Cannabis Cuisine Part 3: Mac-n-Cheese
Hey folks! It’s time again for another romp through the cannabis education hedgerows with your one and only locally owned cannabis retailer. For the last couple of weeks we’ve been taking a swing at making our own infused meals using canna-butter (infused butter which we made together in a previous blog post if you’ve been following along). Last week, I laid down a recipe for Coq au Vin: a fancy sounding but rustically simple meal, which I was pretty proud of.
However, one of my close friends who reads my blog posts gave it a look and the very first words out of his mouth were: “Ew, onions” because he lacks any sense of adventure when it comes to his pallet; choosing instead to continue to eat like an 8 year old despite the fact that he’s old enough to still remember when people wore parachute pants unironically.
So, with him in mind I present to you a much more basic recipe that can be easily infused with canna-butter: Plain ol’ Mac n Cheese.
What You’ll Need
This recipe is dead simple but requires attention to detail in order to make sure your sauce is creamy and not chalky or oily. Maintaining a low heat is key to making sure your cheese sauce doesn’t separate and lose its texture.
Ingredients:
-¾ of a pound of uncooked macaroni noodles
-2 Tablespoons of all purpose flour
-½ teaspoon of salt
-½ teaspoon of black pepper
-¾ cups of heavy cream (half and half)
-1 ½ cups of milk
-2 to 3 cups of shredded cheddar cheese (pro-bono cheese rant. While you totally could buy a bag of pre shredded cheddar for your mac-n-cheese, I urge you to use a high quality, old, sharp cheddar and grate it yourself. The flavour difference is palpable.)
-1 to 2 cups of another cheese of your choice – I have never been a one cheese kind of guy. Cheese is right up there with penicillin in terms of human inventions and more of it is never a bad idea, regardless of what your friends and loved ones tell you while you crush thirty-seven packs of Cheese-Strings on a Tuesday afternoon.
Anyway, you can use whatever cheese you want as long as that cheese has a reasonable meltiness to it. I personally am a fan of gouda due the way it compliments the flavour of the cheddar and adds another dimension of creaminess to the texture.
-3 to 4 tablespoons of Canna-Butter (Base your butter amount on how intense you want your edible experience to be)
You’ll also need a medium pot for cooking the noodles, a medium saucepan and a casserole dish or other decent sized baking dish.
How it’s Done
- Preheat your oven to about 350 degrees Fahrenheit and lightly grease your baking dish
- Fill your pot with water and bring to a boil, then add in your macaroni noodles and cook until al dente (Fun fact of the day. Al dente literally translates from French to English as “to the tooth” and is meant to describe ideally cooked pasta or rice that has a slight chew to it)
- Now let’s take our canna-butter and melt that in our saucepan over medium heat. Once it’s melted down add in the flour, salt and pepper and stir that until it’s well mixed.
- Stir the milk and half and half into the saucepan slowly before removing it from heat and adding 1/2 of our glorious cheese mix into the pan, stirring slowly until the cheese is just melted.
- Mix our cheese sauce together with the cooked noodles and toss gently to coat the noodles.
- Add half of those saucy noodles to the baking dish and spread some of your remaining cheese before adding the rest of the pasta and topping the entire concoction with (you guessed it) more cheese!
- Resist the urge to immediately dig in and pop the baking dish into the oven for about 10-15 minutes until the cheese is completely melted on top.
And that’s all there is to it! Tuck in and enjoy your weedy mac-n-cheesy delight. Again the presence of the fat provided by this cheese is going to further bolster the effects of your canna-butter, so enjoy responsibly!
Hungry? Check out our menu for a wide array of edibles that’ll satisfy even the most seasoned stoner.