Dec26

yes, you can eat your christmas tree.

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How to Eat Your Christmas Tree: Delicious, Innovative Recipes for Cooking with Trees By  Julia Georgallis

This cookbook explores Christmas trees and features recipes for cooking with pine, fir and spruce. It encourages reflection around food waste in an age of deforestation and climate crisis, and asks how we might be able to celebrate nature in an alternative way.

Pine needle tea is made from white pine needles chopped, added to boiling water, steeped, and strained. The drink can be enjoyed hot, iced, or blended with other herbal teas, notes registered dietitian nutritionist Kate Spurgin. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources reports that the tea is rich in antioxidants, vitamin A, and vitamin C, which can boost immunity and soothe colds.

Tea isn’t the only way to utilize your leftover pine needles. They can also be used to flavor other dishes.

“The way that generally I cook with Christmas trees is to use the needles like an herb, in the same way that you might use rosemary,” said UK baker and cook Julia Georgallis  you use the rosemary to flavor a dish but you don’t necessarily eat the rosemary itself.”

Her book includes over 30 recipes that use different parts of the Christmas tree, from drinks to ice cream to “Christmas tree ash”—which is exactly what it sounds like.

“That’s basically when you char the tree in your oven, so you blacken it and then blitz it down into a black powder, and that’s actually really flavorful. It’s very delicious — you just need a tiny bit of it — but it’s quite chef-y,” she explained in a recent interview with Christoper Kimball’s Milk Street.

Part of Georgallis’ motivation in writing the book was conservation. More than 25-30 million Christmas trees are disposed of each year. While the author and chef knows 30 recipes aren’t going to save the world, she hopes her book can “start a conversation. It’s absolutely huge what leaving one year’s worth of Christmas trees globally in the ground could do,” she explained.

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*Disclaimer: I’ve never read the book, so this is not a review, but the title is interesting, an idea I’d never considered.  (If you still have room left after all of those Christmas meals, you  might want to take a closer look at your tree.)

 

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‘you ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas.’

i’ve only ever had one.’

-albert einstein

 

 

 

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Source credit: Meredith Kile, Vice

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38 responses »

  3. We have a fake tree that we have used 12 years in a row now. When it eventually outlives its usefuIness, it can be recycled with other plastics and metal. I prefer that to using real trees that have to be cut down and then get chipped later. But if I had a real tree, I’m not sure I would be trying pine needle tea. 🎄🎅
    Best wishes, Pete.

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