If your Christmas tree is still sitting in your house, here's an option instead of dragging it out to the curb: before I say this, FYI people really do this! Serve it for dinner.

There's a new cookbook out from a, quote, "artisan baker and cook" in the U.K. named Julia Georgallis called "How to Eat Your Christmas Tree". And it features dozens of recipes you can make using your tree. This is not the only book out there I found at least four more books that were about eating Christmas trees as I was googling info on this strange, but supposedly tasty way to use your tree.

For example, Christmas-Cured Fish uses almost a pound of needles for decoration and flavoring. With Christmas Tree Pickles, you throw a handful of needles into a jar with your pickles for a month.

There's even ice cream flavored with blue spruce needles and ginger.

Julia says she created the book so people would get better use out of their trees, rather than chopping down 30 million trees every year and then throwing them away.

Plus, quote,

"I don't know why it's so weird because we eat and we forage so many [other] plants."

The book has recipes that involve pine, fir, and spruce trees, Just so you know careful cedar and cypress are poisonous to eat. What are the flavor profiles of those three trees and how did you choose trees for certain recipes?

Fir is really zesty and really grassy. I’ve used it in things like pickles, and things that need a sharper taste. Spruce is really surprising. It’s not as grassy, it’s more “orangey.

The spruce in the ice cream I make actually gives it a vanilla taste. The blue spruce ice cream I make is actually my favorite recipe. She says doing her research, she ended up finding out is some of the earlier vanilla extracts, like artificial flavorings, had notes of spruce in them. Then pine doesn’t taste like it smells.

It’s very delicate and almost floral. In some of the recipes if I give the option of all three, I say if you’re using pine, you need to use a lot more of it.

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