Episode Transcript

Audio Transcript

Trevor: Kirk we're back

Kirk: Hey, Trevor, how's it going, man? What's new with you?

Trevor: Good! Instead of boring everybody with smoke details this time, which we still have a lot of in Manitoba, a smoky story led me to an E. Coli thing. So they were announcing on the news this morning that a sailing race in Gimli, like a competitive race, got canceled because of smoke many moons to go, like, uh... Late 80s I used to race sailboards in Gimli so that instantly brought me back to being a teenager in Gimli racing sailboards. I was particularly good but it was a lot of fun and that brought me to another news thing. Kitsilano beach in Vancouver got closed down due to too much E. Coli and that bought me back into the early 90s. I've been a geek a long time so I was working particle accelerator at UBC as you do, but one of the really cool things about that job is sort of being associated with UBC for the summer is they had a windsurfing locker that you could as sort of a student you could sign up for. So I could ride my bike down to Kitsilano beach and you know I paid whatever it is $10 to be a member of the windsurf club and could have access to all these boards and I could go out off of Kitsilano Beach and sail around and uh get because you know Kid from Manitoba doesn't understand the size of the enormous ocean going freighters out there so you know each link is the size of my of uh of the chain coming out is the side of my sailboard and more scary that you might not think of for a completely stop thing if you are on a a craft that is completely powered by the wind if you go on the other side of one of these things there's no wind there like zero you are freaking stopped and you know you are basically beside the the side of a steel cliff and so you do these funny things with your sail to kind of try to paddle. Paddle air with your sail to get back to the other side and go, okay, don't go in the wind shadow of a ship. Don't go into the wind shadow of the ship, even when they're parked. Anyway, those were things that just sort of caught my attention the last couple of days. Well, that's a fun story.

Kirk: But what sparked me in that comment was E. Coli grows in the saltwater brine.

Trevor: They apparently have closed several public beaches around Metro Vancouver due to E. Coli.

Kirk: However, we need to get a story about cannabis as a disinfectant. There was a story, ironically, out of Florida about three years ago, I got pitched a story of a fellow that was doing his graduate studies on using cannabis as disinfectant, he never got back to me. However, the segue to Tarik Sparks from Florida, he did get back to me.  Thank you. I met Tarek on LinkedIn and over a period of a couple of weeks we chatted and got back and forth and we set up an interview and I chatted with him. As you said off air here a couple minutes ago, it's a very casual conversation. Once again, Trevor, I seem to find myself in these conversations with people that should be done face-to-face over a coffee or beer or a spliff. Casual and the conversation seems to go everywhere and so yeah it was just a conversation.

Trevor: Oh yeah, and he's a very pleasant gentleman and you can feel the excitement and the passion he has for his craft, which is honestly what we're always looking for in a conversation like this. And we'll talk more on the way back out, but what I want people to listen for is Um. He has chef training, you know, at, I even looked this up and it is Johnson Wales University. And if I've got this right, that's in Providence, which that kind of sounds right since he said he was, has lived in the Boston ish area. And then. So his official real, you think of the Bear television show, honest to goodness, chef training eventually got into using that. Basically to make cannabis taste good. So that listen, listen for his journey on that.

Kirk: Yeah, yeah, I met him on LinkedIn. He is a cannabis educator, culinary, culinary storyteller, the founder of Hidden Creations, which he has a web page for. He's a food photographer. He helps brands text and teaches and reaches. He has a book, Infusion Hour. He got free downloads. I went to his web page. He pretty transparent in his story. And yeah, let's get into a story we can come out and talk about what we learned from him unless you got anything else up front to say or...

Trevor: No, no, no. We'll save the rest for afterwards. Listen to Tarik, he's a good conversation.

