Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to learn some cooking tips from one of the best: Sacramento’s own favorite Uncle Buck. Uncle Buck is known for making delicious, healthy, and consistENTly medicated edibles, from butter to cookies to…trail mix! He’ll be giving these free classes at Magnolia Wellness for the next few Thursdays, and if you’re anywhere in the neighborhood and have a medical recommendation, I recommend that you join in the fun!

So, since I was mostly gazing in awe while Uncle Buck whipped up some terrific appetizers, all I was able to do during class was take some quick notes. And afterwards…but that’s another story. So anyway…here are the notes I can still read:

• When making butter, Uncle Buck uses flour sacks (that he buys at Smart & Final) to squeeze out the leaves. This insures that every trace of vegetation is gone. I think he said he makes 24 pounds of butter at a time! THC/CBD extraction is done at 225°.
• Medication is important, but this is food, and it’s nothing without taste. Uncle Buck mixes olive oil and soybean oil for cooking, and uses a maximum of 150° to 200° when extracting THC/CBD from the cannabis.
• The large fan leaves, especially, generally have more CBDs than flowers in typical strains. Fresh raw leaves are great to cook with, especially with basil and other herbs.
• Apples! Uncle Buck likes to add green apples occasionally for extra flavor, but red apples when baking.
• The basic ratio he uses when cooking is one ounce of cannabis to one pound of butter or oil.

Uncle Buck’s butter is the best, but when you’re making a butter-heavy dish, the taste of weed would be evident. He proved his great taste, making a bread dip from 3 ounces of cannabutter and 4 ounces of regular butter. I dipped two pieces of bread into this mixture and couldn’t taste anything weedy at all.

But the stars of the evening were the stuffed mushrooms. Nothing fancy, just regular mushrooms sauteed in Uncle Buck’s cannabutter and then stuffed with chopped vegetables and a few cannabis leaves that themselves were sauteed in cannabutter. They were amazing. More than amazing…? Yes. They tasted like any similar mushroom dish in a top restaurant. You couldn’t detect any taste of marijuana whatsoever.

And after all the problems I’ve had overdosing accidentally on edibles, I tried to be careful! I asked what a full dose of the mushrooms would entail, and he said “Three.” So I only ate two (even though they were delicious) along with the bread. Then later in the class…much later…after I had asked him about the mushroom dose and also about the butter dose…I suddenly realized…

Uncle Buck’s dose size was about eight times as large as the one I use!

Well…the class was just about over, and Uncle Buck was letting the people in the class take home the leftovers (!), so I decided to drive straight home. Like, before anything happened. Which it did when I got there. But as I said, that’s another story.

I certainly don’t blame Uncle Buck, but my wife is writing him a note for the next class, saying that “Old Hippie is not allowed to eat in class ever again”.

And now, after all these years, I can say that I have finally — and even legally — tripped on mushrooms.