Hank Shaw — author of Hunt, Gather Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast” (Rodale, 2011, $26) — is on an unusual book tour: Part marathon, part gastronomic adventure, part tent revival, he’s crisscrossing the country, preaching the gospel of wild food. He’s leading foraging walks in Portland, Ore., and Seattle and has a few traditional talks at bookstores, but mostly he’s partnering with chefs who embrace the idea of cooking with the ingredients that surround them and are willing to craft wild-food menus inspired by the book.

Mr. Shaw was born into a foraging and fishing family. “My mom grew up in the Depression in Massachusetts,” he said, “so part of her chores were to dig the clams for chowder, to pick the berries and nuts and things that were around where she grew up. My dad’s side, he’s a big fisherman but he’s also a rabid bird watcher. He made it a habit of being able to identify every bird within a 100- mile radius.” Mr. Shaw grew up in New Jersey and recalls that each year his family would “scrimp and save” in order to rent a cottage on Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island. Those days were filled with wild food. “We’d pick blackberries, blueberries, we’d get wild grapes, we’d go tread for clams. Back home in New Jersey, [we’d pick] wild onions, which grow in the grass pretty much everywhere.”

Grazing on the edible landscape was a passionate hobby, but besides relatively short stints on a clam boat and working as a line cook, it never was a job. Mr. Shaw worked for 19 years as a political reporter for newspapers. Then, in 2007, he created a blog, “Hunter Angler Gardener Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast,” where he wrote about foraging, fishing and hunting (a skill he’d picked up as an adult), as well as how to cook these wild foods. He’d never planned on blogging for a living or writing a book, but America’s political scene grew angrier and uglier, and the blog became more and more successful. After winning a James Beard Award, the offers began to pour in.

“Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast” is meant to help people slow down and see the edible world around them. It’s not a field guide or a how-to fishing or hunting manual. Instead it explores some of the most rewarding wild foods — the ones that taste the best — offers some information on how to find them and provides a wide variety of recipes to make use of them. Sections of fishing and hunting likely will seem more intimidating to some readers, but Mr. Shaw focuses on demystifying the basics, and these recipes are easily adaptable to more prosaic proteins; for example, you can substitute domestic rabbit or even chicken for squirrel in braised Squirrel Aurora.

“The reason I wrote the book, the core thing I’m trying to do, is to help people realize this is entirely doable within the confines of a normal life,” said Mr. Shaw. “You don’t have to live off the grid. You don’t have to be a survivalist.”

He largely is motivated by how delicious these wild foods are, very often much more flavorful and interesting than their domestic counterparts. That’s largely why so many chefs are drawn to them as well. “Everybody wants to do something original and creative,” he said, “If you’re using standard ingredients, pretty much every flavor combination has been done already. What if you introduce new ingredients?”

As he planned his tour, he learned that he had a thriving readership among professional cooks, which led to the idea of book events as dinners.

Derek Stevens, executive chef of Eleven Contemporary Kitchen, was one of them. An avid fisherman, he also enjoys foraging. “It’s nice now because I have kids and I can take them mushroom hunting,” he said. “My son found his first morel when he was 3 years old.” Mr. Stevens has been a longtime reader of the blog and also followed Mr. Shaw on Twitter.

The two men came into more direct contact after Mr. Stevens posted a picture on Twitter of a dish he’d made — local asparagus with a poached egg and duck-fat hollandaise — and cited Mr. Shaw as the inspiration. He later suggested that Eleven would be a good setting for a book tour dinner, and Mr. Shaw added Pittsburgh to his list.

Mr. Shaw jokingly calls this book tour “noma on the road,” a reference to Rene Redzepi’s Copenhagen restaurant, one of the driving forces behind today’s wild-food movement. “It’s more than just seasonal,” he explained. “It’s finding what is wonderful precisely where you live and exploiting it while it’s ripe and then moving on.”

Eleven’s menu highlights specialties of the region and emphasizes seasonality, and the restaurant regularly works with foragers, but the dinner for Mr. Shaw will take that local focus to a different level, said Mr. Stevens. “People talk about local food — it’s fantastic and all — but you look at morels and chanterelles and pawpaws and wild lettuces, it doesn’t get much more local than when you’re talking about things that are actually indigenous to the area.”

The Oct. 5 dinner will include foraged ingredients such as pawpaws (a fruit indigenous to this region), mushrooms and shagbark hickory nuts, as well as farm-raised edibles such as dandelion greens, duck and venison.

While the chef planned his menu several weeks ago, last-minute changes are certain. One of the challenging and exciting aspects of working with wild edibles is that adaptation and creativity are essential. Mr. Shaw, Mr. Stevens Big Burrito chef Bill Fuller plan to forage locally for ingredients the morning of the dinner, and Mr. Stevens still is working to track down a few of the more unreliable items. But whatever he comes up with is certain to be a unique and delicious taste of Western Pennsylvania.