Pheasant, Grouse, Quail

Pheasant Breast with Parsley Sauce

Seared pheasant breast with a refined parsley sauce I learned from the French Laundry's cookbook. It's an elegant way to sex up a simple seared piece of pheasant.

Recipe

Carrot Consomme with Gnocchi

Don't be fooled by the fancy name. These are your standard ricotta-spinach gnocchi, only made with wild cow parsnip greens, and the carrot consomme is fiendishly easy to make. A knockout dish that's pure simplicity.

Recipe

German Fish Balls with Green Sauce

Fish meatballs! What's not to love? This is a German version, doable with pretty much any fish that swims, and it's served with a bright, herby green sauce that is traditional in Hesse. Remember the Hessians from the War of Independence? That's them.

Berries and Fruits

Chinese Plum Sauce with Wild Plums

A Chinese style plum sauce made with wild plums. This stuff kicks the crap out of store-bought, and is even better on Peking Duck than the more common hoisin sauce. But hell, this stuff is so good it'd be awesome on an old tire.

Pheasant, Grouse, Quail

BBQ Quail Southwest Style

Quail barbecued slow and low with Arizona sauce. What is Arizona sauce, you say? All that is good about the wild foods of the Southwest: mesquite honey, tequila, and wild chiltepin chiles.

Salmon and Trout

Saffron Sauce with Fish

Every spring I create a dish that celebrates spring's colors, which for me are green and gold. Here is this year's edition, a trout dish that is as simple as it is pretty.

Pasta, Risotto, Gnocchi

Ramp Pasta with Morels

This might be the prettiest - and best-tasting - dish I've made this spring. You can really taste the ramps in the pasta, and the morels, cooked simply with ramps, butter and a little stock, compliment the pasta like sunshine on a pretty girl's eyes.

Preservation Recipes

Pickled Mustard Greens

Ever since I began studying Chinese food some years ago, I noticed how much fermented and pickled foods factor into…

Fish

Trout with Morels and Wild Onions

Trout with morels, ramps and fiddleheads is a classic combination - all are in season at the same time, and in the same place. Even in the High Sierra, we have our own rendition, with bracken fiddleheads and Sierra wild onions. I call this dish Sierra Spring.

Recipe

Venison Tartare

Beef or venison tartare is the "trust fall" of the culinary world: Raw meat and a raw egg yolk. If your ingredients are not impeccable, things can go very, very wrong. But done right, this is at once a primal and exciting little appetizer.

Recipe

Swedish Salmon with Peas and Vattlingon

Behold, one of the most vividly beautiful recipes I've made in a long time. Salmon Swedish style, with vattlingon. It screams Christmas, right? Wrong. This dish can only be made in springtime. Read more to find out why...

Salmon and Trout

Salmon Rillettes

One of the cool things about salmon is that it is rich enough to make rillettes with, especially when you use belly meat and the trim from around the bones. This is a pretty classic version, with both smoked and fresh salmon or steelhead trout.