Althouse: Eat your Christmas tree.

December 25, 2010

Eat your Christmas tree.

"At my restaurant we use their needles as a spice. You can cook with a branch of spruce or fir as you would a sprig of rosemary or thyme. Wouldn’t it be beautiful if families gathered after Christmas, festively removed the decorations and then cut off the tasty needles of the tree to flavor their food?"

31 comments:

chickelit said...: Eat your Christmas tree (but not if you find 12 inches intimidating): link.; 12/25/10, 4:09 PM
mesquito said...: White People will do anything to assuage their guilt.

And whoever heard of a Dane called
RENÉ?; 12/25/10, 4:10 PM
rhhardin said...: Northern White Cedar is good for convulsions, hypotension and the occasional death, if the celebration isn't going well.; 12/25/10, 4:12 PM
mesquito said...: "I don’t mean to sermonize."

Yes you do.; 12/25/10, 4:13 PM
chickelit said...: Gathering up the wrappings, trappings, and boxes of this year's gift giving for the pagan ritual of burning of the combustibles in the backyard fire pit. Let us pray:

Forgive us O future generations looking back on this comment; forgive us our ways of carbon-rich living and indulgences; forgive us our trespasses of carbon dioxide, as we forgive those who exhale against us and lead us not into temptations of plastics and polymers made from the life-giving juices of Mother Gaia.; 12/25/10, 4:20 PM
TosaGuy said...: If I want to ingest something from the evergreen family, I'll have a gin martini....preferably with Hendricks and served extra dirty.; 12/25/10, 4:27 PM
Clyde said...: Euell Gibbons LIVES!; 12/25/10, 4:29 PM
ddh said...: The NYT taking itself so, so serious, it can't recognize a likely hoax.

If people don't already eat pine or spruce anywhere, it must be because pine needles are inedible. But who knows? They may go great with a horseshoe crab dip.; 12/25/10, 4:29 PM
Humperdink said...: If anybody wants to give this a whirl next Christmas, I have several tall hemlock trees that I would make available to guilt-ridden set.; 12/25/10, 4:31 PM
Christy said...: Maybe they pretend the pine needles are rosemary?

My natal family went to artificial trees when baby sister had a nasty allergic reaction to the scotch pine. We use other forms of roughage in our diets.; 12/25/10, 4:34 PM
Cedarford said...: Some meat dishes are good with pine needles added (German food uses pine and conifer berries esp juniper... and "piny-er" pine nuts than we eat Stateside)

We sometimes add spruce needles, crushed, to a multispice wet marinade used for grilled pork and chicken. (Washing needles off before grilling, but using the strained marinade as baste).

I think the spruce makes it fresher and sharper as a spice effect.
A lot of "backyard" sort of fresh spices and greens exist. I use a neighbor's mulberry leaves, off-peak edible flowers, squash blossoms.
Our dream neighbor was the guy near our last house that had puffballs, hen in a basket and MORELS all over the place. Who said - "You're crazy to eat that stuff..welcome to take it if I;m not liable!" Who just wouldn;t listen to our guilty consciences telling him MORELS, if nothing else, were really good and not mistakable for other stuff with 2 minutes of training.. "Crazy to mess with wild mushrooms, I;ll never do it."
(One of our big moving regrets..loss of cantankerous old neighbot with the free mushroom supply)

As for cedar, maybe parts are poisonous, but cedar=planked fish, a little cedar thrown in in smoking never hurt anyone.; 12/25/10, 4:43 PM
Unknown said...: They got all the mileage they could out of those fertility symbols.; 12/25/10, 4:46 PM
Lincolntf said...: Christmas the Kim Jong Il way...

wv: debegin

Unstart?; 12/25/10, 5:00 PM
Anonymous said...: chickelit --

"forgive us our trespasses of carbon dioxide"

With that, you prove your ignorance.

"as we forgive those who exhale against us"

With that, you prove you're a fucking cult moron.; 12/25/10, 5:10 PM
The Musket said...: I learned from one of those survivor guys on tv that pine needles make great tea and provide lots of vitamin C. My kids tried it -- it actually tastes good. I'm glad to know I need never die of scurvy.

