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.
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.
Think schnitzel, and you usually think veal or pork: pounded into tenderness, battered, and fried to a golden magnificence.
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.
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.
Aside from the martini, the mint julep may be the most iconic cocktail in America.
Trout plus bacon is one of civilization's greatest formulas; it always equals pleasure.
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.
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.
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.
The spectacle of a good bar fight, properly executed and healthily ended, is not merely annoying boorishness. The best of them - an admittedly minor slice - are shaded with the elements of high art.
Dry rubs are as integral to downhome barbeque as smoke.
The mint julep may be sacred in the South, but so is college football, and that doesn't stop us from enjoying it.
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.'
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.
The greatest meal of my life involved a Triscuit.
Though we tend to reach for the bacon or sausage, fish and eggs are a classic breakfast combination in many places around the world, and for good reason: They're great together.
For me, alcohol has this endless fascination that there's this substance that can enhance life so beautifully and destroy it so completely.
David Benioff can hardly be classified as an underdog. The 2002 film adaptation of his first novel, 'The 25th Hour,' was directed by Spike Lee and starred Edward Norton.
Grilling grapes may sound crazy, but the smoky, blistered char they get from a few minutes on the fire gives them a deep, winelike character.
