4/20 refreshments, strips and cheese, Ancient Drinks, and more
Baking while baked, a trip to Stella in West Hollywood, and my favorite digestive cocktail...
This year, 4/20 fell on a Saturday; I would have gotten high anyway. It’s more fun when holidays fall on the worst day of the week—it forces you to stop what you’re doing and savor the moment. A Tuesday Christmas? That’s amore. I never knew what to do on April 20, the national day of smoking pot. Get high and do something trippy? Sneak in a round of disc golf after a Dune 2 matinee? People used to simultaneously press play on The Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon and freak out about how they matched up occasionally. Are there any modern-day versions of this? What would happen if I pressed play on Eyes Wide Shut and Kacey Musgraves’s Golden Hour, recorded when she was wake-and-baking gravity bong hits? Eventually, one thing would happen.
I received a complimentary munchies box in the mail on 4/20 eve, thanks to Gossamer and Nuts.com. Unfortunately, the box was damaged in transit, and my chocolate-covered pretzels and cashews were rolling around like puzzle pieces in their cardboard box. Don’t ask about the prerolls; they had been swiped days prior, maybe somewhere in New Mexico. (Update: Pure Beauty sent a tiny box of tiny joints.) This made me wonder, what are the best stoner munchies? What is the ultimate dank food to enjoy on 4/20? My relationship with marijuana is responsible—I don’t do much—but I do it regularly. On pot, the voice inside my head reminds me to brush my teeth before bed and make sure I have enough night water. So when I’m munching while on drugs, I want the food to be a bit responsible, too. There has to be a natural element; it can't be too rich or indulgent, and you have to be able to consume a good amount of it before stopping. Simple popcorn is fine, but it’s too one-dimensional. Too many dimensions and our baked brains get overwhelmed. I think three unusual dimensions of texture are ideal for enjoyment, like soggy chips, crunchy cheese, and user-friendly sauce.
I used to order these “strips and cheese” growing up in Huntington Beach, California. They’re a common snack-shack treat for people with untried palates. Deceptively simple: just tortilla chips, grated cheddar cheese (unmelted), and a taco sauce, whatever that means. The chips become a bit soggy from the sweet sauce that plays well against a sharp, nearing crystalline cheddar, barely able to shred against the weight of its own density. To meet their margins, my sandy snack shacks used canned taco sauce, the type that LeBron might use on a Tuesday; pre-shredded cheese, sawdust and all; and the five-pound Costco bag of tortilla strips. So, like many other foods in my life, I wanted to capture some nostalgic comfort—but with higher-quality ingredients and excessively time-consuming practices.
I like nachos a lot. On a good day, they could be considered my favorite food of all time. I used to get them from the Green Burrito as a kid—before the Carl’s Jr. acquisition of ’02, of course. Making them at home kind of sucks, though. They get cold and dry quickly, and the unfortunate truth is that nachos play better in the microwave than in the oven, but y’all aren’t ready for that conversation yet. These strips and cheese, in so many ways, are like a “raw” nacho. Not “raw” in the Erewhon sense of the word but simply in that they are served at room temperature, with no heat manipulation. These nachos can never come back down from the ride because they never left the ground. This means strips and cheese can be mobile, so they should be eaten outside. They need sunlight, they need salty air, and they give you something to look forward to when you finally get to the place you’re going. Because you’re never melting the cheese, you can grate ripe cheddar, so I use Sweet Red Grass-Fed Cheddar from Whole Foods. And get a thicker, more resilient tortilla chip to stand up to the saucing—unless you’re a full-mush pervert, then you people can do what you want. And when I say user-friendly, I mean a sauce with a kick that isn’t spicy. It’s familiar, tomatoey, not sickly like a bowl of ketchup but not fresh like orange habanero water. You could reduce it to “white people salsa,” but Scoville-phobic folx come from all over the world.
So try it this weekend. Pre-grate your cheese, put it in a little deli container, pour some sauce into a glass jar with a lid, and grab a bag of chips. Take them somewhere outside and eat them with friends. Alternatively, if it’s not summertime and the tomatoes are shit, substitute a small can of tomato paste (Bianco, if they have it) and 1 cup of chicken broth for the fresh tomatoes. Some of you might even prefer that.
Strips and Cheese
Equipment:
Box grater
Blender (immersion, Ninja, or Vitamix)
Small pot
Ingredients:
1 bag thick tortilla chips
1 block high-quality, sharp cheddar cheese
Sauce:
3 medium-sized perfectly ripe tomatoes
1 large shallot, grated
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1/2 tbsp chile powder
1 tsp sumac
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp pepperoncini vinegar
Add 1/2 tbsp hot sauce (Del Taco packets or Tapatío), and add more hot if you want more heat.
