Eat Your Christmas Tree

Its aroma filled your house, its decorated branches made the season festive, and now your Christmas tree can spice up your dishes.

In a New York Times article, René Redzepi, the chef and co-owner of the restaurant Noma in Copenhagen, explained that a tree’s needles can add a lemony taste to chicken, rice, and even cookie dough.

"Spruce and fir are useful in many other dishes as well. Fresh fish, salted for a day and covered in fresh needles, absorbs the forest aroma and emerald color into its flesh. Needles work especially well in oils and vinegars, condiments that my staff and I lavish on fresh sweet peas every spring," he wrote.

Redzepi offers three recipes that call for the evergreen sprigs:

Spruce Butter
7 ounces butter
3 ½tablespoons pine needles
Sprig of lemon thyme.
1. Mix in a blender for eight minutes until soft and green.
2. Pass through a chinois sieve.

Spruce Oil
3 ½ ounces pine needles
3-4 tablespoons finely chopped parsley
1 ¼ cups neutral oil.
1. Blanch needles for four minutes, then dry.
2. Mix all ingredients in a blender until they reach 160 degrees.
3. Pass through a chinois sieve.

Spruce Vinegar
3 ½ ounces pine needles
3 ½ ounces apple vinegar.
1. Briefly mix in blender.
2. Place in a sealed container overnight.
3. Pass through a chinois sieve.

If using your needles as an ingredient doesn’t make your mouth water, consider mulching your tree.

A number of communities have also thought up creative ways to recycle Christmas trees. In Louisiana officials build fences out of conifers, creating barriers to erosion and slowing wave action. Three to four hundred trees are used each year as heron and egret nesting structures in Cook County, Illinois. And in Burlington, Vermont the McNeil Wood and Yard Waste Depot chipped and burned Christmas trees last year, creating electricity, making the season warm and bright even after the holidays.

Oh, Christmas tree, much pleasure thou can’st give me. Bon appetite.