Cannabis Cooking Prep — Join Us in the Kitchen

Ellen Scanlon:

This podcast discusses cannabis and is intended for audiences 21 and over.

Monica Lo:

My favorite treat in the cookbook is the Snowflake Crisp nougat, and it’s a recipe that I got to work on with my parents, so it’s extra special for me.

It’s a soft, chewy, nougat filled with crispy biscuits, almonds, and cranberries. So texturally, it’s very fun. And it’s a candy that we eat for Lunar New Year, something that I look forward to, and everyone who’s made it has had success with it.

Ellen Scanlon:

Welcome to How to Do the Pot, a podcast helping you feel confident about cannabis for health, wellbeing, and fun. I’m Ellen Scanlon.

You just heard Monica Lo, the California-based author of The Weed Gummies Cookbook, and the creator behind the beautiful blog and Instagram account, Sue Weed. Doesn’t that Snowflake Crisp sound delicious?

This holiday season, to celebrate all the home cooks and the people who love to eat their food, we will be talking all about cooking with cannabis. We started our season of food and weed with How To Do The Pot’s Thanksgiving episode, which I hope you listen to, where we finally solve the mystery of why people get the munchies.

Last week we dropped an episode of the podcast Psychoactive, hosted by the founder of the Non-Profit Drug Policy Alliance, Ethan Nadelman, in conversation with the celebrity chef Nicki Stewart. If you haven’t yet checked that out too. Nicki is an expert at dosing cannabis so that everyone has a good time at her celebrity weed dinners.

If you’re one of the many people who has drooled over How To Do The Pot’s Friday infusion reels, with recipes for weed-infused honey miso sweet potatoes, rosemary pumpkin seed brittle, sour diesel bucatini or Cheddar Bay biscuits. Stay tuned to Do The Pot on Instagram for more delicious holiday treats.

In today’s episode, we want to help set the table for you, so to speak. Since the Weed Gummies Cookbook by Monica Lo is such a great gift idea, we’ll talk to her about what she’s learned in the test kitchen. And we’ll share our favorite cannabis expert’s best tips for preparing to cook with weed.

Stay tuned this month for our listener’s favorite episodes that really give you all you need to know about cooking with weed. From how to deal with the smell, how to dose your goodies, and how to make sure that you and your guests all have a fun and delicious experience.

Lizzie Post is a writer and a podcaster, and the great, great-granddaughter of the etiquette expert Emily Post. Since many of us will be cooking for family and friends this holiday season, Lizzie helps us out with what is probably the most important tip to remember if you’re bringing cannabis-infused food to the table.

Lizzie Post:

If you are going to be bringing edibles to any kind of gathering, you are labeling and making it incredibly, incredibly easy for anyone to tell that what you are serving has pot in it.

Whether that is making things pot leaf shaped, whether it is having signage, whether it is having completely separate tables of food for infused foods versus uninfused foods.

Let’s say you’re bringing that classic plate of brownies. Maybe it’s that you are keeping those brownies, jokingly, under locking key and you are the one actually passing them out, or distributing them once dessert comes, so that you really do have some kind of control over it.

Ellen Scanlon:

Monica Lo agrees that labeling, whether you’re at a party or at home, is incredibly important. Especially if there are kids around.

Monica Lo:

I take childproofing and cannabis labeling very seriously. Cannabis gummies and candies look just like the uninfused version, so they’re very tempting for the kiddos, and they just need to be kept out of reach of children.

I highly recommend purchasing child-resistant jars, and creating really big, colorful labels. And I’ve designed some of those labels for you to download and print. They’re located on my blog. And if you have little ones at home, please store your homemade goods in a locked location or high on a shelf.

Ellen Scanlon:

Are you ready for some tips on cooking with cannabis? For the holidays we have you covered. California-based chef Amanda Jackson encourages starting with the basics.

