June Naylor

Grady Spears

"Grady's probably the only guy I know who could dress up a Frito pie and make it look pretty, and the only cook who'd think of marinating skirt steak in Dr. Pepper. . . . [He is equally] at ease in a worn pair of leather chaps as he is wielding a saute pan."—Nolan Ryan, Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher and lifelong cowboy As at home on the coffee table as it is on the kitchen counter, this definitive cowboy cookbook features historical essays and photographs depicting life on the Chisholm Trail alongside recipes that reinvent cowboy cuisine. Cowboy-turned-chef Grady Spears reinvents chuckwagon dishes from Barbecued Quail Tamales to Pork Tenderloin with Watermelon Salsa to Butterscotch Pie by elevating them to haute cowboy cuisine. Equal parts cookbook, history lesson, and photographic essay, The Texas Cowboy Kitchen blends Spears's distinctive culinary recipes with June Naylor's narrative of life on the Chisholm Trail and Erwin E. Smith's award-winning black-and-white cowboy photography and four-color culinary shots. Divided into 10 chapters ranging from "Campfire Cocktails" to "Things You Don't Rope" to "Chuckwagon Secrets," The Texas Cowboy Kitchen contains 100 original recipes perfected at Spears's renowned former restaurants, the Chisholm Club in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Nutt House Restaurant in Granbury, Texas—both of which satisfied wagonloads of hungry customers.

The Texas Cowboy Kitchen

David Manning

Kelly Frazier

Life in the saddle, on the trail, and in the outback has forged a style of living that cowboy-turned-chef Grady Spears calls the Cowboy Way. It's a life where boots and hats are much more about function than fashion. It means that when you eat, drink, and breathe the tending of cattle, raising beef is not just some exercise where loss is charted on a spreadsheet. When your days are filled with the smells of fresh-cut hay and the creaking of worn leather, when you wake up with the sun and to the smell of coffee on the boil and biscuits from the chuck wagon, you are living the Cowboy Way. Because cowboys spend long days outdoors in every kind of weather, sometimes for weeks at a time, satiating a cowboy's hunger is a challenge for ranch cooks from Texas to Florida, north into Canada, and south of the border into Mexico. This collection of almost one hundred recipes is not only the result of Grady's journey across North America, but also the cowboy's journey through history. In Cooking the Cowboy Way, you'll have a ringside seat at the rodeo as Grady wrestles down new recipes from some incredible cowboy cooks and kitchen wranglers who know what hungry cow folks want to eat. And in the process, you'll be carried away by the magic of starry nights by the campfire and seduced by the heritage of the chuck wagon and ranch kitchens, where the menus are still stoked by the traditions of the Old West just as they have been for a century or more.

Recipes Inspired by Campfires, Chuck Wagons, and Ranch Kitchens

Cooking the Cowboy Way

Robb Walsh

A collection of authentic cowboy recipes with an uptown flavor, including such dishes as venison chili and ranch beans

Grady Spears

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