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BLOGS

CHEF ROBIN'S BLOG ON FORAGING & COOKING
IN VANCOUVER, BC

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 wild hedgehog mushrooms in BC

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…

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)…

How to harvest geoduck clams

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…