1 tsp kosher salt
Directions:
Bring a medium-sized pot of water to boil.
Score the bottom of the tomatoes in an “X” shape.
Once the water is boiling, carefully place the tomatoes in the water for 10 seconds or until you see the tomato skin peel open.
Remove tomatoes onto a plate or bowl, peel the skins off, and discard the skins.
Roughly chop the mushy, warm tomatoes into large chunks. We’re blending them, so don’t get fussy; the more you chop, the more juices come out.
Add the tomatoes to a small pot (if you’re using an immersion blender) or to a regular blender (if you’re not).
Add the remaining sauce ingredients and blend until smooth, 1 minute maximum.
Heat the pot on medium until boiling and reduce the heat to low, stirring often.
Cook for 15 to 20 minutes, stirring or whisking often, until the mixture deepens in color and thickens to something you’d call a sauce.
Remove from heat when you’re happy, and let cool.
Assembly:
If you’re making them out in the world, you can grab your bag of chips, remove some of them to make space inside the bag, and pour in your sauce. Close the bag and carefully move it around to coat the chips. You can always add more sauce, but you can never take it back.
Once coated, cut the bag open to form a makeshift bowl plate of soggy red chips. Cover in grated cheese and eat immediately—Tostilocos or Frito Pie style.
If you’re making the chips at home, you can toss them in a large mixing bowl. Mix carefully with a large spoon or wok spatula to avoid breaking the chips. Resist the urge to toss them like pasta; they’ll only be crushed by their own wet weight. If you hate the thought of a semi-soggy chip, you can go sauce on the side, but that’s no fun.
Rumors & Ramblings
I tried the trio of flavors from Ancient Drinks. A canned beverage, dubbed “Yesterade to Slay Today,” features primordial ingredients like apple cider vinegar—a witch’s brew from when men were men and lived well into their twenties sometimes. They all taste the same and are pretty good, low in sugar, and not too cardamom-y. Their visual branding resembles early ’80s video game advertising and Grimes’s AI-generated Coachella visuals of men fighting on a biblical scale.
Last week, I went to Stella, a new Italian restaurant in West Hollywood. (Thanks for the res, Max.) The location couldn’t be more LA, and they spent a good amount of money on the buildout. You’re led downstairs to a buzzing dining room and open kitchen. Karolyn pointed out that the layout resembled that of an Eataly. Their garlic knots were obviously everyone’s favorite, but surprisingly, rosemary was the star. Many of the flavors may be too reserved, subtle, or challenging for the demographic, and hopefully, that is by design. We spotted the Oppenheim twins from Netflix’s Selling Sunset marching back and forth through the dining room a few times, seemingly tethered at the hip in matching Dior heather sweatpants and hoodies. I couldn’t tell because the seated guests obstructed most of their frames, but I knew they were each holding multiple iPhones. We liked the Harry’s Berries with lardo and balsamic as a fun starter, and the long pizzas were fun to scissor out squares around the mozzarella plops. Speaking of ancient, the pizza dough had an earthen, nutty, almost ancient-grained flavor, likely due to its cold fermentation. Stella’s desserts may be the star so far though. If I lived closer, I could see myself popping by for a nightcap and some saffron tiramisu or their coquette-piped pistachio-green cakette.
Speaking of nightcaps, I’ve lately yearned for a shaken “elevenses.” Specifically, Fergus Henderson’s version of the drunkard’s cocktail. He mixes equal parts Fernet-Branca and Branca-Menta, a mint-forward cousin of fernet, it’s meant to be sipped at 11 a.m. To me, the drink’s spirit is that of a bartender never knowing if it’s the first drink of the day or the last drink of the night. I was personally introduced to a variation on the drink by Giovanni Paradiso, owner of 10 William St, an Italian restaurant in Sydney. He prefers the drink shaken; the extra-cold water lowers the ABV, and the shaking smooths out that Fernet burn. Unfortunately, it’s rare to see a mint fernet behind most bars.
Music Pairing
“Wish Amber,” Wish (via SoundCloud)
I found this song yesterday in this NTS mix from Ian Kim Judd. It combines three of my favorite things: ambient grooves, Whole Foods, and insufferable people in love. Musically, it’s an eight-bar loop of 311’s “Amber” with additional washed-out guitar echoes and pans. Vocally, it’s two vloggers narrating how they met at Whole Foods and fell in love. I simultaneously hate it and never want it to end.
that’s nacho crudo
Hey Jason -- This post got me thinking about other types of low brow snacks, and I wanted to know your opinion on classic midwestern pub mix. When a nice bar has a good one it can be killer, but it seems like anything packaged doesn't replicate the most perfect ones I've tried. Do you have a recipe?