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.
Think schnitzel, and you usually think veal or pork: pounded into tenderness, battered, and fried to a golden magnificence.
I first encountered fish jerky during a marlin tournament in Kona, Hawaii. It was steeped in the island flavors of ginger, soy, and pineapple.
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.
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.
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.
It drives me crazy to throw something out. I find planned obsolescence revolting.
A combination of stir-fry and salad, Lok Lak is a popular staple in Cambodia. It's usually made with beef, but in olden times, in the country's mountainous areas, venison would've gone sizzling into the wok.
Vitello tonnato is a classic dish from Italy's Piedmont region that, frankly, sounds patently insane: veal slices dressed in a creamy sauce made from canned tuna and capers. The brain may say no, but the mouth disagrees.
Most of the time, comparing printed song lyrics with poems is like comparing recipes with food: that's to say, patently unfair.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A salmi is an oldfangled, richly flavored game stew - often served, like chipped beef, over toast - that was a delicacy popular in the 1890s.
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.'
Trout plus bacon is one of civilization's greatest formulas; it always equals pleasure.
A mourning dove's beauty is an understated one: the colors of its feathers ranging through various shades of gray and drab violet, often with a striking splash of turquoise around the eyes.
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.
Loading a hollowed-out loaf of bread with steak, mushrooms, shallots, and a fat dose of horseradish yields a kind of portable beef Wellington - the pinnacle of British cuisine reinvented as a trail snack.