By David Draper

If any time of year begs for surf and turf, it’s early summer. The fish (or in this week’s case, crabs) are in season, and there’s usually still a bit of venison in the freezer from last season. Those steaks will slowly disappear as summer wanes on, so two of our readers took advantage of the larder in this week’s Food Fight with a couple wet and wild dinners.

By Colin Kearns

By David Draper

Last fall, I was lucky enough to finally fulfill my dream of hunting Sitka blacktail deer on Kodiak Island. The trip was pure Alaska: rough-water beach landings, white-knuckle bush plane rides, brown bear encounters, whale sightings, and mountain vistas so magnificent I won’t even try to describe them here.

And, of course, the food.

You might think it would be hard to eat well on boat with a galley the size of a closet, but with the help of Camp Chef’s Steve McGrath, we dined mighty fine. It didn’t hurt we had access to some incredibly fresh protein, including blacktail deer and tanner crab plucked from the Gulf of Alaska just hours earlier.

By David Draper

My girlfriend, T. Rebel, tried to kill me once.

Her weapon of choice? Exploding meatloaf. She claims it was an accident, but I know better. The whole scene went down like this.

She offered to cook me dinner, which should have tipped me off from the start. I do most of the cooking, so this was a rare occurrence indeed. As the meal was coming together, I was in the kitchen helping out, which generally consists of me saying, “That’s not how I would do it.” (I never said she didn’t have a good motive.) She pulled the meatloaf from the oven, sat it on the stovetop and asked me to stir the risotto simmering on the back burner. I started to lean over the meatloaf when I realized there wasn’t a spoon in the pot.