Help Make Borderlands Better

I am looking for recipe testers. Can you help?

Sonoran carne con chile. Not the same as chili con carne…

UPDATE: I am floored by your response! Already more than 250 of you have volunteered to test recipes. I thought I might get maybe 50. Thank you thank you thank you! I now have far more volunteers than I have recipes to test, so I think I’m set. For all of you who have volunteered, it’ll take me a bit to catalog everything and get a recipe out to you. But I hope to have that done in a week or so. Y’all made this guy’s day! THANK YOU!!!

Hey all. I am excited to say it’s finally time for recipe testing for my upcoming book Borderlands!

One of the things that sets my books apart from others is that they are all tested by normal humans — not chefs. This is why my recipes work, and those of many other cookbooks do not.

If you’ve ever sent a text message, and what you wrote is not what the other person read, you know that meaning can get lost in transition. It’s vital that that doesn’t happen with a recipe, especially a recipe that involves wild ingredients that you can’t just go to the store and buy more of.

Now Borderlands is not only a wild ingredient book, but it does have a heavy wild component to it. I’ll have recipes for everything from making tortillas at home to salsas, lots and lots of tacos, stewy things, grilled things, raw things, you name it.

If you want to help make Borderlands a better book, send me an email at hank@huntgathercook.com and tell me:

• What proteins you have or can get, like venison, chicken, beef, fish, seafood, etc.

• Vegetarian? Tell me and I’ll send you a meatless recipe.

• Food allergy? Tell me and I’ll get you a recipe that doesn’t have that item.

• How skilled a cook you are. I am looking for everyone from newbies to former chefs.

Here’s how it works: You send me an email, we agree on a recipe, and I send it to you. You make it exactly as written — this is vital — and then you give me feedback. I want to know:

• Did you like the recipe? Why or why not?

• Is there something confusing about the wording? Let me know.

• Got an idea to make it better? Fire away! Can’t promise I’ll incorporate it into the final recipe, but I do want to hear you.

If you are game for it (see what I did there?), I’ll need that feedback no later than March 7. That gives us all the better part of 2 months to hammer away at this.

Yes, you can do more than one recipe, but it’ll be one at a time. Do one, then I can give you another. I had one super reader who tested five recipes for Hook, Line, and Supper!

Some of you have tested recipes for me in the past, so you know your reward is more than just the satisfaction of helping me out: If you want, I will print your name in the acknowledgments section of the book. Kinda fun, no?

We’re getting closer on this book, and I am getting stoked! You better believe I’ll be on tour for it, too. Just starting to plan that. If you want to host me, send me an email and we can see what might work.

Thank you so much in advance for helping me with this!