I have for you today what I think is one of the most fascinating sweets I’ve ever tasted: what I’ve been calling Pine Pollen Fudge or Pine Pollen Truffles. I started working on the recipe last year, but had a couple accidents with my pollen (D’oh!) and, if you’ve ever gathered the stuff, you know…
Spruce Tip and Conifer Recipes
Spruce tips and conifers are some of the easiest wild edibles to gather, but they need to be used with care to taste great. If you're new to spruce tips, read through my basic guide to cooking with spruce tips first. If you have some you'd like to cook, don't miss Classic Spruce Tip Syrup, or Spruce Tip Ice Cream.
Pine Cone-Cider Jam / Varenye
“Ever eat a pine tree?”. That infamous quote from Euell Gibbons during a Grape Nuts commercial (there’s a lot of them on You Tube now and some are hilarious) has some truth to it. Sure, you can make tea (mostly I see it done with the soft needles of Easter White Pine) from needles, bark bread…
Pollen Bread
My pollen bread is essentially pollen cornbread, with a few tweaks, and it’s a good introductory recipe to start out with if you have some pollen to use. Most of the time, when people talk about cooking with pollen, they might think of pollen pancakes, and they can be good, as well as your other…
Pollen Pancakes with Conifer Syrup and Berries
I have a big stash of pine pollen I’ve been waiting to use the cold months and I finally got around to making some new things with it. If you’re not familiar, pine pollen is a thing, similar to cattail pollen, but much easier to harvest in my opinion, as the window for capturing it…
Mugolio: Pine Cone Syrup
Mugolio, a dark, aromatic syrup imbued with the flavor of pine cones, is the poster child for the kind of crazy cool, Illuminati-esque foodstuff foragers have access to, all for the price of a hike, or even less, depending on how close you are to some pine trees. The syrup came on my radar…
Classic Spruce Tip Syrup
I’ve been writing this website for years, and although I have a spruce tip syrup that tastes like spruce, it’s not the most powerful one you can make–it’s a hybrid, a shortcut. That older recipe of mine was back from when I had bartenders breathing down my neck about running out of spruce tip syrup…
Spruce Tip Panna Cotta
Spruce tip panna cotta is a great alternative to make if you don’t have an ice cream maker for my signature spruce tip ice cream recipe. Panna cotta is great for a lot of reasons: it’s relatively cheap, easy enough for a blind-folded child to make, and refreshing for those warm summer or late spring…
Spruce Chocolate Mousse
This is exactly what it sounds like: chocolate mousse flavored with spruce tip syrup. Just using spruce tips simmered a bit with water isn’t going to cut it though, for the flavor of spruce to overcome the chocolate you’ll either want to make a slow sun syrup using equal parts by volume of brown, natural…
