By David Draper

Cannellini, or white kidney, beans are staple in my kitchen and I always try to keep several cans in the pantry. Truthfully, we usually have several cans of beans, along with a few pounds of dried beans, on hand, but cannellinis are probably my favorite. They’re creamy and readily take on the flavor of whatever they’re cooked with. I toss them with tomatoes for a quick and easy side dish and incorporate them into several different main dishes, including this simple braise with some venison merguez the I made from last summer’s axis deer.

By David Draper

When you write about eating, drinking and cooking, friends and family members like to ask a lot of questions. Strangers even get in on the act when they find out what I do for a living—especially if they’re also sportsmen. The most common question is typically some variant of “How do you make _______ taste good?” with the blank most often being filled with the word “duck” or “goose” or sometimes “antelope.”

After the first few times this happened, I developed some rote answers, typically a simple cooking tip or quick recipe that would convince them to give duck or goose or antelope another chance at the table. Truthfully, the straight answer, which I should probably have printed on the back of my business cards, would read: “Don’t overcook it.”

By David Draper

As an outdoorsman from The Outside (that is, the Lower 48), I’ve been blessed to have visited Alaska about a dozen times. Admittedly, more than half of those occasions were work trips scheduled in early March when there isn’t a lot for an uninitiated outdoorsman to do. Those times my coworkers and I would retreat to a good dive bar (generally Darwin’s Theory in downtown Anchorage) filled with friendly locals and spend our off hours listening to their stories of lives spent in the Last Frontier.

Since then, those tales, told over stiff drinks, inspired several trips of my own, and I’ve now hunted or fished Alaska five different times—from the Kenai to the Noatak to Montague and Kodiak. It seems like I’m always somewhere between reminiscing/recovering from my last trip and planning the next. Through all these adventures, I’ve managed to have more than a few memorable meals. Here are my five favorites, in rough order of overall epic-ness:

By David Draper

If there’s any one ingredient (besides bacon) that will almost guarantee a Food Fight victory, it’s venison backstrap. So, who do you vote for when both entries include this reader-favorite cut? I guess this week’s fight between Wild Chef readers Neil Selbicky and SMC1986 will come down to the side dishes, but then they each excel on that front as well. What to do? What to do? I can’t decide so I’m leaving it up to you.