Wildflower Chocolate Cake
One of the most delicious spring treats, chocolate cake with wildflowers, specifically flowering currant in my area (Vancouver, BC). Ribes sanguineum is one of the most fragrant sweet, sage like blossom and is great in sweet as well as savoury cooking. This recipe is so quick and easy it will boggle your mind. Substitute fresh…
How to cook crispy fish
I love salty crispy fish skin, but it’s so easy to mess this step up. Here are foolproof tips for frying the perfect fish. Trout is a good fish to experiment with as it’s affordable and a fairly thin fillet, so the skin is all important. The key is pre-seasoning your pan: Get a stainless-steel…
Lime Leaf Falernum recipe
What is Falernum? It’s a tropical liqueur originally from the Caribbean that is used in Tiki cocktails. It’s base ingredients are lime peel, cloves, ginger, almonds and sometimes allspice and it’s delicious. I made a variation of this recipe for my 2020 Tiki event to serve at the jungle location (cocktail recipe listed under the…
Gift Certificates
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…
What is witches butter?
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…
Finding hedgehog mushrooms in BC
We found these lovely, big edible mushrooms in the mountains 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 spines that hang down on the underside of…
Cooking wild mushrooms: Bears Tooth mushroom
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…
Edible Seaweed – How to harvest and enjoy sea lettuce
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…
How to make Chaga tea
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…
Bull kelp recipes
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)…