Right now you’re probably saying to yourself: Jesus-fucking-Christ it’s about time they get off their negligent ass and write something, anything! Well, this, everybody, is your heads up.

We didn’t get knocked off, bills are paid, dead I insist we are not. In fact, like the old Obi-Wan Kenobi, we intend only to return stronger and better. And we never left per se, but due to our over-active imaginations leading to some new and interesting ideas, we decided to enter yet another phase of theFreshScent thrusting it forward to version 4.

As with any path of evolution, we’ve decided to take tFS in a slightly new direction. We want your experience at theFreshScent to be fun and entertaining as well as inwardly stimulating. (We all try to dream ‘big’ here.)

We appreciate all the comments you’ve left over the several weeks we’ve been absent and it’s nice to know that you’re still thinking about us. Soon we’ll be back, screening the breeze once again and we hope you remain with us upon our return. Until then…

See you soon gorgeous.

- tFS Staff

We dropped a sneak peek of our new tee design late last week, now it’s time for a look at the full frontal (and back-al).

The goal was to play off our California roots, hence the Bear Flag design base. When originating some concepts, we started with the tried-and-true centered design and then replaced the lone star with a lone marijuana leaf. The tee looked good, but the design blends in and doesn’t have any real impact.

Impact is good, we always strive to be bigger and better, so why not make our design bigger and better? It was time to magnify, but where the hell do you put a giant flag print?

After some trial, some error and some light cursing – we settled on a left-side print location. Bear face to the front, bear ass to the back. Everything else worked out pretty smoothly.

As we speak, this limited edition run is coming out of the screen printers. We’ll be picking them up on Friday and handing them out to a lucky few at the THC Expo. Not local? No worries, whatever we keep will be available for purchase on theFreshScent.

Let us know what you think, and expect many more custom designs in the future.

The THC Expo is coming up (June 13-14th @ LA Convention Center) and we’ve decided to prep some fresh tFS gear for the occasion.

While we wait for the printers to do their thing, here’s a tiny sneak peek. Coming soon to a back near you, expect an update late next week.

- tFS Team

Likely when you’re on the go and need medication, you’re looking for absolute convenience. Personally, I don’t have the time to bumble for items I need to get to a higher level. So we put together a checklist for a mobile smoking kit for women. (Don’t worry dudes, your list is coming soon.)

Here we’ve included the essentials. Of course you can add more stuff to your pouch but the goal was to keep it simple.

1. A small zip makeup bag is great to hold your supplies while you’re on-the-go. You can get a variety of them at places like Target for anywhere from $5-$10.
2. Lighter wrapped with Bee Line. Bee Line is optional; it’s hemp wrapped with wax that you use as a wick to light your pipe.
3. Cigarette-shaped one-hitters are convenient and cheap. You can find them at virtually any head shop for anywhere from $5-$10.
4. Toothpicks are great to unclog your one-hitters. You can buy metal pokers, but toothpicks work just as fine at $2 for a box of 250.
5. Small medical marijuana container. If you don’t have one, film containers work too.
6. Every girl and long-haired guy has caught their bangs on fire while leaning over trying to light a pipe. It reeks for about two hours after you do it and is just extremely unpleasant. So try and keep a bobby pin or two in your kit to push away your hair while you toke.
7. Eye drops are your friend! Clear Eyes, Visene, or generic Target brand, they all get the job done.

Banana Bread is an all-time classic, easy to produce even for the most novice of cooks. In our version of this tasty treat, like always we’ll kick it up a notch and add some extra kick using our homemade Cannabutter. If you didn’t get around preparing your own cannabutter yet, you can use hash resolved in butter, too.

So today, we’re making Canna-Banana Bread; let’s get to it!

Breakdown:

• Prep time: 30 mins
• Baking time: 60 mins
• Difficulty: Easy
• Price: Affordable

Ingredients:

• 1 cup walnuts or pecans, toasted and chopped
• 3/4 cup granulated white sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 2 large eggs
• 1/2 cup cannabutter, melted and cooled
• 3 ripe large bananas (~1 lb.), mashed well
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Instructions:

