I just read a “foodie” magazine from cover-to-cover. 

This probably doesn’t seem all that big a deal, but trust me, this is not my usual reading preference.  I don’t do recipes.  I don’t really care for the language and pomposity of much of the gourmet cooking genre.  I’m an OK cook from time to time, but it’s not something I generally spend my free time reading about.

And then, last spring, I heard about Cooking Wild Magazine.  Even better, they asked me to do a piece for their innagural issue.  Now, unlike Groucho Marx, I was pretty honored that this “club” would have me.  I mean heck, to be featured in a magazine that includes writer/chefs like Scott Leysath and Hank Shaw… and so was born a kind of cool relationship.

I just received the winter issue of Cooking Wild, and flipped it open.  OK, in the interest of full disclosure, I was wondering if they’d included an article I wrote about lead ammunition (they did), but I got sidetracked right out of the gate by a first-person piece on hunting in Africa which was immediately followed by another story about a wild sheep hunt.  Then there was the piece on cooking ducks by the aforementioned Mr. Leysath.  And Hank Shaw wrote about cooking with nettles, which grow like a plague in my honey-hole at the Tejon Ranch.  I probably wouldn’t have read Chef Michael Tuohy’s piece about braising except for the fact that I just cooked a piece of venison, and honestly, it would have benefited from that treatment. 

The point is, I guess, that the magazine has managed to pull together the elements required to get my interest.  There’s hunting stories, wild game meat processing tips, and tasty-sounding food… all couched in pretty good writing.  Who could ask for more?  Well, maybe that’s pushing it, but the magazine is definitely worth a read.   Check it out if you get half a chance.

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