After all the hunting, the cold, the short days and then an endless stream of much-needed rainshowers, I’ve finally been able to visit my garden again. I found I have a lot of work to do. Most of my beds need digging and weeding, and I need to make some hard decisions about whether the [...]
All the best meals in life start with a connection between cook and diner; this is why most of us have a soft spot for meals our mothers made. “Cooking with love” isn’t just a cliche: When everything goes right, each dish is a little present of flavor, wrapped in care and tied with skill. It doesn’t [...]
So I got this email from Jonathan Miles of Field & Stream a few months ago asking if the magazine could reprint one of my recipes, Braised Duck Niederwald. Sure, I said, so long as you credit Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. Jonathan said he would, I said “coolio,” and promptly forgot about it. Until I [...]
I’m not entirely sure why, but I have been thinking about my Ethiopian roots lately. No, not my genetic roots. I’m talking about my time as a line cook in a restaurant called The Horn of Africa in Madison, Wisconsin. This was my first restaurant job. I started as a dishwasher. I was in Madison [...]
Curing meat stirs something primal within me: It is an ancient alchemy, a way to turn scorned cuts of meat into something sublime, a way to connect with a past we’ve all but lost. These are not original ideas. Any of you who make your own sausages, salami or cured meats know this, as does anyone [...]
A chicken recipe? On Hunter Angler Gardener Cook? Yes, it’s true. But this is no ordinary chicken. Allow me to explain… Last week I was getting ready to make some Portuguese blood sausages (more on them in a future post) when I heard a knock on the door. It was Dominic, my Puglian neighbor, who informed [...]
Yes, of course I watched the Super Bowl! Haven’t missed one since the mid-1970s, and I must say that this was an excellent game, even if I didn’t care about the teams themselves (I am still in afterglow from the Giants’ win last year). And for me, the Super Bowl isn’t complete without yummy fried [...]
I do comfort food with big, flavorful, stew-y things loaded with tomatoes and herbs and some sort of meat. In this case the meat is pheasant, and what better dish to suit my comfort jones than pheasant cacciatore? Hunter’s style. The French call it chasseur, the Spanish cazadores, the Italians cacciatore. This dish in its variations [...]
Rillettes. If you know what this is, you are definitely a gastronome. If you don’t, think of it as a fancy way to say “potted meat.” See the difference? I’d eat “rillettes.” Potted meat evokes images of SPAM and other industrial horrors. Rillettes are basically a preserved, fatty meat product pulverized enough to be spread [...]
