By David Draper

In our Six Pack series, I sit down with interesting people to ask them six questions about hunting, fishing, eating, and just plain living well. This week I sit down with Scott Leysath, better known as the Sporting Chef.

If you have any interest in wild-game cooking, and obviously you do, you’ve probably seen Scott Leysath’s name a time or two. Billing himself as the Sporting Chef, Leysath has been cooking up fish and wild game, and promoting it to the public, long before it was trendy. Over the years, he’s hosted a number of television shows and is a regular on the sport show circuit. Most recently, he serves as the host of “Dead Meat” on the Sportsman’s Channel and authored a new book of deer recipes, The Sporting Chef’s Better Venison Cookbook. I had a chance to hunt with Leysath in Utah last fall and found him humble, hilarious, and an all-around good guy.

When we met, you joked about recently burning yourself while making a batch of jerky in the smoker, relating yourself to all the rest of us hunter-cooks who have done the same thing at one time or another. How does that everyman approach translate into your wild-game cooking?

By David Draper

In last week’s post about my North Carolina cottontail hunt, I promised I’d share the recipe for camp cook Danny Martin’s smoked barbecue rabbit. Danny was an amazing cook who always seemed to have the smoker going out back. He served us some amazing eats for lunch and supper, so when he asked if we’d like a few of our rabbits cooked up as an appetizer everyone in the group gave an enthusiastic yes.

By David Draper

I realized it’s been several weeks since I’ve stepped into the ring for a Friday Food Fight, so I think it’s time to knock the rust off a bit and get back in the game. I don’t want to pull a muscle, so I’ll start easy, with another photo of the Sunday Gravy I made earlier this month. Sticking with the Italian-American theme, my competitor will be Neil Selbicky, who fought a tough one in the last Food Fight against Levi’s beaver. Let’s see if we can put Neil in the winner’s circle this week.

By David Draper

A friend and I were talking about food the other day when he asked me, “Do you remember Old English?” Me being me, I immediately thought he was talking about Olde English 800, that high-test malt liquor we swilled when we were young and didn’t know any better. After some back and forth, I figured out he was talking about the processed cheese food sold by Kraft in what my friend so aptly described as “jelly jars.” Once the fog induced by too many 40-ounce bottles of Olde English cleared away, I did remember that particular Old English, as well its companion Pimento cheese spread.