Tarik Sparks: My name is Tarik Sparks. I am a photographer, chef and cannabis educator and it really began with me when I went to Johnson Wales University and I never knew I was going to be a chef. I kind of went there on a whim there and that opened up a lot of new opportunities to allow me to travel and live outside the country a little bit. Um and travel outside the country and just meet a lot of different people. Um my dive into the cannabis industry happened when I went to Alaska. Um I went to work in Alaska for about three months and I met people from Amsterdam, from Jamaica, from the Netherlands, from Portland, from Oregon. We were just all there working for you know, just a seasonal work. And I was just occasionally smoking. Well, you know, I wasn't doing it too often. I met some chefs there who were trying to explain to me that cooking with cannabis can be a lot more than just brownies and baking. And they took me out to, one night we all went out to the woods and did like a campfire. We grabbed some steaks from the kitchen and they were cooking like with all the herbs and everything and then they like infused this butter with all of the elements. They really knew what they were doing. And they were like, this is a cooking with cannabis. And I took that and I came back to Miami, finished up my college degree. And then I tried learning, I tried doing cooking with Cannabis, couldn't really get it for a little while. Then I met my wife, we went to, we were working at a restaurant called Zuma. At that time, I wasn't working in the kitchen anymore, I moved to the front of the house. And she was, Smoking all the time. I wasn't, but I had this idea and we started just putting recipes together from the kitchens and what I knew about infusion and just working in the kitchen. When I was at school, the biggest thing I wanted to do was be a saucier. So I loved. Um, infusing in general, which is herbs and how to make a sauce and how to make ketchup and a barbecue sauce. And, uh, there's like the, um, it's called the flavor Bible, which has like all these different like sauces in it and, um. You know, it just. I realize that cooking with cannabis is no different than any other herb, it might take a little different method to get the benefits of it, but if you wanted to make it infused olive oil without cannabis, it's the exact same process, same thing with rosemary oil, and then when you're making sauces it's all about, you get all your ingredients and you put it in a pot, add some liquid and you wait, add fat and then you wait. It's the same thing. And as I kept doing it and making all these recipes, just realized that people, it's not that they don't know if they can cook with cannabis. It's just most people don't think of it as like that as a herb. You know, sometimes people treat it as, you know, their go-to for the 420 holiday or 710 holiday or just here and there. But I just realized throughout meeting a lot of people that... You know, you can't smoke forever. There's situations where you just, you know, you can work in corporate. You know it was kind of like the joke I used to tell because I did it for a little while. And like, you have to find out how to just heal, you know throughout the day and also trying to be in this stressful environment.

Kirk: So are you a Red Seal chef?

Tarik Sparks: I got my degree at Johnson and Wales University. Graduated four year service management, all that.

Kirk: And, and so you went up to Alaska to work as a chef?

Tarik Sparks: I did.

Kirk: Okay. But you got your training as a Chef in Florida?

Tarik Sparks: Correct.

Kirk: Alright, and then you went up north, you know, up to the northern hemisphere kind of thing and learned to apply your craft and obviously came back the sunshine in Florida and you're working in a restaurant now and you discovered cannabis as a business, I guess, eh? So it's as much a business as it is a passion for you, cannabis? What's your relationship with cannabis?

Tarik Sparks: My relationship is I can't stop enjoying how intricate the plant is as just a herb as a chef because I didn't I've always kind of thought about this like I never had like any like illnesses where I need to like get into cannabis for me was just like oh like I can cook with this and this is really cool.

Kirk: See and that's cool for me. That's cool for me because that's what I like to get is where is the passion of the person and you you see the plant as most of our guests is that My God what a complicated plant what the things you can do with it yeah you can smoke it but you can ingest it but how can you ingest better. So what do you offer people then from Miami and here we are in Canada what can our listeners do when they get to your web page what can they What can they find from your web page?

Tarik Sparks: Yeah. So the first thing I offer is a free guide. It's basically a small section from the book that I feel when people are ready to no longer smoke or at least are interested in how to even get started. That's the free guide there. It has a couple of free recipes on there as well, but it's mostly showing how to break down the butt, essentially, because it's the first step is understanding that Yes, when you go online and you look at people making edibles, you'll see people doing like seven grams or like 14 grams. But the reality is, and I don't know how it is in Canada, but down here in some, I've seen in other states too, but if you buy a pack of 100 milligrams gummies, they're usually 10 milligrams each, and 100 milligrams, people don't really understand what that is. But if I told you to buy 10% THC, you would never buy it. And it's like, it's the same, you know, like one gram could equal a hundred milligrams. So it's just getting people to understand that and understand that you don't really need a lot, especially now where cannabis is going up to like 26%. 30%, you know, like one gram could meet a lot of people.

Kirk: And it's by weight too, isn't it? It's by wait. When they measure THC in a plant, it's the weight of the THC. So when they say it's 26% THC, that's the wait of THC in that gram bud.

Tarik Sparks: Right, and then the moisture content loses when you have to decarb it, so it's kind of just teaching people the the step. Do you want to do it in the butter? Do you wanna do in the oil? Okay, cool. Let me show you how to get the math of this and then let me show you where you can put this in some like easy recipes.

Kirk: So give us a recipe. How would you decarb cannabis? Let's say I've got a quarter ounce of pot that I want to put into a cake. Would that be too much?

