It’s Sunday morning. You wake up in a cold sweat, having just come out of a nightmare in which you forgot to take several players on BYE-week out of your fantasy football lineup. Big Ben was still your starting QB and Antonio Brown was your WR1. Your pillow is wet; you think you may have sleep-cried at the thought of missing out on those sweet, sweet Patty Mahomes fantasy points.
In the offseason, you wouldn’t have gotten up before noon. But this isn’t the offseason, baby; there are football games to be watched, fantasy lineups to be adjusted last-minute, and insults to be thrown at your Raider jersey-clad friends. You need to get up extra early to make sure that the house looks good for when your buddies come over later at gametime. Part of your preparation is bound to be making snacks for the event. No NFL viewing party is complete without a mountain of delicious snacks and sugary drinks to feast on while you watch your RB2 score his second touchdown of the game. The greasy foods present on game day make it the ultimate cheat day, but what if there was a way to combine these great treats with the only thing keeping you sane through the football season: CBD? Here are 5 easy and delectable NFL Sunday snacks that you can infuse with servings of CBD.
#1: CBD-Infused Nacho Cheese Dip
There are few things that scream “NFL Sunday” more than a sea of tortilla chips and a big bowl of warm, spicy nacho cheese. A staple of football viewing parties, it almost takes more effort NOT to make a nacho cheese dip than to provide one for you and your friends to enjoy. There are two routes you can take with this recipe. You can either perform a short slant route and purchase a heatable nacho cheese dip from the store–offering a delicious yet somewhat less earned flavor–or you can elect to run a Hail Mary straight to the end zone and make the cheese dip from scratch at home.
If you choose the former, hey, that’s totally fine. A person should never feel lesser in their own home on game day. Well, unless they’re a Dolphins fan. Buying a jar of pre-made nacho cheese dip makes preparation much, much easier since it eliminates any steps involving actually putting together the cheesy concoction. Pour the cheese out of its jar and into a heatable bowl, preferably one with Barry Sanders on the side. Place the bowl in your microwave and let it warm for the amount of time instructed on its original jar.
Once the timer ends and you feel like your cheese is up to NFL Sunday standards, you can add CBD oil to it. This is best done through the use of a tincture, since it will allow you to dispense an accurate amount of CBD into the cheese dip. The best CBD oil to use here would be one that’s unflavored, such as the Ignite CBD Unflavored Tincture. You’ll want to figure out ahead of time who is going to be coming over to your house so that you can put enough CBD in to service the entire group. Using a tincture and measuring out the CBD also ensures that you don’t put too much into the dip. Not that there would be a serious problem with that, but you just don’t want to waste any of your oil when less of it will get the job done. Once the CBD is in the dip, stir it all together to allow the cheese and hemp extracts to become one and the same.
This is the less labor-inducing version of the dip. If you want to make the dip yourself from scratch, it is still quite simple. You are going to need 2 tbsp each of butter and flour, a jar of diced green chilis, 6 ounces of whatever cheese you love most and 1 cup of whole milk. Put the flour and butter into a sauce pot and whisk them together over medium heat. When the combination begins to bubble, whisk for about one more minute before adding your cup of milk. Keep whisking until the milk begins to simmer and thicken enough to coat your utensil, then turn off the heat. Slowly add the cheese, and as you do this, also begin to add your CBD oil tincture. As before, an unflavored tincture oil such as this one from Clear Bright Days CBD is ideal for this dip. You don’t want to risk burning away any of the compounds in the hemp extract, so you need to add it once the pot is off the flame. Whisk everything together, blending the CBD into the dip. Then, pour everything into a bowl and enjoy. As stated previously, make sure to calculate how much CBD will be needed based on the amount of people eating the dip and your desired concentration.
#2: Wings with a CBD Glaze
A good plate of wings is just the snack to keep things lively on Sunday. Normally a day to take it easy and quietly prepare for the upcoming week, wings allow you to tap into that dormant caveman DNA and transform your Sunday into something closer resembling Mad Max than a day for relaxation. Tearing apart a wing with nothing but your hands and teeth makes you feel powerful, as if you belong down on the gridiron with all those players on TV.
Adding CBD products to your wings is much easier than you would think. You hardly need to do anything to your wings before cooking them, only when preparing the glaze that you plan to apply to them once they’ve been cooked to near completion. The wings themselves can be prepared as they normally would be, since there is no point at which adding CBD would really be optimal. When working with CBD-infused snacks, you don’t want to cook the CBD for too long or you risk burning away many of the compounds, similar to the cheese dip. Besides, the oil will be easier to manage in the creation of a glaze rather than as a wing application.
Your first move will be to determine what type of glaze you are going to make for your wings. There are more flavors for wing glazes than you could ever imagine, and each flavor appeals to different groups of people and fits better for certain events than others. For something like NFL Sunday, it would be smart to go with a classic, and for the sake of this article we will be choosing a BBQ sauce glaze. For this glaze you will need the following ingredients: ½ cup of ketchup, 2 tbsp each of worcestershire and brown sugar, 1 tsp of salt, ½ tsp of pepper and 3 tbsp of cider vinegar.