Amanda Jackson:

My best practical advice for home cooks is to get a cookbook. And I really do suggest starting there, because they start you on how to do dosages while you’re making it, so you actually learn the same process that the rest of us do. It can be really, really daunting, but it’s really not necessarily like a super hard thing.

Ellen Scanlon:

And are you wondering how much cannabis to use when you’re cooking? Chef Michellee Fox says, head to the dispensary for a sample kit to help you figure out how you want to feel.

Michellee Fox:

Go to the store. Because the companies that are selling at the dispensary, they have to make sure that that milligram amount is a hundred percent correct. When you’re trying at home, you’re still trying to figure it out, how to get that amount correct. But if you buy a gummy that says 2.5 milligrams and you eat that, and you’re like, okay, I can totally handle that.

Because when you’re cooking at home, there’s a lot of a guessing game in a way. Because you can’t just send your cookie to the lab to get tested.

Ellen Scanlon:

One of the most appealing parts of cooking edibles at home is being able to choose your own dose. Monica Lo felt frustrated with the edible options available, and knew she wanted to create recipes that are flexible and allow the cook to have more control over the potency and the effects of your sweets.

Monica Lo:

So I’ve designed the gummies and the candies in my cookbook to be low-dose. I find it so annoying when I have to cut what is already a tiny piece of a gummy into even smaller pieces because it’s so potent. I just want to have something that I can grab a handful of and snack on.

And that said, I know there are people out there who have a very high tolerance. So you can always make your infusions more potent before you add that into any of the gummy and candy recipes in the book.

Ellen Scanlon:

And since you probably don’t have a home testing lab, try to go easy on yourself if you have a cooking mishap. Even cannabis experts like Emily Kyle, the New York-based founder of Emily Kyle Nutrition, can over serve themselves.

Emily Kyle:

I was filming a YouTube video on how to make canni-butter, and I must have licked way too much off the spoon. I completely intoxicated myself. At about 3:00 PM my husband rolls around, and he tells me I have to go to my son’s lacrosse game. And I was not prepared. So I definitely wasn’t expecting that. And that’s, again, where you get the variability on those homemade edibles.

Ellen Scanlon:

I believe you can never have too many favorite podcasts, but with so many to choose from, I also know that finding the right shows to add your rotation can require some legwork. So we started How To Do The Pot’s podcast club, where we share some really great podcasts that we think you’ll like too. If you feel like reciprocating with podcasts that you think we might enjoy, please reach out at hi@dothepot.com, or you can DM us @DoThePot.

With all this talk of cooking, I’m excited to share with you a podcast that will be a great resource. It’s called Bite Me, the show about edibles. Hosted by Marge, who helps cook make great edibles at home. On each episode, she’ll walk you through a cannabis edibles recipe that she’s tested in her own kitchen, and offer her tips and tricks so that you can do the same.

You get to learn along with Marge as she interviews professional chefs, culinary cannabis experts, and edible enthusiasts. Whether you’re seasoned or just getting into edibles, there’s always more to learn about making them at home. Tune in for new, fun, informative episodes every Thursday on your favorite podcasting app.

One way to control dosing is to plan out the ratio between THC, which will get you high, and CBD, the non-intoxicating part of the plant. Cannabis tolerance is a very complicated thing, especially for women because of our hormones. Depending on where you are in your cycle, cannabis can be up to 30% more potent. Yes, you will feel more high from the same weed the closer you get to your period. We have a chart on our website and a grid post on Do the Pot’s Instagram with all of the details.

Monica shares a cannabis tolerance story from the test kitchen that really shows how surprisingly different tolerance to cannabis can be.

Monica Lo:

So I had flown my mom out to tinker with me in the kitchen, kind of as a bonding experience. And I really wanted to show her how I use cannabis infusions in our family recipes. And so I had the opportunity to document her making some noodles that I really loved growing up. That’s how I discovered that her beginner’s dose is my maximum dose.