Tarik Sparks: That would be alot. Yeah, I mean, when you think about it, like if you buy anything, it doesn't really matter. This is a study with 25%, that number isn't the total THC for all of the bud. It's for one gram. So you have to find out what the total thc is for all it. So if you do, I'm getting a little handy and complicated here. So if you do 25% and then you buy, you know, an eighth, 3.5 grams, that total... Yeah, that total is 875 milligrams for 3.5 grams. So you're like, all right, well, usually when I eat an edible, if I eat one gummy and I only eat 10 milligrams, maybe I don't need the whole 3.50. And I think once people understand you can... And I think this is where the pharmaceutical, there's people up there that probably smoke weed and they're like, look, people understand this. They're not going to buy as much as we think we need to make so then people can buy it and then the whole industry will change. People just grow it at home. So that's basically what you can get when you start off on my website. And then if people want to go a little bit further, on my YouTube, I haven't started this because I've been wanting to build up a... A library of telling people introducing the concept that you can just cook with cannabis before I just start cooking with cannabis because once I start cooking I go into more like chef mode and it's kind of sometimes a little bit harder to do them at the same time so but then you can start coming to my YouTube and then I do teach I was doing it once a week. I think I'm probably gonna do it like twice a month because I have a two year old now. So it's been learning the new schedule has been new. But we do teach like basic infusions and people can come on and ask questions because it is cooking. Not everyone was capable of going to culinary school to understand how fast you should cook something, what it should taste like and so forth. So it is a shepherd approach. You can do that in a group setting or we can do it with a one-on-one.

Kirk: All right, let's walk through what I vaguely understand. What I have done in the past is I grow my own, and I usually get an ounce of cannabis, about 30 grams of cannabis at my homegrown, and I put it into a pound of butter, right? So now, there are different ways of doing this. I've tried both. I have decarbed the Flower in my oven at about 250, and then I take that decarb and I've put it in to the butter. And then I sit the butter into a hot water bath overnight and then i filter it. I've done that. I've also just taken the raw flower and put it directly into the butter without roasting it first and I find I get more of the terpenes and more of the flavonoids from the flower that way. Does that work with your plan? How do you I recommend people do it.

Tarik Sparks: Well, it just depends what you want. So if you don't decarb it, you get more of the THC-A, which is more of non-psychoactive properties of the plant. Will you get some psychoactive properties? Yeah, but if you're not decarbing it, you're saying like, I just want the health benefits of this plant. Just like if you, any other plant, you know, if you actually cook it or activate it, or you know if you. Just stick with that, then you won't get it. Now, some portion of it since you're still cooking it inside of the butter will slowly start to decarb inside of it and because I'm assuming you keep the you can't keep the top one up to you depending on how fast you're doing it but if you keep the top on you you have like a low rolling bubble then the terpenes will stay inside of there and then the benefits of that you'll feel a lot more. Now, if you decarb it, you won't get as much terpenes, but you will get the psychoactive portion of it. And usually that's what people are looking for when they want like the high of it, and you can do it overnight. The longer you do it, of course, the better and then the more reduces, it's better in in terms of, if you think about making... This is culinary, but if you like think about making like caramel, you know, like the longer you cook the sugar, the different colors of the caramel that you'll get same thing with cooking the flower. If you do it in two hours, will it still be psychoactive? Yeah. If you'd do it for longer periods of time at a slower, that's why some people do it with the, um, uh like at the slow cooker um I have a gas stove now and I have a daughter so like I can't leave things off for extended periods of time versus when I did it before um so the slow cooker can work and you can control the water you know as long as it doesn't evaporate out you could be fine yeah um you can also even if you did that well

Kirk: Well, I guess what I neglected to tell you is I use a mason canning jar, a little half pint jar, and I put the flower, I grind my Flower, put it in there, I put that in the oven so that everything stays in there and I turn it and turn it. Then I take that jar, I take the butter in the jar, then I put it into a boiling water or just hot water. But the reason why I do that is... It can't like I have friends that just put it directly into the butter and but the butter doesn't get hot enough, right? Because if you get butter up to 200 degrees, it's going to boil and separate right and you get

Tarik Sparks: If you do it in the double boiler, same concept, you just make sure the water level is higher than the butter.

Kirk: But is the water going to get hot enough to decarb the butter and the flower?

Tarik Sparks: The decarbing process will still have to be on the...

Kirk: So you have to do it in the oven.

Tarik Sparks: You still have to do it in the oven. Or you get a machine, but usually most people do it in the open. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can do it in a mason jar. You can, I mean the, when decarbing, you're just really trying to make sure that no direct heat is on it, but it's long enough and slow enough where it can start to toast it, you know? And you can, you could smell it. And what I like to do, especially when doing things like sauces, I will usually tell people just to make a brown butter. That way, your butter can stay intact, kind of similar to what you're doing. But you brown the butter a little bit, or you decarb the flower, you put the flower inside of the pan. And let's say we're gonna do, the first sauce we made was a brown butter Alfredo sauce, so we just kept all this together. So after we decarbed our butter in the oven, we just put butter and we grounded up our butter inside of a pan, and then we cooked that together. And now, since the flowers are decarbed, now it's just infusing the butter. And then that butter is going to cook and then brown a little bit. It's gonna be toasty, nutty. Now you have like a more flavorful butter. And then you kind of just build on top of that. You got your cream, salt, pepper, your seasonings, your herbs, cook that down, reduce and blend it. Now everything is completely combined. You don't have to worry about anything breaking up and the whole thing is infused. Um, you could do that with any sauce, um, if you're going to just, you know, make everything together. Now, if we're just making a butter, like you said, inside the Mason jar, once it's done, you can, you don't have to remove anything inside the mason jar. You can, once it's cool, you probably just either pour it out, have your portion or just put it in fridge.

