Arts council dinner features exotic menu

There will be kangaroo, wild boar and alligator as well as an award winning quail entree on the table May 20, for the Vernon County Arts Council Wild Game Dinner at the Eagles Lodge on East Austin Boulevard.

Chef Cecil Pritchett will cook up the exotic fare for the fund-raiser for the local arts group. A limited amount of tickets for the event are on sale until May 10, and are available at several locations.

The Chamber of Commerce, Austin and Ash, in the newly refurbished Carnegie Building, and the Holle Renfro's Family Chiropractic, 124 W. Walnut, on the Square, have the tickets, which can also be purchased by calling the Vernon County Arts Council president, Jeanne Board, at (417) 667-5289.

Tickets are $17.50 each, as a donation to the VCAC. Because of an ordering deadline, ticket sales must absolutely end on May 10.

Pritchett said that he enjoyed cooking wild game and that he'd had lots of practice -- he's been cooking it since childhood.

"I like it and it's been great for me, I won an award in Kansas City for the quail we'll be serving," Pritchett said. "I was up against 100 other restaurants that year and I won."

The menu Pritchett has planned includes alligator and sausage jambalaya, Swedish style kangaroo meatballs, wild boar smoked ham medallions and the entree will be grilled quail on wild rice with a pecan-honey sauce, the dish that won Pritchett the award in 1982.

Pritchett already has plans for next year's menu.

"Next year we'll have other meats as well. I plan on having bear and mountain lion," Pritchett said. "I think people will really enjoy it."

Pritchett gained a lot of attention for the wild game restaurant he used to own in Osceola and several stories about it ran on the Associated Press wire, circa 1995, as well as several radio and television stories.

Even then-candidate John Ashcroft, who was running for the U.S. Senate at the time, stopped in and had his picture taken beneath the exotic menu.

"It was something else," Pritchett said. "I got coverage all over, even internationally, after the AP ran those stories."