COOKING WITH WEED: 5 TASTY AND EASY RECIPES WITH CANNABIS

You can't just smoke cannabis - you can also incorporate it into recipes to make edibles, for example. This is not only healthier for your lungs, but also delicious. Moreover, edibles give a distinctly different experience from smoking. Want to make sure you incorporate cannabis into your food the right way? Here you'll find everything you need to know about cooking with cannabis: from the right dosage and ingredients to our favourite recipes.

Incorporating cannabis into a recipe versus smoking weed

Smoking cannabis produces different effects from incorporating cannabis into a recipe. Firstly, you can see that in how fast it works. When you smoke it, it is absorbed through your lungs into your bloodstream almost immediately. So you can go from sober to pretty high after a few minutes, depending on how strong the cannabis is and how often and deeply you inhale.

When you incorporate cannabis into your recipe, we call them edibles. An edible ends up in your stomach via your mouth and oesophagus. But only once the active substances have travelled to your liver can they be absorbed into the bloodstream. As you can guess, it takes a considerably longer time before you experience an effect from eating cannabis. And that is what many users of edibles get wrong. You may be familiar with the classic beginner's mistake: half to a full hour after taking your cannabis cake or cannabis candy, you still feel nothing, so you take another serving. And suddenly that first serving kicks in... Before you know it, you're higher than you've ever been. So don't make this mistake (or make it again) and be patient. Most people notice an edible after 30-120 minutes. 120 minutes: that is indeed 2 hours.

Effects

Whereas with smoking weed and hash the peak wears off after 30 minutes, with edibles it takes about 4 hours before you're at this level. All in all, you can spend around 12 hours with an edible, while the effects of smoking it do disappear after about 6 hours. So start baking and eating on time when you are going to make one of our cannabis recipes. This will prevent you from peaking only in the middle of the night.

Also know that many users report a more intense high from edibles, especially when the dose is high. Something to keep in mind when deciding where, when and with whom to make our cannabis recipes.

Easy recipes with cannabis

12 hours nicely stoned, sounds like music to your ears? Then you must be itching to get baking. Below are our 5 favourite recipes with cannabis. Actually, there are 4, because the first recipe tells you how to make the basis of most baking: cannabis oil.

The basis of your cannabis recipe: cannabis oil

If you like taking edibles so much that you start doing it on a regular basis, then it's handy to always have a batch of cannabis oil at home. The oil binds to the active substances in cannabis, the cannabinoids. With this recipe, you can very easily make your own cannabis oil with regular cannabis:

Ingredients:

• 5 grams of cannabis (dried; home-grown or from the shop)
• 70 ml water
• 20 ml olive oil

Preparation:

1. Grind cannabis to a fine powder in a grinder and/or chopper and food processor.
2. Mix cannabis, oil and water in a (stainless steel) pan.
3. Heat this for two hours au bain marie on low heat.
4. Remove the pan from the heat and let everything cool to room temperature.
5. Filter the residue through a sieve and then a coffee filter, and put the cannabis oil in a container.
6. Rinse the remaining plant material with some water and filter it again through the cafetière.
7. Add water to the container with the filtered mixture.
8. Leave the mixture in the freezer overnight. This will cause the oil to float on top of the water.
9. Carefully pour off the oil.

You can then use this oil to make all sorts of things! Here are some examples of versatile recipes using cannabis.

1. Space biscuits

You can make space cookies with any biscuit recipe. And it's easier than you think! Find a tasty biscuit recipe and simply add the oil to the baking mix. Or make it easy on yourself and buy a ready-made baking mix from the supermarket. Just bake and enjoy! Do some research into how strong a biscuit is. So take one first, before you get the munchies and eat the whole batch...

2. Brownies with weed

Space brownies or a spacecake are also mega easy to make. Like biscuits, you can just add cannabis oil to a recipe for brownies. Just follow the recipe instructions or the packaging of the brownie baking mix, and you're done.

3. Cocktail 2.0

Do you like a cocktail or special drink at times? Then add a few drops of cannabis oil! You will be surprised how delicious this can be, if you get the right flavour combinations. Go for example for a piña colada, but with an extra dimension thanks to the cannabis oil.

4. Salad dressing

Not so crazy about sweet? Go on the healthy track and make a salad dressing with cannabis oil. You can also find lots of inspiration for dressings online. Find a tasty recipe, add the cannabis oil and enjoy your healthy meal.

5. Chocolate milk

Nothing better on a bleak evening than a cup of chocolate milk. Or is there? Make space chocolate milk with a few drops of your cannabis oil for a lovely evening on the couch. Or go for our ready-made cannabis chocolate milk, if you prefer to save your oil for another recipe.