Kirk: Yeah, usually what I do is I put it through a cheesecloth, and then I've got this green butter that sits in the fridge. And I tend to just make cookies. I like my ginger snaps. But what I want to talk to you about now, I guess, is let's go a little deeper. What other oils do you use now that we've decarbed it? And like you said, if you want to decarb it to get the cannabinoids acid forms out, you want it put it in an environment where it reaches, what, 200 degrees? What would you recommend?

Tarik Sparks: The lowest your oven can do it. I mean, most ovens, my gas oven only goes to like 240, I think most oven's around there. You wanna do it for as low and as, you know, a minimum two hours, as low as your oven could do it, sometimes people recommend keeping the oven open now that I have a daughter. I'm like, that's up to you. You know, before, yeah.

Kirk: Children change everything, man. Children change... Yeah.

Tarik Sparks: Yeah, so...

Kirk: So you've got your de-carved flower. You also talked about the acid form as well, so you must cook with the raw flower as well.

Tarik Sparks: I don't have access to raw flower. We're in a legal state or in a medical state, so I always just end up getting either shake or just the flower itself. Even now, I even switched over to doing things like distillate or RSO, but when I was doing it with the flower, it was just mostly the flower from a dispenser.

Kirk: Okay, so let's talk about your business. It's a medical state. We've interviewed several people from Florida lately. It seems to be a state that I find a lot of cannabis people, but you're in a medicinal state. It's not recreational. So how do you have a business in a medical state as a cannabis chef?

Tarik Sparks: Well, I'm not selling any weed. I'm OK. I'm selling a book. You know, I was one on one conversations. The interesting thing about Florida is that, you know, someone wants to throw a private event. So I want to throw private event, you know, so so.

Kirk: So can you have, can you then arrive as a caterer and produce cannabis infused foods at a private event?

Tarik Sparks: yup.

Kirk: Is that a, I can edit this if you want me to, but is this a gray area or is this fully, people just don't care?

Tarik Sparks: I just don't think people care. I mean, and I've had, you know, like, you don't know, but you know I've to deal with this quite a bit because it took me a long time to be like, yo, like I'm a little afraid to talk about this openly, but then like it's kind of getting ridiculous when you start going to like these events. And it's like, these people are just selling weed, not like medical state, medical dispensary. People selling weed. It's four o'clock in the afternoon. You got armed security outside. Okay, well looks like we're good. I mean, this area is called a windward where you can quite literally just walk down the street and smoke, and it's been like that for years. So am I going that length? No, do I see it happen all the time? Yeah, so I mean I just had to change the fact of how I become vocal about what I do. But my viewpoint of it is I'm not trying to sell you weed, I'm trying to show you how to do it differently. So at some point in your life when you wanna cook with this, I can show you how to take your favorite recipe that maybe you're. Grandmother gave you or some traditional whatever, it doesn't need to be that deep. I mean, like whatever it is, like how you can make this into an experience too.

Kirk: Give me some recipes. How do you use it? Do you always use butter? What other oils could you use?

Tarik Sparks: Yeah. So let's start with the first one that I've learned before we even go to the butter. So the first thing that we learned was something called Green Dragon, which seems like it was around forever. So the fastest way to make to make a it's called a tincture but like an infusion is what is going to be with alcohol. Yeah it's everything alcohol. It is a little dangerous not gonna lie because it's your cooked alcohol on the stove. So you're cooking out the alcohol so you're not actually ingesting a lot of the alcohol. You're cooking it up but it is the fastest. You would decarb your flower in the oven like you would normally do and then same thing with how you do it basically a double boiler, you would put in one ounce of your Everclear into your double boiler and then you will put your flower in there and then cook it up to 170 degrees and then it's done. That's it. It takes 15 minutes. Once it gets to 170 degree, cut it off because it's reducing which does make it concentrated and that version of that turns into something called an RSO. But you're not trying to do that. You're just trying to get all the cannabinoids and the THC into the Everclear. The cool thing about that is once you're done with that Everclear and what we started doing is we put the cannabis inside of tea bags because it makes it a lot easier for us to discard it or keep it. If we dry that out, you can actually take that bag and put it into anything and infuse it because no matter what happens you can't squeeze out all the butter that is absorbed in the plant and all the cannabinoid that's also absorbed in a plant and alcohol. So. If you were going, we took that and we made it into a seasoning. So say like your favorite seasoning is. Mrs. Dash complete seasoning. I don't know right if you actually take that Cannabis tea bag and put that inside of there The THC will actually be absorbed with the rest of the seasoning and now that seasoning can be used for your food So now you have infused seasoning so you can make a tincture and then you can have a few seasoning is one Where you can do it When you're done with the butter same thing you can actually take after you made you said you have like 30 grams So after you squeeze all the buzz that you possibly could I would tell you to don't even throw that away get some more butter just put the other thing back like just take that put it back on there with some butter and let it reduce again and It might not be as strong, but you'll definitely have way more than if you didn't, because you just can't squeeze it out. It's so helpful, because I was throwing all this stuff away and I was like, wait a minute, can I still use this? And I was, like, oh wow, this is great. So then we turned it into seasonings, salts, it's been really helpful.

