Day 335: Sous vide weed

Yesterday I tried Feastly for the first time. It’s a meal sharing platform. Or maybe more of a pop up-restaurant thing.

I found an event in the Mission District, where I stay here in San Fransisco. A potluck ”Benefit Friendsgiving: Celebrating Diversity” dinner. The price was 15 dollars, but most of the money would be donated to some fund for helping new immigrants and the guests where supposed to bring some food, preferably something signifying inclusion and multiculturalism. It sounded very San Fransisco.

I bought some French cheese and bread. I figured that together with the other announced dishes (like falafel and shepherds pie) it would at least be a contribution from another culture.

When I arrived at the venue my first thought was that the chef of the day, Malasiyan Tracy, had a really nice apartment but it turned out to be the Feastly head quarters. It’s a pretty small operation, they have so far only launched in a few US cities and have about 200 meals per month.

There was a big spacious room with a long table which felt a little empty with only six of us there. Except for Tracy and a woman working for Feastly there were only four guests. It was interesting to hear about how Feastly works. Their events seem to be a lot more curated than the ones I’m used to from AirDine or EatWith. And I have to say I prefer the latter ones.

To me one of the interesting things about the sharing economy is exactly the unpredictability. You never know exactly what you’ll get or who you’ll meet, but that’s the charm of it.

It would definitely have been more personal if the dinner had taken place in Tracys home and I think that it would have made us feel more comfortable as guests too. Now it was more like being on a semi professional dinner. 6-8 pm. Mostly talk about the business model of Feastly. The food weren't super exciting either since there were so few of us who had brought anything to eat.

The two most interesting things that came up was that three of the six women had been married to Israeli men. ”Yeah, but the key word here is ’have been’”, said one of the women, ”Israelis are just very persuasive.”

And then when someone mentioned the upcoming legalization of marijuana and then Tracy said that she’d previously arranged a ”medicated dinner” for Feastly.

Some people can buy it legally for medical reasons. So for this dinner the guests were told to bring their own buds. A true pot luck dinner.

So in other words she’d made a full dinner with dishes containing marijuana, instead of just making the famous brownies. She told me they had used it in bitters for cocktails and in meat dishes. ”I use it like other herbs and it can for example give the dish a more nutty flavour. I have some friends who write a blog about using marijuana in cooking, it’s called Sous Weed”, she told me. ”Actually, since it allows you to control the temperature better, sous vide is a great method for cooking marijuana.”

This city is so hipster.

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