My first duck. Sort of.
I shot a duck. Here’s how it went down. Yesterday was the most astonishingly beautiful January day Cape Cod has ever seen. Temperatures rose into the high 50s, and there was a light breeze out of the southwest. We outfitted our oyster boat, a 17-foot Carolina Skiff, for duck hunting, by which I mean we [...]
How not to sell oysters
Many years ago, on a soy bean press junket to Peoria (yes, my life is non-stop glamour), I met a man named Brian Wansink. Then at the University of Illinois and now at Cornell, he’s made a career out of studying how environment affects what we eat. Thanks to Wansink, we know that people drink [...]
The black art of bluefish
A note to my readers: I’m very excited to tell you that, as of today, some of my work will also be appearing in the Huffington Post’s food section. This is the first of what I hope to be a long and popular series on First-Hand Food . Uncertainty is the mother of superstition, and getting food [...]
Here’s to tuna
I must be living right. That’s the only possible explanation for finding this, from a complete stranger named Jon, in my e-mail one morning a few weeks back: Hello Tamar, I have been reading your blog now for about a year with great interest and amusement. I do not know how I ran across the [...]
Camp Poultry
I can never understand other people’s happiness unless it’s derived exactly the way mine is. If it makes you happy to fish, to talk to people smarter than you, and to watch episodes of The Good Life back to back, I get it. But if opera, kayaking, and adventure travel float your boat, your psyche [...]
All’s fair
Ah, spring! The weather warms, the robins return, the crocuses poke their little heads up through the soil. The cycle of life begins anew and all thoughts turn to … hunting ethics. I blame Tovar. He started it, in a post at A Mindful Carnivore about wounding animals. Every hunter I know believes it is [...]
Going BRO-K
It’s a mystery to me why anyone who actually knows something about gardening would bother following my misadventures here, but there is nevertheless evidence that I have an extremely well-informed readership. When I posted about testing my soil, the Starving commentariat weighed in with suggestions about raised beds, soil amendments, and no-dig techniques – complete [...]
Felony angling
I find, to my surprise, that I’m feeling less cranky about winter. Maybe it’s because the days are getting longer, so I’m getting more sunshine. Maybe it’s because it’s about to be February, which means we’re only 28 days away from its being about to be spring. Maybe it’s because I’ve decided to throw economy [...]
Our thanks giving
For the entire week before Turkey Doomsday, their imminent death was all I could think of whenever I checked on the turkeys. “Dead bird walking,” Kevin would say. And then, “Eat, eat!” The day before their appointment with the Cone of Silence, we took their feed away. As a consequence, they were abnormally vocal and [...]
Hoopla!
Back when my parents lived in Manhattan, they had no outdoor space – no patio, no balcony, not even a fire escape. This was a problem, because they enjoy grilling. No, that’s not really true. They don’t enjoy grilling per se. They enjoy eating grilled food, and grilling is the only way to reliably produce [...]