Quotes from Jonathan Miles

For me, there's something likable but not quite lovable about poached fish: the ultraclean flavor, the melt-away texture, the no-fat virtuousness.

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.

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.

The South's cuisine is often likened to gumbo - a thick and bubbling melange, spiked with a little bit of this, a little bit of that - yet the metaphor, like the dish, comes from West Africa.

The perfect way for an angler who loves to cook to show off his fish is serving it whole, fresh off the grill, with crispy skin and moist flesh. Problem is, that's not usually how it happens.

My childhood was basically divided between fishing and roaming the woods and hiding out in my bedroom. Maybe things would've turned out differently if I'd had a TV in there; who knows.

It drives me crazy to throw something out. I find planned obsolescence revolting.

A hot, deep bowl of venison chili is as close to manna from Heaven as you're likely to find in deer camp.

I'm not sure the word "sorry" does anything justice. It's such a loose word isn't it? I mean how can one puny word encompass all the stuff you did - But also the, all the things you didn't do? It's the inactions that keep people up at night. The actions, they're done. They're done. It's the inactions that never go away. They just hang there. They ROT. How is sorry supposed to stretch across all that?

wondering, not for the first time, if there was a kind of dark bliss built into dementia: an immunity from death and abandonment, a way of fixing a point in time so that nothing can change, nothing can be rewritten, no one can leave.

He deplored the victims as much as their murderer but most of all deplored the hours they all spent crowding his head; his job, he felt, was merely to punctuate a sentence he wished he'd never read. "From my earliest childhood," he says, "it was always my goal to live in a state of astonishment. But this was the wrong kind of astonishment. This was astonishment at humanity's capacity for evil, depravity, for greed, for apathy. It was too much for me. I wanted to be amazed by something greater.

But then he decided it wasn't an irony, it was merely the broken gears of time, or the way life can feed you when you're full (youth) and starve you when you're hungry (midlife).

Alexis was at that age, seventeen, when mothers come into view as tyrants or imbeciles or both.

This is our condition. We do not solve problems. We replace them with other problems.

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.

I first encountered fish jerky during a marlin tournament in Kona, Hawaii. It was steeped in the island flavors of ginger, soy, and pineapple.

Great sauces are like an insurance policy for venison roasts, which can easily overcook or dry out. Beyond their ability to rescue, however, is the power to elevate.

I once stumped Jimmy Buffett by calling him a saint.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dry rubs are as integral to downhome barbeque as smoke.

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.