These portions should provide with you enough glaze to cover all of your wings, but if this is not the case you can simply increase the portions to better suit your needs. The beauty of making a glaze is that you practically don’t have to do anything. There are no flourishes, no extra steps like freezing or heating the combination of ingredients in order to achieve some sort of ideal stasis. Simply combine everything in a single bowl, add enough CBD oil to obtain the concentration that you desire and mix it until you feel that it has completely blended together. For a sweeter flavored glaze, you can apply some of Blue Moon Hemp’s Flan Tincture, which will effortlessly heighten the sweetness of the sauce. If you feel like your sauce will taste perfect the way it is and doesn’t require any additional flavors, Blue Moon also offers a pure hemp tincture whose flavors will be all but drowned out by the glaze’s other ingredients. It’s a short and headache-free process, meaning you can spend less time prepping your food and more time worrying about your favorite player’s injury updates in the hours before the game begins.
Once you’ve done this, it’s just a matter of getting the wings prepped and thrown into the oven to be cooked. You should apply some of the glaze for the initial cooking process, so that it can better infuse itself with the wing. Then, when the wings are ready to be taken out of the oven and devoured, apply a second coating of the glaze in order to regain some of its more lively flavors and introduce a second serving of CBD that has not been burned off by the cooking process. Just like that, you have a delicious CBD treat fit for a king. Not one of those fancy kings, of course, but rather one of those Medieval kings that ate everything with his bare hands and spoke almost exclusively in grunts. That’s the kind of king that would have really enjoyed NFL Sundays.
#3: Sliders with CBD-Infused Butter
Sliders and wings share that instinctive appeal of requiring no utensils to enjoy them to their fullest potential. Smaller than a full burger but often appearing in higher quantity, there are very few people who push back against a good slider. Their compactness benefits them greatly, allowing for easier customization and requiring less ingredients than a regular batch of burgers would. Your buddies are guaranteed to get hyped when they walk into your home on game day and see the “Leaning Tower of Sliders” that you have prepared for them.
Another similarity between the slider and the wings is that the CBD will not really be involved in the actual cooking process, just in the added flavoring. In this instance, the CBD product will be included in the butter that acts as a coating inside the buns of the sliders. Like the glaze, mixing CBD oil with butter is extremely straightforward and requires little to no preparation time. Simply place a portion of butter into a heatable bowl and warm it until it has begun to get softer and melt. Then, add your CBD oil to the butter and blend them together. CBD in a powder form would work here as well, and if you chose to use a product such as JustCBD’s Isolate Powder, there would be no accompanying hemp flavor or aroma. The butter’s strong taste is going to drown out the terpene flavors of most hemp extracts regardless, meaning that you don’t really need to worry about your sliders’ buns smelling or tasting like a cannabis plant. Apply as much oil as you believe is necessary to achieve an adequate concentration that you and your friends will enjoy.
When you believe that your butter-CBD combination is ready to go, spread it across the insides of your slider buns. While your mini-patties are cooking on the grill, give your buns a bit of love and toast them up next to the patties. If you’ve decided that patties aren’t the move and you would rather prepare juicy pulled pork for some sloppy joe sliders, you can place the buns on a pan over low heat in order to get a similar toasted effect. In both instances, make sure not to keep the buns over heat for too long, so as to keep the hemp extract as strong as possible.
Once the patties or pork are done cooking, you can bring everything together to complete your sliders. If you don’t especially like butter on your sliders, you can always just add CBD oil directly to your bun. In this case, something sweet like HUGS CBD’s Mango Tincture could provide some tangy notes that you would enjoy. Add any extra bits of flavor that you’d like, such as pickles or barbeque sauce and prepare for the most important aspect of the entire meal: visual aesthetics. Sliders are essentially the Lego’s of the food world, with a size and shape allowing for some interesting stacking potential. You don’t just want to impress your friends with your cooking and CBD skills, you want them to recognize your engineering genius by presenting your food in a fun and interesting way. Don’t be the Frank Gore of sliders; give it some flourish!
#4: CBD-Infused Root Beer Float
While NFL Sunday meal prep is focused primarily on different kinds of foods, chips and dips, it’s just as important for you to recognize the need for a few popular drink options. Sure, you could always lean on “Ol’ Reliable” and grab some brews for the boys, but that’s exactly what is expected of you. In the NFL, you don’t become a superstar by doing the bare minimum of what your position dictates. You need to excel, proving that you are a step above everyone else at your position and deserve recognition. This is no different from NFL Sunday snack prep; you can do what’s expected and buy a 30-rack of cheap beer, or you can prepare some drinks that your friends will remember and clamor about in the Sundays to follow. That is the kind of reaction that you will get with these CBD-infused root beer floats.
