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 once stumped Jimmy Buffett by calling him a saint.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Except for a very few elite pro racers up front, the Dakar Rally is not, at heart, a contest among the competitors; the battle, instead, is between mankind - more precisely, Western mankind, with all its fire-breathing machinery and inexorable arrogance - and Africa, which has been proving itself untamable for centuries now.
Anyone with a fondness for intricately flavored, carefully measured cocktails and entertaining at home knows how poorly the two mix.
For most of the competitors, winning the Dakar has little to do with the standings on the final day and everything to do with making it to the final day.
There is a mammalian side to all of us; on occasion, it rears its head, snarls, makes a mess, acts the fool, howls at the moon, gives or gets a black eye.
Young men feel they have much to prove; older men, as a very general rule, tend to feel more comfortable in their skins.
Bullies are bullies, and they're always uninteresting.
Though little known in the U.S., the Dakar is a sports juggernaut in Europe, where France's state broadcasting company runs more than 25 hours of coverage, and the leading drivers and riders are accorded the same status we give to Super Bowl quarterbacks.
Driving a race car isn't too far a cry from driving any other sports car, but driving one through Africa in the middle of the night offers a wide scree of new sensations.
For centuries, pates have been one of the greatest vehicles for wild game. But making a pate, which is nothing more than a meatloaf, has tended to be a laborious task, with ingredient lists as long as a shotgun barrel.
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.
Poyha is a venison dish handed down from the Cherokee tribe. You can think of it as a meatloaf, which it is, or as a skillet of cornbread that some venison sneaked into, which it also is. Either way, it's a simple and satisfying meal.
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.
Few things grace a plate as dramatically as a whole plucked upland bird, however it's cooked.
You pray for days when the crappie fishing is so relentlessly good that you're giggling like a kid and the only things you're lacking in life are another stringer and an extra hour on the water. But what do you do with that pile of freshly caught crappies spilling out of your cooler? Call your pals for a mega-fry.