• Preheat oven to 350ºF (180ºC) and place adjust rack to the middle position.
• Butter and flour the bottom and sides of a 9 x 5 x 3 in. loaf pan.
• Place the nuts on a baking sheet and bake for about 8 to 10 minutes or until lightly toasted. Let cool and then chop coarsely.
• In a large bowl combine and incorporate all the dry ingredients.
• In a smaller bowl thoroughly mix the mashed bananas, eggs, melted (but not hot!) cannabutter, and vanilla.
• With a rubber spatula or wooden spoon incorporate all the wet ingredients into the bowl with the dry ingredients. Do not over whisk the mixture. If it becomes too runny and smooth, the Canna-Banana Bread will be very cheewy, and not fluffy at all.
• Now scrape the batter into the prepared pan.
• Bake for approximately 55-60 minutes.
• The bread will be ready when you insert a toothpick into it, and it comes out clean, without any unbaked batter sticking to it.
• Don’t attempt to get the bread immediately out of the pan while it’s still hot. It will most likely fall apart. Set it aside to cool down for some time.

The potency is depending on the potency of your Cannabutter. You can freeze the bread, too, just in case you’d like to enjoy some later, way later. It will last three to five months in a freezer. It is advisable to cut the loaf into slices, and wrap them individually in saran wrap. Like that you don’t have to unfreeze the whole loaf, if all you want is a slice.

Bon Appetit!

Ah, summer’s on its way — the time of the year, when you don’t have to make up excuses to eat enormous amounts of ice cream.

We here at theFreshScent want you to eat your ice cream and get medicated simultaneously. Get ready to enjoy the wonderful fresh flavors of lemon and orange, combined with the earthy taste of medical marijuana. Don’t be afraid to try it at home, even if it may seem complicated at first glance: it’s not. The result is something that speaks for itself.

Let’s get to it.

Breakdown:

• Time: Prep: 30 min – Freezing: 6 hrs
• Serves: 8
• Difficulty: Medium
• Price: Cheap

Ingredients:

• Sugar: 250 g
• Egg Yolks: 6
• Cointreau: 100 ml
• Lemons: 4
• Oranges: 4
• Cream: 600 ml (Regular. Not low-fat.)
• Hashish: 10-15 g
• Butter: 1 tsp

Instructions:

1. Crumble your hash into a cup with one teaspoon of melted butter, and mix it until there are no big lumps left. Add more melted butter if needed. (Note: Do not use margarine.)
2. In a pot bring the cointreau and crumbled hash to a very low simmer.
3. Add zest of the lemons and oranges. The white, inner part of the peel is bitter and will spoil everything. Add the juice of all oranges and lemons.
4. Let it cook for at least 30 min or as long as it takes to finish all the other steps. DO NOT ALLOW MIXTURE TO BOIL!
5. Whip the cream and set it aside in the fridge.
6. In a pot heat 2-3 inches of water. Put a bowl hovering over the pot with the eggs yolks and the sugar in the bowl. The bowl may not touch the water. All you need is the temperature of the steam.
7. You will have to whisk for about 5-10 minutes. You will see the best results if you do it manually. Even if it is a lot harder, don’t use an electronic whisk. Your goal is, to get as much air into the egg/sugar mix as possible. The steaming water ensures you are applying enough heat to melt the sugar, but not so much that you’ll cook the egg. You are done when you don’t feel any more sugar crystals crunching between your teeth when tasting the mixture and everything is creamy and fluffy. Don’t stop whisking, not for one moment. Switch arms if you have to.
8. Now hurry up. Get a pot the same size, or even the same one and fill it with very cold water and ice cubes. Put the bowl with the mixture you just whisked into the iced water and cool down the egg-sugar creme as fast as possible. Just whisk it a little bit, not as hard as before.
9. In the iced water, and in a fresh bowl, cool down the Cointreau mix.
10. You should now have:
    • One bowl with whipped cream.
    • One bowl with cold cointreau / sugar / fruit / hash.
    • One bowl with cold, creamy egg yolk and sugar mix.
11. Carefully and in small amounts, incorporate the cointreau mix in the egg yolk / sugar mix. Don’t whisk it too hard, just mix it together gently.
12. Even more carefully mix the whipped cream in there, too. Again, be very gentle. If you whisk too hard, everything will reduce down to a liquid, and will be unusable for ice cream.
13. Fill the mixture now into cups of your choice. The mix should produce eight units, so chose the size of the cups accordingly.
14. Cover the cups with saran wrap and leave them in the freezer for 6 hours or more. They’ll keep fine in there for at least three months.

You can serve these little ice cream bombs anyway you want. It’s advisable to take the ice cream out of the freezer 20 minutes before consumption, in order to get a softer texture.

