No Taste Like Home

We wanted to do something different for a bachelorette weekend and tried out foraging with No Taste Like Home. Our foraging location was near Addison Farm Vineyard, which was nice because we were able to have a wine tasting after a long morning of hard work (not really)! There was great communication from the company. We were well-​informed of what to expect, how to dress, and so on.
On the morning of the tour, we met up with the guide, Alan, at the vineyard and we drove to the location together since it was a little isolated. Alan is an amazing guide and a great sense of humor! You can tell that he is very passionate about what he does. He even recited a poem on mushroom. Throughout the tour, Alan would teach us what we can and cannot eat. He also made sure that if we didn’t know something is edible, we would always ask first. This way, we would still be alive by the end of the tour. Although everything was new and exciting to me, I wished that we had more free time to explore and forage by ourselves.
At the end of the tour, Alan even cooked up some wild mushrooms for us to try. The best part of the tour was we were able to bring what we found to a local restaurant where they turned the wild plants into two appetizers for free.
Side note, after you are done, you will be tempted to eat anything see around you!

My husband and I somewhat randomly chose North Carolina as a destination for our recent trip. I checked the Bradley International Airport (Hartford CT) website to see where we could fly non-​stop on a Friday night so that I wouldn’t have to miss work — and there was a very convenient flight to Charlotte NC. At first we were planning on spending our entire 5 day trip in Charlotte, but then I started to research the surrounding areas.
is the source I rely on primarily. I was so excited when I read about No Taste Like Home, because it sounded like such a unique experience. Frankly, we changed the whole focus of our trip to Asheville instead of Charlotte because of No Taste Like Home. And we were not disappointed! What a fun and educational morning! When we return to Asheville — and I hope we will — I would like to take the tour during a different season.

A cancer treatment in your own backyard?
Indeed, the humble Turkey Tail mushroom is being studied as an adjunct therapy for certain cancers. Intrigued? So is Alan Muskat who has spent most of his life foraging for mushrooms, wild edibles and medicinals. He is overjoyed at sharing his knowledge (and enthusiasm). Part thespian, part activist, part entrepreneur, and completely real, he spends his days (when he’s not appearing on national media) foraging, writing, teaching and leading tours. His non-​profit organization is, in part, dedicated to teaching children to forage the most common edibles in their area. He believes in finding free food as a basic skill in the fight against hunger.
We found Alan while searching for a place to stay in Asheville. I know that sounds slightly confusing, but he has lodging/​foraging packages. We booked a private outing since it was past his regular season. Our group had a small dog, young couples, not quite as young couple (ourselves ;-), a very pregnant lady and my 20 something son. Foraging for wild foods often takes you deep in the woods. We drove for hours… actually, well; our location was 10 minutes from downtown Asheville. Sensible shoes and clothing are necessary, but Alan supplies the foraging basket, a high tech foraging tool (a dull knife taped to a small paint brush), the knowledge and entertainment. Our trip lasted around 3 hours culminating with a demonstration of his culinary skills sautéing foraged mushrooms on a portable burner. We munched on these and a sampling of other edibles Alan brought. You can also arrange to have some of your finds prepared at certain local restaurants. Forage in the morning and nosh on it in the evening!
The trip ends with a recap of what we’ve found and talked about as well as a divvying up of the day’s «catch.» You also get an ebook and some great memories of the ultimate field to table experience. We went in late October and plan repeat trips in different seasons. Alan has promised me we will find all the morels we can eat if we come back in May (wink, wink).
Oh, and the Turkey Tail? Yes, it is growing in my backyard, un-​noticed by me until now.

I’ve done some farm tours up here, but there is nothing quite like this as far as finding out where food comes from. You go out into the woods with a tour guide and you pick plants and fungi to eat. How cool is that? So cool that Andrew Zimmern came to do it apparently.
I went on one of their 3 hour tours on a Saturday morning. We all met out in the woods about 15 minutes from town. Our guide, Marc, showed us some poison ivy as well as a couple medicinal plants, before we even got out of the parking lot. By the time we were a couple minutes into the woods, we had all seen bunches of cool different mushrooms. Some, we found out later, were quite edible.
We would go forage for a little bit, then come back, and go over our findings. Marc was very knowledgeable. After our 3^rd outing the assistant cooked up some of the mushrooms that we found! Chanterelles and some kind of lactarious aka milk caps. We were told we could actually take some of our findings to The Marketplace or Zambra as well.
All in all, it was a great time.