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For your food loving friends or family, any of our unique culinary experiences can be presented as a gift. You can choose a specific food experience like our mushroom trips, online foraging courses, secret suppers or get a general Swallow Tail Culinary Adventures gift certificate for any amount and let them choose their own fantastic…

Witches butter is an edible wild fungi. Nutritionally, it is made up of polysaccarides (carbohydrates) and is being studied for it’s immune boosting properties. If you get stuck out in the forest it’s one of the few edible mushrooms that can be eaten raw. Always grows on dead wood and is commonly called a ‘jelly…

Found these lovely, big mushrooms near Bella Coola, BC on a foraging trip in October. They are great mushrooms for beginners because there are no poisonous look alikes to confuse you. The distinctive feature of hedgehog mushrooms is their little ‘teeth’ or fingers that hang down on the underside of the cap. The mushroom is…

Bears tooth mushroom (Hericium sp.) fried in butter. One of the tastiest and most aromatic BC wild mushrooms. These can be found on wood of hardwoods and conifers, (Ginns(5)), on old logs, dead stubs, or cankers on living trees with heart rot, (Harrison), late summer and fall (Miller). Always cut a piece off the main…

Sea lettuce – (Ulva lactuca) – This bright green seaweed grows in thin sheets in the mid-intertidal zone, so it’s easy to pick at low tide.  A very clean tasting seaweed, not fishy, great in seaweed salad or add to ramen, congee or risotto for a colourful note of the sea.  Great firm texture.  Can…

Chaga (Inonotus obliquus ) is a superfood aptly named the ‘gold’ of the forest. Find it growing on older, dead or dying birch trees in BC.  It’s a wild mushroom that’s as hard as a rock, but can be smashed into small particles to make into tea. This is an ancient medicine used by cultures…

Furikake I love harvesting bull kelp, it makes a salty snack with tons of umami. Here are some tips to harvesting your own and one of my recipes for using the blades of the seaweed. Harvest some bull kelp blades, rinse them and dry roast them in the oven at 150F till just brown (er)…

Geoduck are called the king of clams for a reason. When they are eaten raw and fresh from the sea they have an almost crunchy texture and have a briny and slightly sweet flavour. These big beauties are the laughing stock of the sea, but amazingly can go for $60/lb. If you on the Pacific…

By Chef Jane Cornborough (L’Abattoir restaurant) Makes appetizers for 4 guests It’s summer which means Salmon season is here! Pink salmon is perfect for canning and making dishes like croquettes, so here is a recipe that Chef Jane is using for our Aug 2019 summer secret supper featuring an all salmon menu in celebration….

Many of us love berry picking around Vancouver. Blackberries, huckleberries, salmonberries, thimbleberries, raspberries there are so many in summer it can be quite exciting for people like me that love a free lunch. Here is a list of some common berries that you may find alongside the edible ones. Twinberry (Loricera involutcrata) – Mildly toxic…

Green figs grow like mad in Vancouver, here’s a simple recipe for Persian style green fig preserves which are traditionally eaten for breakfast with bread, butter and nuts. When you cook figs the flavours really come out as the sugar caramelizes. I’m not one for eating them raw as they just taste like sugar at…

There are hundreds of species of bamboo, all of which are edible. Some are better than others, many species only grow tough, bitter shoots, which must be cooked for a long time to be edible. Black bamboo (Phyllostachys nigra) grows well in our lower mainland (BC) climate and is very tasty, just make sure you…