Are your underwear emitting an odor of feces or stale urine or stagnant crotch-and-ass sweat that I can smell from a normal, respectful distance? Are you wearing some form of outer garment between your underwear and the outside world? Are you someone with whose underwear I may interact directly in the near future,…

Don’t. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Via the Washington Post, I have learned of a study by the Journal of Hand Therapy showing that millennial men are a bunch of weak, pampered diaper babies with butter-soft hands and that your puny muscles are no match for my hardened, callused Gen-X gripping power. I am paraphrasing, here. The Journal of Hand Therapy…

Here’s the thing about South Carolina: if you drive far enough inland from the ocean, you will run out of fingers on which to count highway billboards threatening you with ultimatums like “Accept Jesus Or Burn In Hell.” Not a whole lot to recommend the place once you get out of earshot of the surf.

Parenting a small child means, of course, doubling the number of people whose well being is your responsibility. This can be difficult, for a Wearer Of A Garbage Bag Because You Forgot To Buy Laundry Soap For The 27th Consecutive Week—for someone who has arrived, mostly by accident, deep in the swamp of real-deal…

Just once in your life, cook a brisket, over smoky charcoal heat, on the grill. Do it for the solemn pride of having done so, and for the rime of authority it will lend to your future haughty pronouncements on the quality of others’ briskets. Do it because brisket—a massive cut of tough working muscle from the chest…

Pâté is a fun word to say through your nose. Paaaaah-TAY. You should practice this often, as it will accompany the finished product well as a signal to the swells that you are one of them. ARE you enJOYing your paaaah-TAY.

There are many good reasons for grilling whole fish. The skin and bones keep the flesh moist and flavorful; the skin itself, when cooked well, is life-changingly delicious; whole fish stands up better to grilling heat than a fillet or fish steak will; whole fish usually costs less by weight than the portioned stuff;…

“Bone broth,” the latest and stupidest of food trends, gets a hard time, here and elsewhere. But really, that’s only because the term “bone broth” is a sequence of mouth-sounds the actual semantic content of which is, “Our educational system has failed.”

Hollandaise sauce is the lifeblood of the brunch-industrial complex. You want brunch—which is to say, you want eggs Benedict, the totemic brunchstuff, and maybe like some strawberries or quiche or whatever else goes with brunch? I dunno, I just really want some eggs Benedict, and it’s 11:30 already—but don’t know how…

Roasting a chicken is the last threshold to full coming of age. Before you have done it, you are a fledgling. After, you are an elder.

Pity the poor East Coast rat racer. Look at him, pouring out of the subway with his sooty, bedraggled kin, lurching through ill-lit corridors, past dripping pipes and glaring widows just missing him with the splash of their chamberpots. There he is, spending $12 on a substandard turkey sub. Here he goes, hat brim…

I love St. Patrick's Day. I know it's terribly unfashionable to admit so, but I love it all: I love the wearing of the green, I love the dogs in costume, I love the KISS ME I'M IRISH buttons. Give me a pair of glittered, bobbly shamrocks affixed to a headband and I'm one bonny Irish lass. The green beer? Hell yes.…

This article originally appeared on October 12, 2013. I'm republishing it today because I went on an insane cauliflower kick this week, and also for the lesser reason that I couldn't find good ingredients for what I wanted to cook. If you're looking for something especially St. Patrick's Day-ish, put some chopped…

Picture, in your mind, a mundane interaction between any two regular, essentially happy Italian people. One purchasing a packet of chewing gum from the other, for example. Can you picture it? The screaming, the wild gesticulating, the red faces, the flashing whites of crazed eyes and bared teeth, the elaborate…

The weird thing about soft-boiled eggs is the widespread misconception that they're so much trickier to make than their hard-boiled brethren. Done right, they're really not much trickier at all. Easier than stuffing 1,200 words of padding into an instructional blog post about making them, that's for damn sure!

You can get away with the extended-family-plus-cake setup for your kid's first, oh, four or even five birthdays. Sure, you might invite one or two chums from preschool or the neighborhood, or the close-in-age cousins, but really: So long as there are candles to blow out, cake to eat, presents to open, and…

Broccoli is good. No, it is! Good for you, sure, yes, high in fiber and vitamin C and some things called carotenoids that I'm pretty sure were the bad guys in The Fifth Element? But also they are supposed to have antioxidant properties, which means they make you immune to rust.