RECIPE: Use Your Old Christmas Tree To Make “Christmas Tree Pickles”
If you’re about to lug this year’s Christmas tree out to the curb, WAIT!! Before you haul it out…. cook it!!
There’s a new cookbook on the market called “How To Eat Your Christmas Tree” which includes dozens of recipes which would get Brenda Lee rockin’ around your dinner table. Author and “artisan baker and cook” in the U.K. Julia Georgallis includes recipes to use your Christmas tree to make everything from tasty fish to ice cream.
One quick warning before serving up your holly, jolly dish: Some Christmas trees are poisonous if eaten — like cypress, cedars and yews. Got it? Good. Now enjoy one of the recipes from the book for “Christmas Tree Pickles” (yum!):
This recipe works best with old dried trees. Take a 2-liter jar and good-quality vinegar — Georgallis suggests cider vinegar or white vinegar and 200 grams, or 7 ounces, of Christmas tree needles. Georgallis explains, “Sterilize your jar you’re going to use, chop up the needles. And then pour the vinegar into a large saucepan and heat it until it’s warm but not quite boiling. And then add the needles to sterilized jar and pour the vinegar over that. And then you just close up your jar and leave that to infuse, probably for up to three months. You’ll know that you’re done because all your needles kind of start to sink to the bottom of the jar. Your Christmas tree vinegar keeps. And you can give that to people the following years as a nice gift.”
Pop in your pickling cucumbers or slices, let sit for a week or so and BOOM, you’ve got Christmas Tree Pickles!
Just make sure not to use an artificial tree. Those are really chewy.
