If you’ve spent your holiday season with a natural Christmas tree adorning part of your living space, you might find yourself wondering what to do with it once the season has ended and the tree itself has seen better days. Some leave it for sanitation workers to pick up; others have it converted into mulch. But there’s another option available to the adventurous: turning a Christmas tree into the basis for a number of meals.
This doesn’t mean it’s time to slow cook a slice of tree trunk, or deep-fry selection of branches. That would be absurd. But it turns out that parts of Christmas trees can be used in a host of meals — including dessert. A new article by Lindsay Campbell ventures into the underrated culinary uses of the evergreen in your living room.
Campbell spoke with Julia Georgallis, author of the cookbook How to Eat Your Christmas Tree: Delicious, innovative recipes for cooking with trees. Georgallis emphasizes the importance of sustainability when it come to these recipes.
“Eating Christmas trees isn’t going to save the planet, but this book draws on the idea that you just need to start thinking about how you might want to reuse, recycle and re-appropriate everything and that includes your Christmas tree,” she said.
If you are thinking of cooking something with parts of your Christmas tree, the type of tree it is can make a difference — fir, pine and spruce all have very different qualities. But the range of dishes that can be made using parts of a Christmas tree is more vast than you might think; ice cream, pickles and fish all come up. It might not be a bad way to turn something from the end of 2020 into a delicious meal or two in 2021.
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