To pluck or skin? It’s a question all bird hunters face. Most of a bird’s distinctive flavor is in its skin and fat, but plucking can be tricky. Here’s how to go about it.
How-To (DIY stuff)
How to Fillet a Flat Fish
My method for filleting a halibut, fluke or other large flat fish will get you every bit of edible meat.
How to Make Mesquite Bean Syrup
If you live where mesquite trees do — and that’s much of the Southwest from California to Texas — you can make a fantastic mesquite bean syrup very easily with a slow cooker. Here’s how to do it.
Homemade Root Beer Syrup
Homemade root beer is easy to make when you use this syrup as a base. No fermentation needed, you just add it to sparkling water and you’re done. And if you live east of the Great Plains, sassafras lives everywhere.
Cooking and Eating Shad
Cooking and eating the American shad used to be part of any angler’s skill set. No longer. All those bones have defeated many a would-be shad eater. But here’s how to cook shad and actually enjoy it. Everything you need to know about dealing with a fish whose Latin name is “tastiest.”
How to Catch Pacific Rockfish
There is no form of fishing I am better at than bottom fishing in the ocean. And here in the West, that means rockfish (rock cod) and lingcod. Here’s how to catch more, from gear to technique, to little tricks and tips that have helped me over the years.
Brewing Gruit and Other Herbal Beers
Gruit beer, which is beer made without hops, or with hops as a minor addition, is an ancient practice that deserves to be revived using the wild edible plants all around us.
How to Eat Bracken Fern Safely
Bracken fern lives all over the world. And most every place it lives, people eat it. Yet it’s recently been branded as a carcinogen. That seems to be true, but like all things, the poison’s in the dose.