The Ganja Gourmand: Pesto Mashed Potatoes

Alright. It’s time for a little transparency. I recently got a new job that expects me to be in the office 40 hours a week. That’s right, your old pal GG is going legit. Yes, I have to go to meetings. Yes, sometimes, for professional purposes, I’m forced to dress like a human valium. But hey, I get dental insurance. That’s not such a bad trade. Anyway, since I have a day job, this means I’m now writing these blog posts/serial ramblings pro bono. But what does this mean for you, the reader? Well from a quantitative perspective, nothing’s going to change. Fridays will always begin with me taking a neuro-laxative puff or two and shitting out mixed-metaphors and largely pointless stories for my (frankly ungrateful) audience. On the qualitative side of things, I can definitively say there may be weeks in which I don’t have the time to spin a beautiful yarn about cookies and family. On those weeks (this is one of them) I will feed you a personal morsel about whatever’s going with me these days. Will it have anything to do with cooking? Not always, but that shouldn’t matter. You come here for my shimmering personality and acerbic wit.

Personal morsel:

I didn’t like mashed potatoes as a kid. The potatoes I was served on Thanksgiving, possibly because my grandmother’s arms were growing weak with age, were always full of hard lumps. I remember thinking that my family’s mashed potatoes resembled the gruel a Dickensian industrialist might feed his many servants. They had a stale, almost musky taste. It’s almost as if butter and milk were exotic ingredients, inaccessible to the average American home. To compound the strangeness further, everything else at the table was expertly prepared. The turkey was golden and scintillating. The rolls and brown sugar carrots and asparagus were all delicious. The mashed potatoes however, reminded me, both in taste and texture, of a pile of off-white lego bricks. After finally trying some decent mashed potatoes in middle school, I taught myself the art of fine mashing and proper seasoning. Then, at my first thanksgiving with my girlfriend, her parents added pesto to the mix, and changed my life forever. Now, I’m throwing in some cannabutter, and changing your life as well. Weed pesto mashed potatoes: the side that gets you high. Alright, that sucked. Whatever. I gotta go back to work.

Pesto recipe courtesy of simplyrecipes.com

Ingredients:

2 cups fresh basil

1/2 cup grated parmesan

1/2 cup olive oil

1/3 cup pine nuts

3 garlic cloves (minced)

1/4 teaspoon of salt

1/8 teaspoon of freshly ground pepper

12-16 red bliss potatoes

2 tablespoons of cannabutter

1/4 cup whole milk

Step 1

Boil potatoes for 10 minutes. Leave the skin on. While the potatoes boil, put basil and pine nuts into a food processor and blend several times. Next add cheese and garlic. After that, slowly add the olive oil and salt. Pulse a few times. Place fresh pesto in a resealable container.

Step 2

Strain your potatoes and put them in a bowl. Mash them with cannabutter and milk.

Step 3

Once potatoes are mashed to a consistency of your liking, add two tablespoons of pesto. Stir thoroughly.