Kirk: Can I go back to the Green Dragon? If you decarb your cannabis and just let it sit in a small bottle of Everclear at 90%, won't the alcohol leach out the cannabinoids?

Tarik Sparks: Um, yeah, I think so. I've heard this before, but I don't let it sit, you know, um, you know, you're, you, you you're cooking it now. I know in the past, I have read that in the older way of making a tincture was just to let it set for a long periods of time inside of it. So I have to imagine over time that alcohol just evaporates. Yeah, I don't think the THC itself is going to

Kirk: it won't evaporate. I guess I'm asking you as a cook, as a chef, because I've done this and I've made Green Dragon and I don't think it's any secret out here in the prairies most guys, most farms have their own stills. So access access to prairie sunshine or what you'd call moonshine is very easy out here. So Green Dragon is something that I've seen, but I haven't I'm trying to figure out what's the advantage of heating the alcohol with the tincture. Does the alcohol then help in the process of taking the cannabinoids off the green stuff, off the plant? Like, why you, why, is that what happens, the heat and the alcohol?

Tarik Sparks: It's like an absorption. I haven't made it in a while, to be honest with you, but it just, there's no fat in the alcohol. So by cooking it, I think it just strips it away. And they just hold on to it. And because you're cooking it to the point of boiling, the highest portion of the alcohol starts to strip away. Now, is it going to be as easy to take versus an oil? No, but if you needed something quick. And will it work? Yes, or what you can do is, again, if you're in a pinch, you can just take that tincture, you could melt down just regular butter, and let's say you had ice cubes, you just pour the butter inside the ice cubes and the tinctures and then just squirt it in, or just put in one milliliter, and then you could kind of do the math on what that would be, but then you'll have it already portioned out. Where as if you do it with the butter, you kind of have to do it the opposite way. You have to make the butter. Portion it out and then weigh it to kind of see what the weight is to equal what the THC would be.

Kirk: What other oils do you use in your cooking?

Tarik Sparks: In the past we were using grape seed oil and now I'm realizing that I can use different oils but for the longest time we used grape seed oils because when I was in the kitchen we always use grape seed because of the high proof, the smoke point. I mean, most people are not going to cook up to the level of burning grapeseed oil. So since I was like, well, people are probably going to be new to cooking this. I want to make sure that they won't burn off any of the cannabinoids. So let me give them something that has a high proof smoke point. So we did grapseed oil with that. We made dressings. We've made bread. My wife is a pastry chef from Johnson and West too, we're done. We're done quite a few parties up to like 20 people. So those are fun.

Kirk: Tell me, give me a story. Give me a a story about being a cook.

Tarik Sparks: Yeah, yeah. So a friend contacted us. He said that we wanted to do, oh wait, specifically, I had a friend that was turning 25 years old and he was like, I want 25 different sauces for my birthday. I was like what? He goes, yeah, I want 25 different sauces. It was a ridiculous ask, but he gave me enough time and I did not use it properly but we made all these sauces probably like 48 hours before it was not the best but we did it and um what he what he wanted was he was going to order like pizza and wings and then have people put the different sauces on it and they were all infused so there were only a few like 15 milligrams for the whole thing but there was a lot of different combinations you can do so then it was teriyaki sauce and I don't know just a lot different sauce so there's that example. Another example is we In the past, we've done the five course dinners. So we'll do a salad course, a bread course, and then two appetizer main and then a dessert. Usually my wife will make the dessert. Anne should make the bread from scratch. I make all the sauces from scratch when we have the time. I went up to New York before for my sister's birthday. Did some dinners up there, two dinners, so yeah. I mean, we've. It just depends what people want, you know, I don't want to, you know, food is interesting, but Miami is kind of weird when it comes to food. It just seems like everyone's doing the same thing because it's still working. And it's, to me, it's starting to get a little boring, because it was a new restaurant. And then like it's like, okay, cool, sashimi. Yeah, how you know big ice platter. So it's just trying to find ways that I enjoy eating whatever I enjoy eating at the time and having people see that. And then I allow people to see it through like, oh, like this food tastes good. It doesn't taste like weed. And I'm gonna get the benefit of it, it's great. So usually when it comes to dinners, also we find out if people have any allergies. I can always change the menu depending on that. And the dosing, you know, usually. When we do the five courses and get people 50 milligrams, if they don't want the 50 milligrams we can either do like half of it or just do, excuse me, half of the TKT, the FCBD. And we usually always have a CBD drink there just in case someone just wants to feel better and not trying to get stoned or just really high.