Just after a meal of infused noodles, and I think we had 25 milligrams each, I passed out on the couch. And she was like energized, blasting music, and just deep cleaning my kitchen. So that was an eye-opening experience for me in terms of everyone’s body is different, everyone’s tolerance is different, and it just depends on a variety of different things. From what you’ve consumed that day, what your hormones are like, your age, your weight, there’s just so many different factors. So you just never know.

Ellen Scanlon:

Cooking an elaborate cannabis-infused meal is not for everyone, and maybe you’re more interested in saving money on edibles. Monica shares how Covid inspired her to provide more resources for home cooks.

Monica Lo:

So in 2021, cannabis edible sales in medical and recreational states began to skyrocket as an impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. We started to see consumers choosing edibles, especially gummies and candies, over the more inhalable forms of consumption like vapes and flower.

And it was just the perfect timing to work on a cookbook focused on confections. And the idea behind it is, it’s just a lot more cost-effective to make your own infusions and your treats at home, especially as dispensary prices are on the rise just due to a variety of different reasons, from taxes to operating costs.

Dispensary edibles also often have preservatives that extend their shelf life. For example, in California, cannabis edibles should be shelf-stable for at least a year. But when you DIY and you make your edibles at home, you can do it without all those commercial preservatives. And you can also customize the dosages to your body’s needs.

Ellen Scanlon:

A question I get a lot is, how long do edibles take to kick in?

When you eat any kind of cannabis, it can take one to two hours to feel. Do not eat another. It’s also important to think about any other food that you’re eating. When you eat cannabis with a meal, or even a heavy snack, you maximize the intoxicating effects of THC. You will feel more high after you eat.

There isn’t a lot of research on this, but eating after you’ve taken an edible, even a few hours later, can trigger the THC and you may feel its effects for longer. You have to experiment a bit with cannabis, and it’s one of the things that makes weed, and especially eating weed, different than drinking alcohol.

Chef Michellee Fox gives one of my favorite practical tips to make sure you satisfy your hunger and feel the way you want with cannabis.

Michellee Fox:

So I like to do things like, for example, if I’m making a cookie, I’ll make a couple of THC cookies, but then I’ll make the same version of the same cookie with the CBD. So then you can eat one CBD cookie, one THC cookie, and then you feel it out. And then you go again, one CBD cookie, one THC cookie, and keep on going until you don’t want to eat cookies anymore.

Ellen Scanlon:

This is especially helpful if your mushy of choice is cookies, and it’s a great idea to offer non-infused options of whatever you’re making for a crowd.

As we talked about in How To Do The Pot’s Munchies episode, cannabis literally makes food taste and smell better. And if you’re looking for some inspiration, Monica’s favorite munchies are easy to have around the house.

Monica Lo:

I love anything that I can just mindlessly snack on and not feel too guilty about. So popcorn is a really great example, and I also love a cold bowl of fruit.

Ellen Scanlon:

And if you really want to enhance the munchies experience, chef Nikki Steward has some tips.

Nikki Steward:

The things that taste really good when you’re high are things that are fatty or sugary, the spices on there make a difference. Things that are spicy, or warm spices really hit hard.

Ellen Scanlon:

Today’s episode was just a taste of all of the great ideas we have coming for you to make cooking with weed easy and fun. And if you love sweets, the Weed Gummies Cookbook will definitely help you find your new favorites. We’d love to hear how it goes if you make any infused foods. Reach out on Instagram or in a voice note to high@dothepot.com. Stay tuned for more episodes with all you need to know about cooking and cannabis, happy holidays and Bon appétit.

For lots more information and past episodes, visit dothepot.com. And that’s also where you can sign up for our newsletter. For sneak peeks behind the scenes, please follow us on socials @DoThePot. And if you like How To Do The Pot, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It really helps more people find the show.

Thanks to our producers, Madi Fair and Nick Patri. I’m Ellen Scanlon, and we’ll be back soon with more of How To Do The Pot.