A Fox At The Table

A good meal is your neighborhood dog, friend to all, easy to find and happy to see you. But a great meal is the fox you’ve glimpsed at a distance who decides for the first and only time to come sit next to you as you watch the sun set.

This is one such meal.

How To Eat A Guitar

If you’re going to the trouble of taking the truss rod out, you may find yourself with a real mess of a neck, twisted or even fractured, unfit for plating. In such cases it is still good for a stew, and the fingerboard can often still be preserved separately.

Conference Center Candy

I feel the crawling acid of pineapple nectar, that chemical that eats you back. Citric acid right up front, thin and bright. The pucker tapers quickly, then withholds. This love-bombing is textbook avoidant behavior. It tempts me not to lick and suck, but to destroy.

Triscuits

Eating a Triscuit is like eating a snare drum solo: a single note, repeated over and over in endless varieties of timing and intensity. This rhythm, this rudimentary paradiddle, is the heart of its enduring crunch.

Grocery Store Sushi

A refuge of the desperate, identical in all cities, all places, tonight's dinner is grocery store sushi. Chewy rice, pitifully sparse sesame seeds, and uncomfortably packed tuna and avocado set a grim table. But soy sauce coaxes out the breathy nip of rice vinegar, enlivening every bite with salt and sour, turning cold rations into a meal.

Reese's Pieces

In the long wake of the Cup, the Pieces were born. Why, with Cup in hand, H.B. Reese chose to fracture and reforge its peanut heart, we will never know. The results are as cruel as they are delicious.

Alison's Risotto

The risotto gave the impression of a bold older aunt, a swashbuckling world traveller with a power-clash eclectic style, wielding heavy accent and chunky jewelry with the unselfconscious originality only age can earn. She broke the mold while young, and it's only now that the rest of the world is catching up to her. On anyone else this look would be a costume, but she wears it as easily as a smile.