Munchies

 

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

In the time MUNCHIES has been around, we’ve gotten to work with all kinds of chefs, making food that ranges from lowbrow to highbrow and everywhere in between. Add to that the fact that almost all of us have spent serious time in kitchens ourselves and have super-high expectations of what food should be, what you get is a team of people who are pretty damn good at parsing pro-level skills and techniques into very tasty home-cook–friendly food.

This book is a culmination of all those skills: in short, this is how we cook when we’re at home. Most of the time, because we’re people with jobs and lives, we’re putting together quick dinners that keep us fed and happy. But we really love food and love feeding people and don’t think there’s a better way to enjoy the company of others than around a giant table of food. So, to that end, welcome to the MUNCHIES Guide to Dinner, our effort to turn the way we like to cook and eat into a collection of recipes. Easy ones for busy weeknights, and fancy ones for the occasional weekend dinner parties with friends.

We’ve divided the recipes in here into four sections: Homemade Staples, Essentials, Weeknight Meals, and Weekend Entertaining.

Homemade Staples is where we offer primers on all the things that add so much character to your meals if you make them yourself: recipes like homemade mayo and salad dressings, chicken stock, tomato sauce, and fresh pasta from scratch for the days you’re feeling ambitious. Do you have to make them at home? No. Will they kick ass if you do? Yes.

Essentials are the techniques and dishes we think everyone should know—the ones that maybe your parents would have taught you if you lived inside a Norman Rockwell painting, where you don’t really want to admit, “Uh, shit, I can’t believe I don’t know how to do this”: the roast chickens, the mashed potatoes, the pots of plain rice. With these basics, you can build all the elements and flavors you need to keep yourself fed and happy. They might not all be the quickest and easiest—although some are, for sure—but they’re exactly what you’ll want to have in your arsenal when a mac-and-cheese emergency comes along.

Weeknight Meals are exactly what they sound like: they’re what you fix yourself after a long day at work or school. They don’t generally require a lot of complicated shopping or prep, and for the most part, they’ll get you dinner on the table in under an hour. There are also a couple of recipes in that section (the Chicken Pot Pie on page 105, for example) that work perfectly if you make them on a weekend and freeze your leftovers in batches. Then you’ll have a very easy pop-it-in-the-oven-and-crack-a-beer-while-you-wait situation when you get home on a Tuesday evening.

Weekend Entertaining is loosely organized theme nights for when you want to invite your friends over and go all out. They’re intended as inspiration; no one’s saying Pimento Cheese Quesadillas and Cacio e Pepe Popcorn are mandatory for a Netflix binge-watching party (see page 113) . . .but no one’s saying they’re not, either. Treat these as loose suggestions, or shoot a couple of recipes over to each of your friends and make it a potluck.

We really want you to treat everything in here as a suggestion. We have thoughts and opinions about what goes with what, and how best to use leftovers, but fundamentally, the point of this book is to give you the knowledge base and skill set you need to be comfortable improvising on your own. We’re hoping this book gives you the tools and skills you need to make yourself (and your friends and loved ones) many, many dinners that live up to your deservedly high expectations.

 

 

 

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Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION 

People have been eating weed for thousands of years—brewed for tea, crumbled into coffee, as a tincture, mixed with fruits and spice in jam—but in the last decade or so, it has started to feel very different. Building on the accumulated wisdom of traditional recipes such as Middle Eastern mahjoun and Indian bhang, cannabis cuisine has gone far beyond brownies and has reclaimed its place as a serious culinary ingredient. We’re now living in a new era of marijuana cuisine; one of space-age vaporizers, designer hash, and cutting-edge science, all of which have helped take weed food to a whole other realm.

In these pages, we’re experimenting with weed, but not like teenage stoners hitting a homemade gravity bong. Instead, we have enlisted some incredible chefs to make weed food that eclipses those early brownies—the kind of fare that you’d want to sit down and eat even if there wasn’t weed in it.

Through a mash-up of modern cooking techniques and hard-won weed wisdom, television series Bong Appétit highlights next-level ingredients and techniques that are revolutionizing the way we use cannabis, as a culinary ingredient—leafy green; spice; dried herb; refined, isolated chemical—and as something that gets you high.

Envied for its extensive pantry filled with fine flowers, rare hashes, infused oils, and weed-infused spices, Bong Appétit (the show) redefines luxury in many respects. We realize that many readers, even those who live in states such as California and Colorado where recreational cannabis is legal, won’t have access to these products. So we’ve translated many ideas from the series into something that works for the home cook. Do you have access to terpenes, cannabinoids, distillates, tinctures, and any strain of bud  you desire and are looking for new techniques that will put them on your home table or turn them into professional-level edibles? These recipes will give you plenty to work with. Do you have to text someone shady as hell to get hooked up, so you basically have to work with whatever you can get? There are recipes here for you, too.

And we’re making it easy to know just how high you’ll get from a plate of fried chicken wings or a bowl of pappardelle Bolognese. We lab tested all of our recipes to make sure you wouldn’t have to worry about (a) wasting a bunch of weed making food that doesn’t get you high or (b) making food that gets you so high you have to call in sick for work the next day. We’ve also asked Bong Appétit hosts Vanessa Lavorato and Ry Prichard to add notes and pro tips throughout the book so you get perspective from seasoned experts.

And sure, there’s some crazy shit in here, like poaching a whole octopus in weed olive oil or force-infusing THC into alcohol with a whipped-cream charger. But we’re also keeping it simple enough for the beginner cook to play along, with cannabis getting into most of the recipes via easy-to-make infusions of butter or oil. Still, if you’re itching for a challenge, you’ll find plenty of next-level options, from cannabis-leaf kimchi to infused pepperoni.

Some of what you may have seen on the show flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that prioritizes budget over flavor when cooking with weed. We freely admit that burning three ounces of high-quality pot in a smoker or dumping a handful of herb into a fryer was more about experimentation than getting high. You won’t find recipes for that kind of thing here. That said, if you feel like balling out, we’re not here to stop you. This book is all about giving you the tools and savvy you need to master the art of cooking with cannabis—no matter what that looks like for you.

If you live in a place without legal weed, please know we’re sorry—and that you are not alone. And, yes, it’s incredibly fucked up that there are millions of people in prison for enjoying the kind of recreational activity you’re about to read an entire book on, and we’re hoping that changes soon too. In any case, rest assured that the recipes in this book can be followed without including any cannabis at all. They’re still excellent; they’re just not quite as fun.