What do people that love food do when it rains in Vancouver?  Mushroom Hunting!  Let me teach you a few simple tricks to start you safely foraging for wild foods in your own backyard.

I’m Chef Robin Kort, a Vancouver native and forager of culinary delicacies.  My company is Swallow Tail Culinary Adventures and I’ve been teaching people to identify wild plants and mushrooms for 6 years now on my popular Wild Edibles Tours.

One easy tip for new mushroom foragers this fall is to know your trees.  Some edible mushrooms must exchange nutrients or ‘eat’ specific trees.  You don’t need to be a scientist or understand why, you just need to know which trees are associated to which edible mushrooms.  Easy, right?

For example, tree oyster mushrooms thrive on dead alder wood trees in Vancouver.  So, if you look for forests of alder wood, you may find large clusters of oyster mushrooms in fall or spring.  For free!  Take them home and fry them up with a dash of butter (not too much or they’ll lose their texture) and thyme.  A nice way to impress your guests is to plate the warm mushrooms on little crostinis with a touch of goats cheese.
To learn more, check out our FREE 3-Part video series on foraging here!

If you are a person would love the treasure hunt of finding free food in the great outdoors, and learning about what’s edible in nature from a chefs perspective, please come out on one of our 2 hour wild edibles tours which include a delicious light lunch of forest edibles or sign up for our online foraging course for beginners.

Happy Foraging!

Chef Robin