Enjoy another tFS original, don’t forget to leave some feedback and suggestions.

Bon Appetit!

This recipe is as easy to do at home as it is delicious. Only a few ingredients are needed, so your wallet will like it, too. It’s best if you prepare it one day before you want to enjoy it, so plan ahead.

Tiramisu is a typical Italian dessert dish, you’ll find it in almost every Italian restaurant you visit. But probably isn’t created with the same magic we use here at tFS. The keys to good tiramisu are time and proper ingredients. So in order to get the best results, stick to the following ingredient list to the letter.

Breakdown:

• Time: 20 min. to prepare (+ 12 hrs. to rest)
• Serves: 4
• Difficulty: Easy
• Price: Affordable

Ingredients:

• Mascarpone – 2-8 oz. cups
• Egg yolks – 2
• Ladyfinger Cookies or Savoiardi – One full bag
• Sugar – 2 oz.
• Vanilla sugar – 1 pack / 1 tbs
• Coffee – 1 pint
• Amaretto
• Cocoa Powder
• Butter – 1 tbs
• Hash – 4g

Instructions:

1. First make coffee. Let it cool completely. Do not use warm or hot coffee.
2. Into the coffee, pour some Amaretto. Not too much, just enough so you can taste it. Do not add sugar to the coffee.
3. In a bowl mix mascarpone with egg yolks, vanilla sugar and normal sugar.
4. Heat the butter so it becomes a liquid. Into the butter, crumble the hash. Stir and let it dissolve. Then mix into the bowl.
5. Find a dish big enough for your Tiramisu. There will be three layers of cookies (biscuits.) The dish should not be higher than that.
6. Now dip the biscuits one by one into the cold coffee. Make a layer of them in the dish. They should be soaked all the way through, but not fall apart. If they aren’t soaked well enough, the tiramisu will taste dry. Make sure you cover the whole dish, leaving as little room for air as possible.
7. On top of the soaked biscuits, evenly distribute a third of the mascarpone mix. Use a wet spoon to make a smooth and even surface.
8. Now pick the dish up a few inches, and let it slam on the table. Repeat 5-6 times, until you are sure there is no air locked inside. The point is to get any/all air bubbles out.
9. Repeat the last three steps two more times, so you end up with three layers of biscuits, and a top layer of mascarpone.
10. Cover the tray with saran wrap, put it in the fridge and let everything sink in over night. Don’t serve to soon, allow the tiramisu to soak all the way through.
11. Now the final touch: Coating the top with cocoa. Put a tablespoon of cocoa powder in a small sieve / strainer and dust the tiramisu with the powder. (Note: If you would do this step the night before, the cocoa powder will be soaked into the top layer of mascarpone. That is not desirable.) So, coat the tiramisu with cocoa just minutes before serving.

It’s also recommended not to dust the whole tiramisu in one go. This way you eliminate the chance of a disappearing tiramisu after an over-indulgent late-night snack attack.

Bon Appetit!

Hash and marijuana can be consumed in many different ways. For a little variation and some culinary pleasure, eating cannabis can be a nice change of pace. The cooking itself is fun, good results are relatively easy to achieve and the high will last considerably longer compared to smoking.

The first dish we’ll be cooking is Spaghetti Cannabonara. Carbonara is a typical Italian pasta dish. Its name is derived from earlier days, when workers from carbon (coal) mines in the the northern part of Italy came home at night, in need of some serious stick-to-your-ribs grub that’s quick and affordable. But this is Cannabonara, Carbonara with weed in it. We thought it was clever too.

In this dish, the grease of the bacon and the fat of the cream will help the hash dissolve nicely into the sauce. No need to make any cannabutter for this recipe. The taste will go perfectly with the bacon, parmesan and the cream.

Breakdown:

• Time: ~15 minutes
• Difficulty: Easy
• Price: Affordable

Ingredients:

* indicates per person.

• Spaghetti — 125g*
• Bacon or Pancetta — 50g*
• Cream — 100ml*
• Egg Yolk — 1* (Only the egg yolk.)
• Parmesan (Freshly ground is a plus.)
• Italian or Regular Cilantro — For garnish. (Optional)
• Hash — As much as you want. (For starters, try 1g*.)
• Ground Pepper
• Salt (Optional. Bacon should provide all the salt needed.)

