But a lot of readers have been asking me to review food, so over the past few months, I've made a point to pick up edibles while I'm out. Some have been worthless, but most have opened my eyes to the wide range of ways people are eating their ganja.
Below are my top ten medicated foods around Colorado.
10. Cheeba Chews Ignoring all warnings against such action, I ate two of these indica-strong chocolate candies a few weeks ago to numb a pinched nerve in my back. My first thought was that the taste isn't anything unique or spectacular and that Cheeba Chews are basically a gooier Tootsie Roll with a light hash aftertaste. My second thought was, Holy shit, this is some strong stuff. The super-potent candies were more than enough to turn me into a pain-free vegetable for an evening, and I can see why so many people with chronic pain tout them as the best on the market. As the company motto says: Chews wisely. 9. Conscious Confections Baklava Medicated treats are often baked to the point of being dry, flavorless and completely unappealing. Not the case with the baklava from Native Roots Apothecary's in-house bakery, Conscious Confections. I was told that the recipe, which has been in the owner's family for generations, has more than two grams of medicated butter in each slice. That explains both the fluffy, flaky consistency and the mind-altering potency of the pastry. Medicated or not, this baklava, dripping with honey-hashy goodness, is some of the best I've had in the city. 8. Simply Pure Peanut Brittle Bar It's hard to make something that is essentially sugar and peanuts healthy, but the folks at Simply Pure are doing their best by using only natural and organic ingredients in their candy bars. On top of a wicked sugar high, the bar has seventy mg of active THC that gave me a soaring mental buzz, put me in a good mood and energized me mentally and physically. It was a good mid-afternoon snack, though I was hungry again an hour later. 7. Granny T's Kettle Chips While all ganja food tends to fall in the "stealth medication" category, these chips are by far the least obvious medicated food I have ever seen. A bag was enough to give me a good head buzz for a few hours and loosen up any tight muscles or aches I had. But more important, nobody knew I was eating pot food in the office (not that anyone here cares). Sometimes you need a little lunchtime relief; pairing a bag of these with your ham sandwich would be a good way to get it. 6. North Shore Edibles Snickerdoodle As far as being edible is concerned, mass-produced medicated cookies tend to fall just above hockey pucks. These snickerdoodles from North Shore are one of the few exceptions. Somewhat crispy on the edges but still soft in the middle, a few minutes in a toaster oven softened them up to near-fresh-baked quality. These cookies were tested back in March and found to have roughly 50 mg of active THC and nearly 1 percent cannabidiol in them. That added boost of CBD made eating two of these more like eating a cinnamon-laden sugar Valium than a cookie, only better-tasting. 5. CannaPunch Fruit Punch I haven't had good luck with most of the sodas on the market, but CannaPunch changed my view on liquid THC. Red, purple and orange were my favorites (like a kid with Kool-Aid, I prefer using color names instead of flavor names), though the red fruit punch did the best at masking the lightly present hash taste. One bottle of the thirty mg was enough for a mellow body high to accompany my nightly bowl.4. Mile High Ice Cream Chocolate Cookie Dough With flavors like Birthday Baked, Mile High Chai and Strawberry Pot Tart, Mile High Ice Cream wants you to have fun with your meds. For me, this was also the perfect way to end a heavy meal, satisfying my chocolate and THC cravings in one fell swoop. Cream-based foods tend to cover the pot taste well, and the rich chocolate cookie-dough chunks masked the ganja completely. A half-pint (sixty mg) was more than enough to cause -- and then cure -- an ice-cream headache.
3. Denver Relief Critical Extract Candy A lot of shops carry these kinds of lollipops now, and I've seen them from a variety of vendors, but the candies I tried were from Denver Relief. Each had roughly sixty mg of active THC butane extract per sucker, or enough to quickly get you buzzing. They generally taste like every other rock candy you've had, with just a little throat-tingling hash aftertaste to remind you how potent the item you just ingested really was. These types of edibles travel well and are relatively inconspicuous to use.
2. Standing Akimbo Medicated Party Mix The folks at Standing Akimbo took second place in the recent High Times Medical Cannabis Cup for their Pecanna Bar. I grabbed one recently, and it was good, but I'm more impressed with the company's medicated party mix. Roughly ninety mg of activated bubble hash is sprinkled liberally throughout the dangerously delicious, buttery/salty mix. I downed three-quarters of a bag in the office the other day and spent a good half-hour thinking Westword's vintage Pepsi machine was trying to communicate with me.
1. Twirling Hippy Confections Caramel Pecan Turtle Twirling Hippy owner Jessica LaRoux has been the reigning queen of medibles in Colorado since before "medibles" was even a word. I don't even like cheesecake -- LaRoux's specialty -- and yet I have enjoyed everything I've ever tried from Twirling Hippy. My favorite, though, is the simple caramel pecan turtle. LaRoux's medicated caramel is shirt-staining gooey and has the perfect amount of cannabis taste to accent the milk chocolate. These aren't the strongest edibles on the market, but that's a good thing for those of us with a sweet tooth who can't stop at just one treat.
More from our Marijuana archive: "Cannabis edibles as breakthrough autism treatment? Mieko Hester-Perez tells Joey's story."