Kirk: But can you do a fried chicken with with with cannabis sprinkled on is one of the seven herbs and spices and like.

Tarik Sparks: Yeah, if you do the Green Dragon tincture, then you have the tea bag left over, you could make an herb and spice. You could make herb and spices, put the bag inside it, and then let the herbs absorb the THC and then use that to sprinkle on. I just like sauces because they're easier to do and everyone, for the most part, has a sauce for something. You know, so if you're You know, we did, let's see, we do like a cauliflower dish before, you know, we did like a sweet pea sauce at the bottom of it. We do like the herb butter on top of it, so it just depends on what the dish is. I'm trying to think of the last dinner we did. The last thing we did we did focaccia bread and the oil was on the bread and we did balsamic and micro greens on top and then we did chicken skewers. Our chicken pesto skewers, the THC was in the pesto. Then we did a waffle to go with that. And I think the THC was a tincture.

Kirk: So let me again walk through a scenario. So I want to hire you and I want a seven course meal. So you might start with a salad with dressing that has cannabis in it. So at the end of the day, you've got to really know your dosing, I guess. Right. So you must buy medicinal flower then you must, and so therefore it's weighed out for you. And you know you're making 15 courses, so you must be able to say to people, if you use a tablespoon of this salad dressing, you're getting five milligrams. If you use a tablespoon of that sauce for your cauliflower, you're gettin' another five. Is that sort of how you dose?

Tarik Sparks: Yeah, most of the time I usually do tincture. So when we've done the dinners in the past, what we started doing is the food. We might focus on one or two flowers, because again, you don't really need that much. So it's just trying to educate people so they can understand what they're going to get and then allowing people if they want to go further, it's available for them on the table. So like each dish might only have five milligrams of. You know, throughout everything. And then on the table, there might be a tincture or a sauce to go with that if they want to add more or a seasoning if they wanna add more. When we did a, gosh, when we did, what's it called? A Caesar dressing, I infused breadcrumbs so that people wanted to add breadcrumbs onto it that was infused and I was like, okay, cool, a spoonful, this is about five, 10 milligrams, completely up to you. So that way people don't have to go overboard. I control five milligrams with the tincture in the background and then just allow people to do that. If my wife is going to make a bread, we might put an herb butter on the table so then people, if they want a five milligram butter, they can just grab that and put on them myself as well. Um, but usually when we're focusing on the, uh, when we have a dinner, we'll start off what I call a victory joint, you know, everyone gets a joint because I've realized that no matter how much THC is in a dinner smokers are going to smoke because we want to smoke, you know? Like, yeah, I want to, I'm going to get high, but that's going to take an hour. So I'm gonna go smoke so I can enjoy this. So, um, we walk people through the herb that we're going to be in, that's gonna be in the food, but let people know the terpenes that are going be inside of it because most people have never had like a tasting. I'm a really firm believer that cannabis will turn into wine. I believe that once cannabis is able to grow in the same regions that the soil that grapes are grown in, that we're going to have some really beautiful stuff in the future. Blue Dream grown in Champaign is definitely going to be different than Blue Dream growing in California or Canada. So, um, you know, we, we do like a, a dry pull that people know what we can taste, uh, the flavor profile of that. Where we're going to you know where it's going to be in the dish and let people understand that and then we go out to the back um smoke kind of allow people to feel a little more comfortable because not everyone always knows each other sometimes they do sometimes they don't um and i'm not trying to get people to smoke the whole joint it's just more like a tasting we can come back to the table um and then, we start them off on either the salad or bread course we can kind of just go from there

Kirk: And do you have alcohol served at the same time or is it strictly a cannabis experience?

Tarik Sparks: Mostly cannabis. I don't really I mean if they asked for it, which usually they don't but like if they want to bring alcohol that's on them. Most times when I've done it at my friend's restaurant. She has a coffee area. So she make coffees or we do mocktails. Usually the mocktails if they wanted can have CBD in it, but they're not there's no alcohol. That's

Kirk: it's it's fascinating what you're telling me here because i'm trying to get my head around the fact that um here here you are you have a cannabis business. There's cannabis everywhere uh you're having you're doing parties with cannabis but it's an illegal state i find that fascinating

Tarik Sparks: I find it fascinating too, again, when you're like trying so hard to make sure you're not seeing it and then you start seeing people come in and doing all this stuff. It's kind of like, okay, well, let me just stay in this kind of gray area. I mean, I see all this all the time. People's businesses are,  especially like the social media, getting taken down and I've been fortunate enough because I'm strictly staying in just the education Portion of things, you know people want to talk about what else they could do We can jump on a phone call, you can get on an email. Of course, all those things are there, but I'm not trying to sell you weed. You know what I mean? And I think because of that and I don't know why dispensaries are getting shut down but like just like how I'm doing here. This is what I do. This is how you can educate it. This is you can transform it. This is like, dip, dip. My YouTube has not been shutting down. My Instagram has not been taken down.

