Cooking the Cowboy Way: Recipes Inspired by Campfires, Chuck Wagons, and Ranch Kitchens

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.

Native Texan and cowboy-turned-chef Grady Spears has created cowboy menus for restaurants he co-owned in Fort Worth, Texas; Granbury, Texas; and Beverly Hills, California, as well as for the Bush family at the Texas Governor's Mansion. This is Grady's fifth cookbook. He owns Grady's Restaurant in his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas.

Award-winning journalist and author June Naylor has covered food, dining, and travel for more than twenty years. She is a frequent contributor to a number of Texas newspapers and magazines, as well as to national periodicals and Web sites. With Grady, June wrote The Texas Cowboy Kitchen. A native Texan, she lives in Fort Worth, Texas.