The root beer float is a low-risk, high-reward drink, requiring little to no effort but looking and tasting incredible. A root beer float will usually include the following ingredients: root beer and ice cream. Really, it’s that simple, yet the combination can taste more satisfying than something containing over a dozen different ingredients. It’s a versatile drink, offering a liquid and a solid that can either be eaten separately–a straw for the root beer and a spoon for the ice cream–or can be blended together into a sweet-tasting dessert that you won’t mind suffering through a brain freeze to consume.
In order to make the perfect root beer float, you need to determine the optimal ratio of root beer and ice cream. There is no real standard ratio, since it can easily vary from person to person based on individual preference. If you like to eat the ice cream or feel like it gives the drink a flavor that you love, add a few scoops. If you are more interested in the root beer and would rather leave the ice cream to blend with the drink, you can add fewer scoops. Your friends may have differing opinions on this, making it an optimal treat for the end of game day, when you can ask everyone what they want. Scoop ice cream into a glass, and then add as much root beer as you deem fit.
Then, add your CBD oil at the very end, blending it into the root beer so that it doesn’t feel out of place in the drink. A flavored oil would be ideal for this dessert treat, in particular something like Social CBD’s Peppermint Tincture that possesses a peppermint flavor to complement the overall taste of the drink without making it feel too crowded or out of place. If you’re looking for a fruity oil addition, a good option would be Air Factory CBD’s Berry Rush Tincture, bringing a different kind of sweetness than the peppermint oil. Just like that, in three easy steps, you’ve completed an NFL Sunday treat that your friends likely won’t be forgetting for a long time.
#5: CBD Rice Krispy Treat Footballs
Okay, let’s say that you like the root beer float idea but are looking for something that is more specific to football, or you’ve already got drinks figured out and want a solid dessert that will make a positive impression. You don’t just want to provide a snack; you want a masterpiece, something that will tell your friends that you’ve worked hard to give them a truly wonderful treat. A batch of Rice Krispy treat footballs is a great treat that makes up for its lengthy crafting time with sheer deliciousness and aesthetic appeal. Chow down on a sweet football snack while yelling at the quarterback on your TV screen who seemingly couldn’t throw a football if his life depended on it.
This treat looks more difficult to make than it actually is. The hardest part of making these Rice Krispy treat footballs is being patient and precise with the amount of time spent at each step. Compile the following ingredients: a bag of mini marshmallows, 3 tbsp of butter, Rice Krispy cereal and vanilla icing. Drop the butter into a pot and place it over medium heat to melt it. Then, add marshmallows and allow them to melt in the same way, mixing in with the butter. You can add your CBD oil into the mix at this point, but make sure that the heat remains at medium and the mixture is close to being set down to cool. Like the root beer float, a sweet, dessert-flavored oil such as Charlotte’s Web Chocolate Mint Tincture will be ideal for this treat.
Once the marshmallow mixture looks melted and smooth, take the pot off of the heat. Add a few cups of the Rice Krispy cereal to the mixture and blend it all together, then let it cool for approximately 1.5 hours. Soften it by rolling a ball across it and place it flat on parchment paper. Begin taking portions of it and making football-shaped Krispy treats. When you’ve used up all of your mixture, allow the footballs to cool further until you believe that they are ready to be eaten, then use the vanilla frosting to draw the seams and laces of a football onto each treat. Voila, you are now an expert in making football shaped Rice Krispy treats.
Not only are these treats great because of their shape and overall look, they also taste delicious and can be eaten in large quantities. Following the instructions given above, you can make over a dozen footballs if portioned properly. Many, many more can be made, and all things considered, the amount of time spent on each batch really isn’t that bad. You could even make batches with different types of CBD as a type of taste tester! One could include the chocolate mint CBD while another could go for a fruitier profile with some of CBDfx’s Blueberry Pineapple Lemon Tincture or tinctures with similar flavors. Your friends will be in love with this treat, as they will be with all the other CBD-infused snacks on this list.
These are five of the countless delectable foods and drinks that you can infuse with servings of CBD for a perfect NFL Sunday snack. Almost anything can feature a serving of CBD, it’s just a matter of how to apply said CBD in a way that doesn’t detract from the snack’s overall taste and aroma. Now that you’ve got a few good ideas under your belt, go out and impress all your friends with your knowledge. Get the snacks and sweet treats ready this upcoming Sunday, and prepare for another weekend filled with cheers, cries and insults slung with reckless abandon. Your Sundays are filled with excitement and fun, so it only makes sense that your snacks would share in that sentiment. As always, portioning your CBD is key. Determine the concentration that you want for a given treat, and make sure that you use enough CBD to achieve said concentration.
Now that you’ve gotten to the end of this listicle, it might be a good time to check your fantasy matchup for this week. You’ve been dreading it, but it’s time to see the damage. None of your players are hurt, thank god, and your RB1 is facing off against the Miami defense, promising a decent return. Your QB is on a roll and your def–oh, oh no. You’re playing “Big Brady Brand” this week, and he’s got McCaffery AND Russell Wilson? Okay, you’re definitely going to need a few of these CBD treats on Sunday to stay sane!
