What to do? Missed out the on the big Nature’s Herb birthday
bash, went the make treats at home route instead. What’s a birthday without
treats? This time I decided that instead of running down to the dispensary and
taking advantage of their great deals that would just end up in my toy box
anyway I would make a batch of cannabis infused olive oil and have a good time
on the cheap. This time I feel my financial sense outweighed my cannabis jones
and won.
I love how new hobbies have all these great new things to
learn. Friday I blew off watching the inauguration and instead voiced my
outrage by debarbing a bunch of old cannabis I brought along with me from
NorCal. The process I used on Friday was fresh and interesting: instead of
grinding down the mota and spreading it all over a baking pan I put the ground
grass into half pint canning jars, screwed on the lids and popped them into a
220 oven for 60 minutes. The cannabis got brown but not overly toasted and the
biggest plus was that the house did not reek of dope, always a good thing when
you have a clause in the lease that forbids marijuana use on the premises!
The next part of the day’s inauguration festivities was
heating some extra virgin olive oil I found on sale at King Soopers and pouring
it over the cooled cannabis in the jars. After a slight sizzle the were loosely
capped again and put into a bath of hot water where they rested on the stove
and merrily simmered away for over 18 hours. The resulting slurry was drained
over a cheesecloth covered mesh colander and rejarred for later use. All I have
to say is thank goodness for gloves! The squeezing out of the oil infused dope
would have sent me off to the moon. 4 oh zees of mota buds yielded just about
40 ounces of olive oil. Just touching a finger-tip of oil to my lips got me
buzzed at work for three hours. Waa-hoo for home made!
That homemade thrill was also on hand on for the weekend,
too. I made two batches of baklava for my birthday, something I had not made in
a long while. My sweetie and I had been out and about shopping before the
Christmas holiday and had haphazardly bought some supermarket baklava for the
ride home. What a bust that store bought crap was! It was dry, crackly, stale
and worst of all, made with corn syrup instead of honey. It was like biting
into a strange dried out cereal bar instead of a sinfully lush, soggy middle eastern syrupy treat. So, with
our hackles up we spent the morning of my birthday, New Year’s Eve, making
baklava. One batch was the real deal, made for general consumption, the other
was a cannabis butter soaked space shot of goodness. One we took with us up to
Lyons for the big birthday celebration (went out to dinner, sipped some wine,
crashed before midnight old fogey style), the other went untouched until this last weekend.
Wow. Layer after layer of butter soaked fila dough and nuts
really does leave an impression on a guy.
Before I got into it I passed along a couple of wedges of
the treat to a friend of the family, with the somewhat sundry, underwhelming warning that it
was “strong”. Freaking understatement. I was gifted an electronic kitchen scale
for my birthday and decided to go all scientific with my dosage. I measured out
a ten-gram bite and then measure that out: one tablespoon of baklava was ten grams. Broke that down
in half and made that my dose for the day: one teaspoon. 5 grams of dessert. Just for science, just
to see what that would get me.
Once again, wow. As I put it to my car load of family on the
way into the city that afternoon: it was like seeing the smoke from an old coal burner ship
way off on the horizon. Something was coming but what it was couldn’t be seen. It was
there but it wasn’t. I was high but then again I wasn’t. A bit of THC slight of hand.
This was at an hour. By the time the two-hour mark hit I was deep in the rushes
and I still had four hours to go. That’s the thing about edibles. One must be patient. The nuance of
the entourage effect of sipping flower from a vape pipe is gone. No terps to help guide you. In this case it was all about the bludgeoning
power of high THC all on its own. No subtlety, no nuance, just the pure heart rush of
a stone.
Treats, yes, wonderful. I had already made the investment on
the mota, just couldn’t let it turn into dust, could I? And I couldn’t look at it as what I
saved by not going to the dispensary that day because I had already laid in the
herb and had to do something with it. Sort of like buying truffles. Can't let them go to waste, had to made
something with that somewhat high priced cooking commodity. Boy, howdy, did I
ever! Look forward to making another batch of butter, to making a Mexican
chocolate coffee cheesecake. Usually those things are ridiculously rich and
require only a slight wedge to be satisfied. I have a feeling that upcoming cheesecake will be a “one
bite, I’m alright” kind of sweet.
Thank goodness I like to cook as much as I like to eat!
Salud!
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