What happens when a classically-trained New York chef and fearless omnivore heads out of the city and into the wild to track down the ingredients for her meals? After abandoning Wall Street to embrace her lifelong love of cooking, Georgia Pellegrini comes face to face with her first kill. From honoring that first turkey to realizing that the only way we truly know where our meat comes from is if we hunt it ourselves, Pellegrini embarks on a wild ride into the real world of local, organic, and sustainable food.
Teaming up with veteran hunters, she travels over field and stream in search of the main course—from quail to venison and wild boar, from elk to javelina and squirrel. Pellegrini’s road trip careens from the back of an ATV chasing wild hogs along the banks of the Mississippi to a dove hunt with beer and barbeque, to the birthplace of the Delta Blues. Along the way, she meets an array of unexpected characters—from the Commish, a venerated lifelong hunter, to the lawyer-by day, duck-hunting-Bayou-philosopher at dawn—who offer surprising lessons about food and life. Pellegrini also discovers the dangerous underbelly of hunting when an outing turns illegal—and dangerous.
More than a food-laden hunting narrative, Girl Hunteralso teaches you how to be a self-sufficient eater. Each chapter offers recipes for finger-licking dishes like:
- wild turkey and oyster stew
- stuffed quail
- pheasant tagine
- venison sausage
- fundamental stocks, brines, sauces, and rubs
- suggestions for interchanging proteins within each recipe
Each dish, like each story, is an adventure from beginning to end.
An inspiring, illuminating, and often funny journey into unexplored territories of haute cuisine, Girl Hunter captures the joy of rolling up your sleeves and getting to the heart of where the food you eat comes from.
Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2011: Through geographically and gastronomically diverse essays, professional chef Georgia Pellegrini gives a voice to something that's been missing in the discussion of where our food comes from: meat. Faced with a freshly killed turkey and her personal decision to either become vegan or head to the source, Pellegrini picks up a shotgun and learns to hunt her own food. She introduces readers to her teachers and locals around the country who share hunting and cooking tips and impresses upon readers her determination to develop tasty recipes for even the most challenging game, like javelina, with as little waste as possible. More than just a collection of essays or recipes,
Girl Hunter is an important addition to the conversation about how we eat and how we live.
--JoVon Sotak 
