Discover the wild side of Canada's Cuisine by harvesting your own delicious bounty

Make your plate the final destination for mushrooms, wild ginger, leeks, giant spot prawns, sea asparagus and much  more.

Take eating local a step further by foraging for your own wild food in Canada; pluck a hefty chanterelle, grab a crab from a trap or dig up delicious root veggies you never knew existed. Hook up with folks who will open your eyes to the delicious bounty of Canada's forests and waters, teaching you to  forage and harvest goodies from coast to coast to coast all yaer round, with your plate as the final destination.

Mushrooms are the most popular delicacy  to pursue - usually in spring and fall - but its important to go with an expert. Foraging doesn't get any more urban than downtown Toronto's Don Valley, where a morning's hike might turn up morels for lunch. Or laern how to stalk up to 60 kinds of edible mushrooms including celli, hedgehog, pine, cauliflowers and chicken of the woods in the woods of Vancouver Island's Cowichan Valley with author/chef Bill Jones, who then cooks them up in his Deerholme Farm kitchen. For more mushrooming head out with nearby Benedictine monk, Brother Michael.

Trout Lilies, wild ginger, watercress and leeks are some of the often overlooked greens that might be on your DIY menu during a guided stroll on trails along the Avon and Thames rivers in Ontario's Victorian City of Stratford. At Nova Scotia's Trout Point Lodge, chefs take guests into Acadian forests in search of fiddlehead ferns, wild cranberries and unusual root veggies you learn to cook in their Pro kitchen. And in the wilds outside Golden, British Columbia, Northstar Bushcraft will teach you literally how to eat out of the forest, from English Holly and horsetails to fireweed and the inner bark of most trees.

On the West Coast, haulu up your own appies from a prawn trap with a marine biologist in the deep fjiord waters off Brentwood Bay Resort just outside Victoria. Toss these plump giant spot prawns onto the marina barbecue to accompany a glass of chilled British Columbia wine. Savour a garlicky Dungeness Crab on a Vancouver beach with crustaceans you learned to deftly extract from a trap or hit the beach at Sooke during low tide between  spring and fall with the Vancouver Island's Seaweed Lady, Diane Bernard, and nibble some of the 300 edible varieties harvested from what she calls "one great, big, wilde, exotic, underwater garden".

On the East Coast, devour a lobsteryou caught yourself with a veteran lobsterman off New Brunswick's Shediac Bay whilst listening to top tapping Acadian tunes and "old Salt" stories about life spent at sea. You could leave the foraging to legendary chef such as Francois  Brouillard, who has been combing the Quebec countryside fo ingredientsl  like pig weed and cat's tongue and creating culinary master pieces at his iconic La Table des Jardins Sauvages restaurant , in L'Epiphanie, 45 minutes outside of Montreal, for almost three decades. Turbot with sea asparagus and a puree of wild radish, or shrimp on a bed of wild salt herbs, lovage, crinkleroot leaf and bee balm anyone?

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For more media information about culinary stories in Canada please contact Ms. Nim Singh, Canadian TOurism Commission on 0207 389 9983 singh.nim@ctc-cct.ca (not for publication)