This year's freshly killed Arizona Spruce will be tossed out in the backyard - with the plan to use it next year for the Jule Log. However, the reality is that the wind will blow it to the tree line, where it will be a habitat for birds and other small criters, it will decompose naturally for a while before I get ambitious and throw it on a bonfire. After they dry for a couple years, they burn nicely.; 12/25/10, 5:16 PM
Penny said...: "Maybe for us Westerners the Christmas tree becomes, if only briefly, like a beloved pet. And who would like to eat their dog or cat?"

Christmas tree like a family pet?

I don't care what he says, if I were his family pet, I'd take my chances on the streets.; 12/25/10, 5:25 PM
rhhardin said...: @cedarford As for cedar, maybe parts are poisonous, but cedar=planked fish, a little cedar thrown in in smoking never hurt anyone.

We need a neutral third party.; 12/25/10, 5:30 PM
Fred4Pres said...: Dried spruce needles would be nasty. No, it is not rosemary (which btw is far better fresh too).

But fresh green spruce shoots would work. In fact, the Colonists often used spruce instead of hops to flavor beer. I have not tried it, but I hear it is good.

Merry Christmas Ann, Meade, and the rest of you readers/commentators.; 12/25/10, 5:48 PM
Lem Vibe Bandit said...: Merry Christmas Fred.; 12/25/10, 6:01 PM
Alcuria said...: I feed the tree to the goats. In two days all the bark and needles are stripped clean off the tree.; 12/25/10, 6:17 PM
Big Mike said...: Whatever you do, don't use sprigs of hemlock.; 12/25/10, 6:44 PM
The Dude said...: Hemlock (Conium maculatum), the deadly poisonous European plant, is not the same plant as Tsuga sieboldii, a genus of conifers in the family Pinaceae. The common name hemlock is derived from a perceived similarity in the smell of its crushed foliage to that of the unrelated plant poison hemlock.

Unlike poison hemlock (conium), the species of Tsuga are not poisonous.

Know your poisons, people!; 12/25/10, 7:02 PM
bandmeeting said...: There would be nothing beautiful at all if the family used the tree for cooking. Plenty utilitarian though.

People are so enamored with feeling precious and special.; 12/25/10, 7:14 PM
ricpic said...: Just got back from Christmas dinner. The meal was simplicity itself: each guest was served a rib eye steak broiled to pink perfection, smothered in mushrooms and onions, and a baked potato. With rich red wine to wash it all down. Nothing beats meat and potatoes when it's done right.; 12/25/10, 8:48 PM
Mary Beth said...: Oligonicella, it looked like satire to me. It's easy to be insulting, why don't you explain what's moronic about it instead?; 12/25/10, 9:03 PM
DavidD said...: Tastes kinda plasticky to me. Guess I shoulda used a live tree....; 12/25/10, 10:11 PM
Anonymous said...: Spruce beer used to be popular [I was tempted to write Poplar but resisted, well almost] made from the fresh green shoots in the spring.; 12/25/10, 10:32 PM
Freeman Hunt said...: Based on reading this blog, I expect to be served nothing but spruced herring at next year's Christmas dinner.; 12/25/10, 11:13 PM
Freeman Hunt said...: Oligonicella, chickelit was making a joke.; 12/25/10, 11:13 PM
Ankur said...: Spruce needles does sound like it might be good flavoring. They have plenty of natural oils.

BTW..I don't get it. A bunch of people seem to be claiming that some sort of guilt is being assuaged. What guilt?

That's like saying you eat gingerbread houses after smashing them - to ease your guilt.; 12/26/10, 2:08 AM
JAL said...: Wouldn’t it be beautiful if families gathered after Christmas, festively removed the decorations and then ...

Short answer?

No.

Some people have entirely too much time on their hands so they can be cutesy and green about everything.

We leave it out for the animals or use it as a natural horse jump or burn it, or let it rot back to the dust it came from.

It's not easy being green for some folks. For the rest of us it's like breathing.; 12/26/10, 3:37 PM