Cooking With Pine? Fir Sure

Cooking with pine, spruce and fir leaves used to be reserved for avant garde chefs in Scandinavia. But as chefs ever push the boundaries on using seasonal products and foraging for local ingredients, those sturdy conifers in the woods are looking more and more enticing as components to everything from steak to dessert.

"We forage ramps and sumac around here. North Carolina, next to Oregon, has the most abundant wild mushrooms, so we...