Kirk: Fantastic. I won't keep it much longer. Is there any question I didn't ask you? Is there anything you would like our audience to know?

Tarik Sparks: Um, no, I mean, I didn't, well, I did not start off knowing how to cook. I think that's kind of important to know because for me, it's always funny that I'm now trying to teach you how to Cook and I've learned that everyone to some I feel like honestly everyone knows how to cook. I feel people don't know when to take things off the oven, off the stove top so it doesn't burn. I feel if I can showcase those areas so that you can have a better dish or you can have a more enjoyable experience with the plant that you love. If you're watching this and you love the plant, hands down. And then lastly, once again, my name is Tarik Sparks, you can find me on my website, It's called The Hidden Creation We thought it was funny to do like a THC little blurb there too, so, but as I've been doing it more, I've realized that the hidden creation is kind of almost like a philosophy, you know, and things are hidden until you realize what they can be.

Trevor: So some of the things that got me all excited was chicken pesto skewers where the cannabis was in the pesto. That sounds really good. I could eat that.

Kirk: It seems to me, I don't have the cookbook. I did download his free service about how to decarb cannabis. I downloaded that. It was a little, took a... It took a lot of clicks but I downloaded it. It's interesting but from the conversation I got the impression that he likes to make his sauces and that's where I got the impression is a lot his creations of sauces to pour and I think that sort of works with my understanding of the number of times we've cooked with cannabis is it's so much easier to make the cannabis infusion in a sauce.

Trevor: That's what he said. He's done other things, but one of the things that he loved in his training was being a saucier. Honestly, I had to look that up too after he mentioned it, but basically a sauce specialist, so that makes sense. I was talking at the beginning and I just want to hit on more now about the whole difference between cooking with cannabis and making things taste good. A guy, another podcaster, Dr. Michael Greger, you pointed me at Nutrition Facts podcast and I eventually bought his cookbook, basically his whole premise is more plant-based stuff and you'll be healthier, which is true. So I bought and used his cook book, How Not To Die, great name, and the recipes are fine but then if I get Jamie Oliver's cookbook, you know, an actual chef who's worked in kitchens, yada yada, and look at his sort of his vegetarian section, they taste better because, you know, they were developed by a chef and then sort of a plug for a Canadian group, this is a few years ago, we had Richard Béliveau PhD, and  Denis Gingras PhD, they had a book called Cooking with Foods that Fight Cancer. Honestly, not quite as catchy as How Not to Die, but, you Now, as you had two PhDs, you might think the recipes were, eh, you know, they just want to throw a bunch of stuff in there, but no, they made the ingredient list and then handed it off to chefs all over Quebec, and the stuff in their, again, tastes really good. So there's a difference between cooking with cannabis and having someone with training taking the ingredients and making them taste good. So I think it is really good that we have a Tariq. And his wife Anne-Marie out there making cannabis stuff taste good.

Kirk: You know, your story is going to take me into another rabbit hole here about nutrition and again, trying to make this clinical, right, as a nurse. When I first started nursing, I went to a very small town, Lac La Biche, small town Alberta, we've done stories from there, worked in a very little hospital, lived in a nursing Residents and I think it was Mrs. Karpets. Because, you know, in those days everyone was Mrs. She would have been probably my age now then. She was the cook. And in those day, you know, her husband would bag a mooze and she would bring moose in and we would feed people in the hospital moose meat, right? And her foods, I mean, when I lived in nursing residence, I pretty much ate at the cafeteria at the hospital because Mrs. Karpets foods were home cooked foods. We built a brand new hospital in the small town and they brought in a dietician and people with education and how to cook and food. And I got to tell you, the quality of the taste and the flavor of the food wasn't there, you know? No, I don't want to be smirked dieticians. I just don't wanna do that. But how many times I've talked to people who've got dietitians involved and the food that is recommended isn't necessarily tasty. It may, you know, it may have a lot of fish oil in it. It might, it might make you better. It might, you, know, prevent you from dying young. But it just didn't taste good. So I agree. I agree with you here. You know, Hidden Creations is going to make cannabis taste good. And when we did our cooking show back, you know, very early in this podcast, one of the first things

Trevor: October 2018, because I looked it up since you mentioned it.

Kirk: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we were talking to the cooks there and they were talking about the same thing, how cannabis always tastes green. When I make my famous ginger snap cannabis cookies, there is a little bit of greenness to the cookie, however, the ginger brings out the ginger snap and it's a nice cookie to eat. And I keep it deep in my freezer and I keep it away from the grandchildren obviously but But yeah, this intrigued me about him making food to cook. When we look at Hidden Creations, he's creating a movement, right? If you go deep into his webpage, he talks about his YouTube channel. I've gone on his YouTube Channel. He has a blog. The blog seems to be more personal than Cannabis Base, the reels that I watched, but he has his whole mission. I mean, the man has a mission and he has a business plan that goes up to 10 years and it's all on that there internets. And he really wants to create partnerships in cannabis and help other people understand cannabis and make cannabis taste good. So I kind of like that. That's a good reason to have a story and have them in our library.

