Happy December, food & foraging friends!
"Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible." That was the infamous line from a 1974 television commercial for Post Grape Nuts cereal featured wild food icon Euell Gibbons, and I still find myself asking people that today.
There is so much to be done with evergreen needles - oxymels, infused vinegars, syrups, booze, and tons of other goodies. Pine, especially Eastern white pine, is plentiful in our area, and it's a friend with benefits for sure: It's antiviral, antinflammatory and antiseptic, in addition to having a good dose of Vitamins A and C. The inner bark, cambium, is also an emergency survival food (but break bark for emergencies only -- harvesting the cadmium can damage the tree, unlike harvesting some of its needles.)
As a forager, knowing what to avoid is as important as knowing what's edible. In this case, the one to look out for is yew - a flat leaved, shrubby evergreen with toxic leaves but edible arils (the red fleshy berrylike thing with a hollow center bearing a poisonous seed).
Juniper berries are another plentiful, multipurpose evergreen edible. A few of my favorite uses include throwing them in a sauerkraut (a traditional ingredient); making smreka, a lightly fermented Bosnian drink made from juniper and lemon; and boiling down ground berries into a syrup that makes a nice, light "forest soda" mixed with seltzer water.
Juniper and spruce are also used to make traditional beers. I'm brewing a mugwort juniper beer right now that uses the mugwort as a bittering agent and the naturally occurring yeast on the juniper to kickstart fermentation.
And last but not least - dessert! I've used evergreen ground in shortbread and in ice cream (a lemon-fir ice cream recipe by Marie Viljoen to be precise) - evergreen's citrusy flavor shines through paired with the sweet.
We also ground pine needles in a simple olive oil sugar scrub in a workshop help at ANXO Cidery this month; this is great for circulation and sloughing off dead skin in winter.
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