Broccoli Rising and Evergreen

Before you start in with the ornaments and pretty lights, admire your Christmas tree for what it is.  Evergreen.  The pine tree’s significance in our lives pre-dates Christmas, going back to Druidic times, because wow, how else to explain a tree that stays bright and green in winter when all the other trees are bare?  It’s magic!  It’s a miracle! Or at least something very impressive.  So people would bring pine boughs into their homes in the hopes that impressive goodness might protect them and keep away the badness.

Over the millennia, we’ve picked up some understanding. Now we know pine concentrates chlorophyll in its tough needles — that’s how it stays green. Pine is built to endure winter cold — naturally.  It’s not magic, it’s science. And yet the Druids weren’t wrong. Pine trees do hold some magic, both culinary and medicinal. So bringing it into our homes and into ourselves is a good idea (okay, there was the Christmas Eve party where we had votive candles winking among the pine boughs, resulting in a small house fire.  No one was hurt).

Sticky pine sap is naturally antiseptic and antibacterial.  It’s been used for centuries as a salve and a soap. 

Pine needles’ high chlorophyll content makes them rich in vitamin C.  Steep them in boiling water to make a therapeutic winter infusion, good for boosting immunity and aiding respiration.  Nick Polizzi of Sacred Science shares a pine needle tea recipe and more about pine’s practical and spiritual benefits.  Flavor notes of pine needle tea are — not surprisingly — piney, herbaceous, and resinous. Chocolate it’s not but its flavor announces its healing properties. Breathe its spirit-lifting fragrance.

Edible author and ecologist Artur Cisar-Erlach serves up another way to savor pine needles — in a plant-based pesto. There are at least 40 different species of pine tree, and as Artur notes, their needles differ in flavor and piney intensity, so this is a play and taste-as-you-go recipe. With his characteristic thoroughness, Artur gives amounts in metric units for the Euro crowd and imperial units for American cooks. Either way, you might want to double the recipe.

Vegan Pine Needle Pesto

• 30g olive oil (2 tablespoons)

• 20g water (1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon)

• 2-5g chopped pine needles (1 teaspoon - 1 tablespoon)

• 40g walnuts + 40g toasted walnuts (2/3 cups walnuts — 1/3 cup raw, 1/3 cup toasted)

• 1g nutritional yeast (1/4 teaspoon)

• pinch salt

Combine all ingredients in a blender and blend thoroughly. If using a household immersion blender, cut the pine needles with kitchen scissors first, then blend them with the liquid ingredients before slowly adding the solids. A splash of water can make the mixture even creamier.

Pine needles vary in flavor intensity depending on the species, time of year, and local growing conditions, such as soil quality and water availability. Much like wine, they have terroir. When making this recipe, start with the smaller amount of needles and adjust to taste.

This mixture pairs wonderfully with pasta, works as a spread, and complements roasted root vegetables beautifully.

Serves 1.

While pine tree bark is technically edible, you’ll have a much more enjoyable time eating the seeds of the pine tree — pine nuts. Tiny as they are, they deliver big, buttery flavor and fun crunch.

Italy has a long history of cultivating pine trees, so they know their way around a pine nut.

Broccoli — kind of an evergreen — and pine nuts come together in one of the oldest written recipes on record, from Apicius’s 1498 work, De re Coquinaria.  A great thrill for me was getting to see an original copy ol De re Coquinaria in Italy — that’s the kind of culinary geek I am. 

My wild rice dish employs an old Sicilian trick of balancing bitter winter greens with rich pine nuts and sweet raisins. The wild rice adds substance and plays up pine nuts’ nutty flavor.  Enjoy this recipe as a stuffing for pumpkin, zucchini or portobellos or on its own — it’s fortifying and fabulous. 

Catalan spinach offers the same concept of pairing greens with dried fruit and pine nuts, but with quicker delivery.

In her cookbook Forage and Feast, Chrissy Tracey shows off pine nuts’ naturally sweet side. Her recipe for buttery, vegan pink peppercorn pine nut shortbread has a little spice and little mmmmmmm.

Because pine nuts are pricy, I prefer to use them as an accent rather than incorporating them into a dish where their piney magic might get lost.  But whether you stud pine nuts as a finish to a dish or integrate them into pesto or pastry, these pine recipes offer a delicious way to enjoy evergreen’s magic and miracle. 

Our primal urge to gather those we love in this season offers some evergreen magic too.  There’s no science behind that I know of, it’s just a cute part of being human.  It’s our striving for renewal even in the heart of winter.  As Dylan Thomas put it in “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” — “Everything was good again and shone over the town.”

Give Broccoli Rising to that special someone this holiday (it could be you) — and what a deal!  

I’m offering half off paid subscriptions through Christmas Eve.  It’s one way I can thank every one of you. Broccoli Rising subscribers have doubled in number this year — that’s a wow.  Free subscribers, I love you, and I want to invite everyone to the table, but the truth is, I couldn’t sustain providing weekly original content and vegan recipes without Broccoli Rising’s paid subscribers. And paid subscribers, I love to offer you an extra serving of good bits, like next Monday’s paid subscriber exclusive— a virtual vegan holiday cookie swap, with many of your favorite vegans sharing recipes.

ICYMI: My chat with fabulous Flavor of Italy’s Wendy Holloway explores how to create a sumptuous vegan Thanksgiving — even for omnivores. Thanksgiving’s come and gone, but no worries, the recipes I share bring holiday celebration all winter long.  And giving thanks is always in season.  So I’ll finish by saying thank you, Broccoli Rising subscribers. 

December 21 Winter solstice 

December 24 Christmas Eve

December 25 Christmas 

December 26 Kwanzaa and Hanukkah begin

December 31 New Year’s Eve — time to make Hopping John for New Year’s Day, to ensure 2025 will be lucky for us.

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You can also visit SoulfulVegan.com to find more recipes and connect with me online at YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Substack Notes.