Trevor: Absolutely and because you were fascinated and frankly we're both fascinated because it's come on and off uh what do you think about and we're not we're not trying to get Tarik in trouble or anyone in trouble but just the semi-legal private parties with cannabis because you know we've talked about that if we were to do such an event in Manitoba legally we couldn't rent a hall and have or rent a restaurant or it would have to be in someone's house because you legally can't consume cannabis outside of basically a private residence here. What do you think about sort of the party scene in Miami that you know, if it's... We're not sure if it's okay or just not enforced if you have a cannabis party at a private event.

Kirk: Yeah, well, in the interview, I talked to him about that, you know, I seem to be getting a lot of American stories right now. And it's fascinating the difference between American Canada because we are federally legal, they are not federally illegal, and we've talked about that many, many issues. And the state of Florida is a medicinal state only, so it's not recreational or or, well, they don't even, like, they... Yes, that confused me because, I mean, here's a guy starting a business and it's illegal. So is it sort of circa Canada before legalization where there is all these British Columbia businesses out there? Eh, it's not...

Trevor: No, well, neither of us are lawyers and neither of us live in Florida, but my two cents was, you know, since Tarik is basically just teaching people how to use cannabis, he's not selling them any cannabis, you, know, there's no, there, he is not doing anything illegal that what? If the catered event, honestly, I think we're going more into a gray zone. So, you know, even if he, you know, he's got legal cannabis there, you know because he's got a medicinal card and maybe he's gifting it, gifting it to the crowd and, you know, they're just paying for the food. I don't know. You know, that's, that the whole gray zone that again, we're not trying to get anybody into trouble, but. I'm going to assume it's all above board or at the worst, it's sort of in a gray zone. But it is interesting in the games you have to play.

Kirk: Yeah yeah well I mean in Canada I mean we have desperate, we have tried to hold cannabis events and it's difficult I mean, we tried to, hold a barbecue and we got one ticket sold but then we tried, to hold that barbecue in Dauphin where we have, you know very few people that are probably interested in it. Well, I guess I'm going to put a plug out there and a cry out there. If anybody in our listeners sphere is holding a cannabis infused party, call us and we'll do a live feed. Let's talk about it. I'm very curious with this because in Florida, cannabis is illegal even in your dwelling. So if you're having a cannabis-infused party, that's... That's illegal. In Canada, we can hold cannabis-infused parties in a domicile in your dwelling. We can't seem to find anybody doing it. It's so flipped. Again, it goes back to that whole thing about what we're trying to do with this podcast is look at cannabis critically and how society is changing. We got a society in Florida that seems to be booming in cannabis. We've got a society in Canada where cannabis is open and legal and the industry has a big thumb on its and so many regulations that can't do what it wants to do it's it's fascinating it's absolutely fascinating and that's why I like this podcast so much

Trevor: Yeah, no. But yeah, so back to Tarik. I really enjoyed it. Really enjoyed the conversation, really enjoyed the whole make cannabis taste good. Yeah, and anything else you you have from Tariik or around the topic of cooking and cannabis and Florida?

Kirk: No, but again with looking at the gentleman's business plan and his want to connect with people, I hope that we stay connected with him. Like many of our guests, I hope to bump into him again in five years, figure out how his business is doing and keep track of him because he's another interesting person in the cannabis industry. And yeah, so yeah, Florida man, another Florida man. Story, so I hope people like it.

Trevor: Absolutely. Go ahead. So I'm Trevor Shewfelt. I'm the pharmacist.

Kirk: Still?

Trevor: Still the pharmacists. This has been ReeferMed, the podcast. Find us at reefermed.ca and at Reefer Medness at most of them their social medias. And you are?

Kirk: I am Kirk Nyquist, I'm the registered nurse and I've been working on our webpage and working on our SEOs like other past guests we've had. I encourage people to go to our webpage. You can find all our stories there. You can link to our YouTube channel. We have a YouTube channel, we're getting some hits there and you can also hit our audio podcast there which goes to Blubrry. And again you can find us on social medias, you can find us in Spotify, and you can find us an iTunes. You can find us everywhere. But what's most important, if you like us, tell other people because I keep harping on this. So again those people that listen to us. My point is Meta doesn't like us. We can't get social media to push us unless you do it. So if you're listening to us and you like us, push us in social media. Tell your friends that there's this podcast up here in the center of Canada doing good things. And yeah, Reefer Medness, the podcast here we are.

Trevor: Been another good one, we'll talk to everyone later.