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Cooking Game Don't bemoan squirrels if you're ever around Georgia Pellegrini. Those little bushy tail animals are some of the best eating going, if you ask the chef and author, who shoots, skins, and cooks up these tasty creatures (and others including elk, boar, and turkey) in her book, Girl Hunter: Revolutionizing theWayWe Eat, One Hunt at a Time. Her frst book, Food Heroes, was released in 2010. P pellegrini's been known to bring frozen squirrel meat through airports, or the postal service (she was mailing the skins to her friend, who would use them for jewelry). She's hung duck, pheasant, pigeon, and woodcock on a London fre escape overnight to cook up for a holiday meal the next day, and stabbed a wild boar through the heart. At twenty-four, living in New York City after college at Wellesley and prep school before that at Chapin, where Ivanka Trump was a classmate, Pellegrini felt a disconnect to the life she was living and the life she had lived as a child: the one by the stream, on top of a boulder fshing for trout with her father on the land of her great-grandfather (George, Person of Interest 82 whom she is named after) in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. The former investment banker at Lehman Brothers kicked off her stilettos and cocked a 20-gauge shotgun, and her dormant pioneering spirit sprang to life. Pellegrini got to work: frst by attending the French Culinary Institute in New York City, then by working in the kitchens of farm-totable restaurants in the United States and France, blogging about the exploration into what it means to, as Pellegrini describes, "pay the full karmic price of the meal" by hunting for it, cleaning it, not wasting any parts of it and eating it—sometimes in dirty pants and boots after the hunt; other times, perhaps, in her camoufage sequin dress (a fnd she hunted down in Fredericksburg, Texas, that befts the lady behind the doublebarrel who seamlessly mixes ferocity with femininity). Pellegrini, thirty-one, who looks like a movie star version of Calamity Jane in her blond-haired, blue-eyed, toothpaste-ad-smile splendor, splits her time between Austin, Texas, and New York City and appreciates the value of knowing where your dinner comes from and what it takes to get it there. "It's not georgia pellegrini Author of two books, soon to be three Tempus-Magazine.com . Spring 2013 easy," she says, but nor does she think it should be. "It's gross sometimes. It's smelly sometimes. But the reality is that a living thing just gave up its life, so I need to get over that and respect that." Her recipe hunting takes us through the wilds of Arkansas, Montana, and Wyoming, and sometimes closer to home in upstate New York, where the night before she shot and then skinned a few squirrels for an upcoming cooking spot on the History Channel. "When I pulled the guts out, it didn't smell great, but that's okay because that's sort of what has to happen if I'm going to eat meat. When I make the squirrel Brunswick stew, it's really going to be a profound meal because I totally understand every part of what had to happen for me to be able to be eating that." She's had such outside interest for this brave new (old) world that she now inhabits that she started hosting Girl Hunter Weekends during which she leads a group (men, too) into the feld to hunt, cook, and learn some of her twenty-frst-century pioneering ways. Her next book's working title that she's writing when she can fnd the time "in airports or on airplanes" is The Fearless Girl's Guide to SelfSuffciency and Survival, so if whipping up some pan-seared deer liver that you make from the day's hunt isn't quite on your list yet, maybe making ice pops from "over the hill" red wine you're about to dump, making preserved lemons, or learning survival skills like using a compass will be. Higher ed on screen Favorite Frock Attended Chapin prep school and Wellesley The History Channel features her work Camoufage sequin dress from Texas photograph By Diane Cu georgia pellegrini's got the world at her feet, and she knows how to cook it up and serve it for dinner.