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How to Cook With Cannabis This Thanksgiving | Alternet

For those of you spending this Thursday with weed-friendly friends and family, here's a quick guide to cooking with cannabis.

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Thanksgiving is a holiday for spending time with friends and family over a heaping platter of comfort food, so why not celebrate this year with a special Thanksgiving dinner? After all, 2012 will go down in history as the year Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana, giving cannabis users a lot to be thankful for. Plus, incorporating easy-to-make cannabutter into traditional recipes will give your dinner conversation an extra buzz, not to mention help you and your guests to clean your plates. So, for those of you spending this Thursday with weed-friendly friends and family, here's a quick guide to cooking with cannabis.

Cannabutter. Making cannabutter is the first and most important step to create a THC-rich meal.

1. Pour a few cups of water into a large saucepan and bring to boil. For every ounce of marijuana, add one pound or four sticks of butter (or one ounce of oil for vegans). 2. Once the butter is boiling, add weed, making sure it is floating about an inch-and-a-half from the pan's bottom, and turn the stove to a lower heat. (Keep in mind that you can use vaporized bud, and that high-quality weed is not necessary to get a good buzz.) 3. Without burning the butter, heat the ingredients for at least an hour (the longer, the better) until the mixture resembles a thick, saucy liquid. Then, use the finest strainer you've got to remove the cannabis from the butter. 4. Let the cannabutter sit in the refrigerator overnight so  the water and butter separate as the cannabutter collects on top. Pour the water into the sink while blocking the cannabutter with, for example, a Tupperware lid.

Now that you've got your cannabutter ready to go, it's time to incorporate it into your favorite Thanksgiving foods. As you'll see, you can add cannabutter to pretty much anything, making for a wide variety of possible canna-snacks and entrees.

Let's Start With An Appetizer

Green-bean casserole is a regular dish at my family's Thanksgiving dinner (which, unfortunately, will not include cannabutter this year, or ever). Spruce up your recipe by adding cannabutter, or use the one below, from Coed Magazine :

Cannabutter Green Bean Casserole

Cooking time 30 mins, Serves 10 – 12

Ingredients:

• 2 cans Condensed Cream of Mushroom Soup

• 1 cup milk (fat free or 2%)

• 1 onion finely diced

• 2 tablespoons cannabutter

• 1/4 teaspoon salt

• 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

• 8 cups cooked cut green beans

• 1 cup French Fried Onions

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

2. In a large skillet sauté the chopped onion in a little cannabutter over medium heat for a few minutes until cooked.

3. Stir in the canned mushroom soup, milk, salt and pepper, green beans and 1 tablespoon of cannabutter and mix well until it's all warmed through.

4. Using the leftover cannabutter grease the casserole dish.

5. Transfer to the casserole dish, sprinkle with French Fried Onions and bake for 15 mins or until hot and bubbling.

The Main Course

Nothing is more important on Turkey Day than the turkey, and even that can be infused with cannabis. From Culture Magazine , here’s how to make this Thanksgiving’s main dish extra special:

What you need:

1 medium-sized (12- to 15-pound) turkey

1/2 cup marijuana butter

1/4 cup chicken broth

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 teaspoon poultry seasoning

1 teaspoon sweet basil

1 teaspoon thyme leaves

1/2 teaspoon sage

How to make it:

Melt butter in a small saucepan over low heat and blend in remaining ingredients. Stuff turkey or season with salt and pepper, if desired. Make a small incision in skin of turkey, force a finger through the slit and break the contact between the skin and the meat. Using a meat injector, squirt half the butter mixture under the skin. Cook the turkey according to your favorite method, basting with the remaining butter mixture every half hour until done.

Dessert

When most people think about weed food, they probably think about pot brownies, which seem to be the standard for weed food. There's also cookies and "space cakes," but they're straightforward recipes many of us mastered in high school. So let’s be adults here and start with a Thanksgiving classic: Pot Pumpkin Pie! From High Times:

Chef Ra’s Great Ganja Pumpkin Pie

2 cups fresh pumpkin or 1 16-oz. can of pumpkin pie filling

2 eggs (beaten)

1/4 cup condensed milk

1 tsp molasses

1/2 stick butter or margarine

1/4-oz fine ganja buds or fan leaves

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp nutmeg

1 tsp vanilla

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 9-inch unbaked pastry shell

Place the ganja, crushed and finely chopped, into a double-boiler pot (one pot that fits inside the other separated by water). Cook the ganja in the butter for 45 minutes over very low flame. Cook slowly without burning the butter. Then, strain out the particulate (leaves, stems, etc.) and set aside. Combine the beaten eggs, milk, molasses, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, brown sugar and pumpkin in a large bowl, and beat. Add the ganja butter to the mixture. Pour the mixture into the pastry shell. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cook pie for 50 minutes or until a knife inserted comes out clean.

