a classically proportioned French 75 - something he'd picked up on the Internet, he told me.
For me, alcohol has this endless fascination that there's this substance that can enhance life so beautifully and destroy it so completely.
Without strenuous preplanning, road food is almost always bad food, sad food, chain food, clown food.
My childhood was basically divided between fishing and roaming the woods and hiding out in my bedroom. Maybe things would've turned out differently if I'd had a TV in there; who knows.
Aside from the martini, the mint julep may be the most iconic cocktail in America.
An early remedy for malaria called for tossing the sufferer, Br'er Rabbit-style, into a prickly bush; in his hasty retreat, went the thinking, he might leave the fever behind. Orally-administered cobwebs were also deemed effective.
The South's cuisine is often likened to gumbo - a thick and bubbling melange, spiked with a little bit of this, a little bit of that - yet the metaphor, like the dish, comes from West Africa.
Poems, unlike songs, are written to be read and, thus, come equipped with their own rhythms and melodies; they're self-contained entities, the whole shebang.
Paddleboarding is what happens when you want to kayak on a surfboard or surf a kayak: You stand atop a board paddling yourself around. It's a leisurely good time.
The perfect way for an angler who loves to cook to show off his fish is serving it whole, fresh off the grill, with crispy skin and moist flesh. Problem is, that's not usually how it happens.
