Our Menu
Our food is healthy, tasty and abundant.
Butterfly Tours provides several organic ingredients. Your guide Gord is an excellent chef, with decades of professional campfire cooking experience. Meals are of a vegetarian nature, with the possibility of adding freshly gathered seafoods.
Our menu is very flexible. While planning each meal, we take into consideration the weather, the day's route and the supplementary food items we may have gathered from the sea and forest. Meals are skillfully prepared over a small driftwood fire on the beach, lending a "tribal sense" to our daily feasts.
Gord has spent decades perfecting many outstanding recipes. He earns steady compliments for his attention to details and his talents with the spice kit. Meals are well balanced and wholesomely satisfying. Our nutritious food, combined with daily exercise and fresh sea air, helps to maintain a steady feeling of well-being during the trips.
For breakfast we serve a number of different dishes. Our choice often depends on how soon we wish to begin paddling in the morning. There is always the choice of black tea, herbal tea or coffee; we serve organic, shade-grown, fair-traded coffee, roasted by the Just Us! Co-op.
On lazy mornings, we collect several pieces of slow-burning wood to cook our 10-grain pancakes. The pancakes are served with European cultured butter and pure organic maple syrup from Quebec.
On days when we choose to rise early to catch a morning tide, we serve an ever-changing variety of cooked breakfast grains including; organic millet, semolina, 7-grain cereal, cornmeal and our popular rice pudding. We mix the grains to create new combinations and add dried mangos, papayas, apricots, cranberries, currants plus roasted cashews and hickory-smoked almonds. Spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg, served with milk, brown sugar or honey, the cooked breakfast grains provide a warm and delicious start to our day.
Lunch consists of a variety of toppings to spread on European rye bread, multi-grain bagels, Dutch pumpernickel and an assortment of crackers. For toppings, we provide Dutch gouda and smoked gouda cheese, salmon spread, pickles, hummus, smoked oysters, cucumber, salami, mustard, almond butter, cashew butter, jams and chocolate hazelnut spread. Apples, oranges and juices are served with lunch. If we have cool weather, we may build a campfire and prepare hot soup, or spiced salmon-cheese melts.
A staple for dinner is our organic brown basmati rice. We mix it with wild rice or black Thai rice and sometimes cook it with slices of pineapple for a tropical flavour. The rice is served with a wide variety of uniquely garnished vegetarian soups and sauces.
Also on the dinner menu are falafel and cous cous with a Waldorf salad, and authentic Italian pasta with our carefully crafted red sauce.
Dinners may include freshly caught fish; we often land lingcod, rockfish & greenling and we could be fortunate enough to catch salmon, or even halibut. If the opportunity presents itself, we may sample a few morsels of fresh sashimi with wasabi and soy sauce. When you catch a fish, we may immerse it into our popular maple syrup, soy sauce and garlic marinade, before grilling it over the fire.
On each trip, Gord creates his famous "Jum." It is a rich chowder full of potatoes, vegetables, shiitake mushrooms and a forever-expanding list of delicious additions. Jum is the Haida word for stew and it is always a big hit.
Rich, dark hot chocolate is provided for dessert most evenings. Peaches & cream are also on the dessert menu.
Many of the menu items we serve are available at Famous Foods - Vancouver's original natural food store.
Special Dietary Requirements
With enough advance notice, we can often accommodate dietary requirements such as lactose and wheat intolerance. However, due to the fact that much of our food is purchased and packed well before the kayaking season, those with special dietary requirements are urged to notify Gord before April 1st. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to provide special food items for those who register after April 1st.
If you have particular dietary requirements, please be prepared to bring some of your own special foods. You are welcome to contact Gord if you have any questions.
Food Packing & Caching
Butterfly Tours' food provisions have been carefully refined for effective and efficient packing and caching.
To maximize seaworthiness, we minimize deck-loaded items on each kayak.
(Other outfitters may launch their fleet with top-heavy deck loads.)
We prefer to pack all heavy and/or bulky items inside the watertight hatches. This lowers the centre of gravity of each vessel, while increasing stability and seaworthiness.
Additionally, we hang our food at night to prevent wildlife from pilfering our supplies.
(Other outfitters may risk leaving food on the ground, or in the kayaks.)
For more information on food caching, see Gord's article; published online by Parks Canada.
Please contact Gord if you have any questions.