10 Delicious Ways to Elevate Your Cannabis Dining Game
Why smoke when you can snack? Boston-area chefs are cooking up some creative new ways to add cannabis to your diet.
Photo by Anna Hunt
The Party Planners
Husband-and-wife team Edgard and Anna Hunt, the twosome behind cannabis-friendly catering business Dope Dinners, marry his restaurant-kitchen-honed cooking and her professional event-planning experience. That means, whether for a small backyard wedding or a milestone birthday, they know how to couple delicious CBD-spiked mocktails and cannabis-infused foods—perhaps scallops with sweet potato gnocchi and herbed brown butter—with thoughtful details that make all the difference: custom music playlists, elegant floral arrangements, keepsake-quality printed menus, and more.
Photo via iStock
The Chocolate
Weed brownies were fine enough in college—now that you’ve graduated to more mature tastes, though, consider registering for one of chef Anne Wolf’s 101-level live or virtual chocolate-making-with-cannabis classes. Wolf, who developed recipes for America’s Test Kitchen before creating bars and bonbons for Cambridge’s acclaimed EHChocolatier, stuffs her group sessions and private bookings with warm chocolate mug cakes, peppermint bark, peanut butter blossom cookies, and plenty of other marijuana-spiked confections.
Photo by Tara Sue Sharp
The Perfect Portion
A Boston-based home-catering outfit that specializes in cannabis-dosed dinners served family-style, Potlove gives every guest their own pocket-sized cards for keeping track of the amount of THC they consume. Each
marijuana-leaf icon on the card represents 5 milligrams, making it easy to mark off your intake as you progress through dosage-labeled helpings of lasagna, twice-baked potatoes, or cheese- and garlic-stuffed mushrooms. Still learning your limits? Cofounders Jonathan Yvon and chef Tara Sue are experienced in guiding newbies.
Photo courtesy of Ardent
The Gadget
A slow cooker–like appliance invented here in Boston, the Ardent FX evenly heats marijuana buds to activate the elevating properties of THC and CBD compounds, then conveniently cooks single-serve edibles—treats such as coffee cakes or Key lime pie—right inside the compact device. Making snacks for friends? The so-called “Easy Bake Oven of cannabis” also easily infuses butters, bacon fat, vegetable shortening, and other ingredients for mixing into larger batches of absolutely anything else you fancy.
The Honey
Talk about sweetening the pot: I Am Edible, a Massachusetts maker of provisions for local dispensaries, rounds out its gourmet-flavor chocolate bars and gummies with some excellent snack-ready spreads, including the so-called Celestial Honey: CBD- and THC-dosed nectar perfect for brushing on Brie and crackers, adding to a cup of tea, or anything else. Still peckish? Swipe a sandwich with I Am Edible’s cannabis-boosted peanut butter or Nutella-like hazelnut spread.
The Hot Sauce
The first Puerto Rico–made cannabis food to be sold in the States, Tropizen’s fiery three-pepper blend and invigorating mix of herbs and spices imports the culinary heat of the Caribbean commonwealth to Boston-area dispensaries. No pot potency is lost in travel, either: The cannabis extract is added locally by New Bedford’s ARL Healthcare, so the 2-ounce bottles pack just the right punch with each suggested half-teaspoon serving.
Photo courtesy of Dinner at Mary’s
The Meal Kit
Pre-portioned meal kit services have exploded post-pandemic, but none have sparked our interest quite like Dinner at Mary’s (5). Every week, chef Alycia Palame—an alum of Eataly, the Back Bay’s Italian-foods emporium—assembles a different three-course menu to send to hungry households (red wine–marinated lamb chops with parsnip purée, anyone?). Each exciting lineup has one optional ingredient in common, though: ready-to-use THC-infused olive oil, available at no extra cost as an added touch. Chef’s kiss!
The Farm-to-Table Feast
Eco-conscious chefs David Ferragamo and Anthony Licari make it easier to eat green—in more ways than one—with Euphoric Food, their cannabis-dining operation. The Haverhill natives travel the region preparing in-home, multicourse meals that support local agriculture and emphasize responsibly sourced ingredients: Wintergreen foraged in New England woods might be used for a cherry-glazed lamb dish, while tomatoes from New Hampshire’s sustainability minded Heron Pond Farm end up in everything from pizza to pancakes to sorbet.
The Beer-Infused Bonus
Mass Cannabis Chefs duo Joseph Nelson and Patrick Mulcahy (who competed solo on the Netflix show Cooked with Cannabis) customize every marijuana-fueled menu for their clients’ private, at-home dining experiences. If you know to ask, that includes multicourse meals that tap Nelson’s local-beer knowledge—he’s also a brewer at Plymouth’s Second Wind Brewing Company—and invoke local brews as flavorful ingredients. See: a soup made with THC sunflower oil and lager from Mayflower Brewing Company, plus purple carrots and crispy prosciutto.
Photo by David Yusefzadeh
The Ice Cream
Framingham-based Cloud Creamery has stocked refrigerators in more than 30 dispensaries statewide with cannabis-infused frozen sweets in gourmet flavors like dark-chocolate truffle, plus vegan varieties such as apple-crisp ice cream made with fruit from Lookout Farm in Natick. The Massachusetts maker’s latest partnership, on the other hand, is straight out of Hollywood: Actors Jim Belushi and Dan Aykroyd have signed on for Blues Brothers–branded pints of java chip and the Creamsicle-like Orange Whip. Fedoras and sunglasses not included.
