Gourmet wild food weekend, West Cornwall

Fat Hen’s Gourmet Wild Food Weekends are based at Boscawen-noon farm in West Cornwall. These weekends are for serious food lovers who want to experience real foraging, learn to cook with professional and passionate chefs, and then to savour the delights of feasting on the freshest, most seasonal wild food in a warm and beautiful environment!

The weekend includes foraging with your guide Caroline in all of West Penwith’s semi-wild landscapes: seashore, woodlands, hedgerows, ancient bridleways and farmland, gathering seasonal wild produce including seaweeds, flowers, herbs, salads, vegetables, fungi, berries, nuts and seeds. Caroline will take you by minibus or by foot to each of these habitats and teach you identification tips, culinary uses and historical facts and folklore.

After each of the three foraging trips of the weekend you will go back to the comfort of Fat Hen’s headquarters where our chefs, Matt and Claire, will demonstrate cooking techniques, in the farmhouse kitchen, for turning your foraged produce into restaurant quality food. During the weekend you will learn to make soda bread and halloumi cheese using milk from the farm. We use eggs from our free range organically fed chickens, and in addition to the wild produce we forage, we use locally caught wild meats such as wood pigeon, rabbit, squirrel and venison and locally and sustainably caught fish and seafood. Matt will show you how to butcher a rabbit and to smoke mackerel.

These weekends are suitable for vegetarians and carnivores alike. There is always a vegetarian option alongside the meaty ones.The weekend unfurls into a series of gastronomic delights with 3 meals (Saturday lunch, Saturday dinner and Sunday lunch), which includes hedgerow cocktails on Saturday night and old world wines chosen to match the dinner.

Saturday night’s feast in the Goat Barn, by fire and candlelight, includes live folk music played by local musicians from the Tinners Arms Session in Zennor. If required, we can organise a taxi service back to your accommodation with a pick up on Sunday morning back to Fat Hen’s headquarters.

Come and join us for one of our Gourmet Wild Food Weekends and a walk in the countryside will never be the same again!

N.B. Accommodation is not included in the price of a Fat Hen Gourmet Wild Food Weekend.

Fat Hen is a small, rural, family enterprise set up by forager and professional ecologist Caroline Davey, alongside the fantastic chefs, Matt Williamson and Claire Thomson. The venture is the realisation of a dream borne out of a passion for wildlife, the countryside, the Cornish landscape and food. Fat Hen aims to teach others the art of foraging for wild food, to demonstrate traditional and contemporary gourmet cooking techniques used to cook the foraged produce, and to feast in rustic style in the beautifully converted granite barn in West Cornwall. It also endeavors to get people out into the countryside, to engage people in being connected to and a part of the landscape, and to teach people about sustainable living and conservation. The Fat Hen additionally strives to empower people with the experience of freedom and independence in finding food resources, and to feel the emotional and physical health benefits of spending time in wild places.