There you have it! These dishes should make for a super-fun Thanksgiving celebration -- and one that, working alongside a little tryptophan, will leave you cozy, full and ready for a good night's sleep. One of the problems with eating a lot of weed food, however, is that THC gives you the munchies, and so quite often, the more weed food you eat, the hungrier you get. It's a slippery slope, so you may want to keep a plate of leftovers hidden away, just in case.

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How to Cook With Cannabis This Thanksgiving | Alternet.  

Why Are No Women Celebrity Stoners Willing to Come Out of the Greenhouse?

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300"]NORML Logo NORML Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption]
Famous women stay mute when it comes to their relationship to weed, but their voices could be of the utmost importance. The only way famous women talk openly and politically about pot use today is if they are using it “medically” -- as in the case with Melissa Etheridge, who spoke openly about her pot use during the chemo treatments she underwent during her 2005 battle with breast cancer. What we don’t hear is celebrity women who are willing to advocate for the legalization and taxation of weed, aka cannabis sativa. But they should, because it’s better for the economy, for the sick and ailing and prescription-addicted, for farmers and for the environment. Twenty million-plus Americans use marijuana recreationally. And here’s where things get tricky for potential high-profile women advocates. Women have not been shown “what’s in it for them” if they endorse re-legalizing marijuana and industrial hemp. Subsequently, they still feel there’s too much at stake both personally and professionally to publicly stand up for drug policy reform. Even as much of our history as a nation included this plant -- it served us as rope and masts in the ships that won our wars, as the medium for our founders’ message when the Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper -- f amous women stay mute when it comes to their relationship to weed. 
Where are the female Tommy Chongs, the Snoop Dog (Lion)s, and the Willie Nelsons? They are out there, but they’re not talking. And they need to understand all they have to gain by coming out of the greenhouse or the pot cookie closet. Is it because they’re not as cavalier as men when it comes to going on record about breaking the law to smoke pot? With upwards of 850,000 marijuana arrests yearly and over a trillion spent, the war on drugs has been the costliest war in American history. Our job at the NORML Women’s Alliance is to urge women to become more vocal about the need to “free the weed.” But a sister needs to help a sister out!
So this is a call to arms to Kristen Stewart, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, Sarah Silverman, Joss Stone, Paris Hilton , Drew Barrymore, Charlize Theron, Rihanna, Cameron Diaz , Mischa Barton and Jennifer Aniston. Which one of you will be gutsy (and career savvy) enough to cash in on your celebrity stoner status? Millions of us are waiting for our USmagazines to arrive with those first photos of a green goddess collecting her platinum bong for her commitment to the cause.Here are three good reasons why famous women should consider legalizing marijuana in America.
1. It’s an entirely green initiative. Oil companies are already bidding on the oil reserves underneath the ever-melting polar ice caps. Hemp is oil and all of our cars and airplanes can run on it while also putting out-of-work farmers back to work. Hemp actually improves the environment where it is grown. 2. It could save your life. Not only is pot way cooler than alcohol, it’s also non-toxic. Dylan Thomas could not have smoked himself to death. There has never been a cannabis-related death. Ever. In fact, recent studies show that cannabis kills stage 4 cancer cells. It’s not only not bad for you, studies are showing that cannabinoids (helpful compounds found in the plant) support the immune system. These same compounds found in the pot plant are found in mother’s milk. So, while drinking can kill you -- and others if you drive while intoxicated -- pot could save your life. 3. It will probably make you a pop cultural icon. If you are a famous hot female, what’s more rad than getting photographed smoking a blunt in a Bob Marley bathing suit in Barbados? Rihanna could change lives if she would just come out and say, “I smoke pot. I like it.” Dr. Andrew Weil, the guru of alternative medicine, has called cannabis sativa the dog of the plant world. In other words, the pot plant has been growing loyally since the dawn of mankind, making itself useful to us as fiber, food and medicine. This war on weed is being sustained by a self-interested government that has never figured out how to properly profit from legal marijuana production, and is afraid of its power to put so many big oil and pharmaceutical companies out of business. Famous women can help change this by arming themselves with the facts and being fearless in the conviction of their choices. Theirs are the voices that are missing from this important struggle, and they need to step up. It’s high time. Greta Gaines is a singer/songwriter who lives in Nashville, TN with her husband and two young sons. She serves on the national board of NORML and on the NORML Women’s Alliance. She has been named in Skunk Magazine’s “100 most important marijuana activists.”