Instructions:

1. Heat a pot of water on the stove, add a few pinches of salt for seasoning.
2. In a hot, pre-heated frying pan cook the bacon. Don’t use oil, don’t use butter.
3. As soon as you put the bacon in, put your spaghetti in the boiling water. Not steaming, boiling.
4. When the bacon is nice and crispy, remove the pan from the stove. At this point, it’s time to get your special ingredient. If you’re using hash, wait until the fat has cooled off a bit. If you can put your finger in the pan for 5 seconds without being in serious pain, that’s cool enough. Stir the hash around, and watch it dissolving into the bacon fat.
5. When the hash has completely dissolved, put the pan back on the stove. Wait until the pan is hot again, and put 2/3 of the cream in. Let the mix simmer on a very low setting. Keep an eye on it, you don’t want the cream to over boil!
6. In a bowl, mix the egg yolk(s), the parmesan and the remaining cream together.
7. Now everything will go very fast, so be prepared and get some plates ready.
8. Check if your pasta is cooked: taste it or go by touch. The pasta should be “al dente.”
9. Drain the pasta. (Do not rinse!) Throw the pasta in the pan with the bacon/cream in it.
10. Immediately add the parmesan, egg yolk and cream mix you set aside in the bowl. At this point, turn the flame off!
11. Now mix! Mix like the wind! The goal is to mix the contents of the bowl with the spaghetti without letting the egg yolk actually cook. If you see bits of scrambled egg, you over did it. It has to be creamy.
12. Put pasta on dish, sprinkle cilantro as garnish, add light dusting of some fresh ground black pepper and voila. You are ready to serve.

You should get the first effects within 30 minutes of consumption, just in time for dessert. Yes, a dessert recipe will be coming soon.

Bon Appetit!

Thought I’d set your minds at ease that despite what you’ve heard or guessed, no, theFreshScent isn’t dead. We didn’t get captured by the feds, and the core remains alive and kickin’.

We’re in the process of re-structuring how we execute the tFS vision, which basically means a new take on how we approach the crowded world of Counter-Culture news. This will take some time to get sorted out, but once we’re back up, you can bet things will be going full steam ahead, better than ever.

Don’t be discouraged, you will hear back from us soon once house-keeping is complete. I want to thank everybody for their continued visits and patience. We promise not to disappoint when we’re back live.

Keep it fresh.
Tim

We’re working to figure out the source, cause and remedy. This is a new one, so bear with us.

Thanks.

Update: All in all, we’ve lost 4 total posts and close to 20 comments – almost all on the Rainbow Cake post.

We’re working with our hosting provider to diagnose the problem, but since our backups run nightly, there’s a high chance these posts / comments will be lost for good. Hopefully, that’s not the case, but it isn’t looking great right now. Expect another update once we get a final word from our techs.

Thanks everyone, and we apologize for some asshole (or group of assholes) out there causing this inconvenience.

Final Update: Boom. The great staff over at BulletHost diagnosed the problem, found a fix, and restored all of our posts and your comments.

Turns out it wasn’t any sort of malicious behavior, tFS received a massive amount of traffic from StumbleUpon, which combined with our generally “load heavy” website to cause some serious server stress. This actually corrupted some of our database tables, which have now been manually restored.

Over the upcoming weekend, we’ll work on optimizing tFS so that it’s more lightweight and prepared for any large influxes of traffic that come in the future. In the meantime, if you want a hosting company that cares, we highly recommend BulletHost.

Thanks for the patience everyone, we’ll have some fresh content for you all tomorrow.

+ tFS Team

If you’ve opened your RSS reader today or navigated over to Bloglines, there’s a small chance a broken URL for theFreshScent will appear. That shouldn’t be happening, but we made backend changes that might cause some breakage, now here’s the heads up & a quick explanation.

We’ve been experiencing technical issues with our separate RSS feeds (via FeedBurner), and also had an internal debate about their set-up, so a few minor changes have been made.

First, and this is important, theFreshScent RSS URL has changed.

Please re-add (or edit your existing link) to this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/tfsrss

Second, there is no more partial content feed, only full content. In retrospect, partial anything is a waste of time, and we want as many people on top of our content as possible. Don’t worry about having to clickthrough to the site anymore, read until you’re sick of us.

Third, and this one is minor, we’ve upped the number of posts within the RSS feed from 10 to 15. Bigger isn’t always better, but the 10 latest articles barely covers 2 days of our posts, so we wanted to up that a little bit.

As always, you guys are awesome, sorry for this inconvenience.

The time has come for us to slow down over the holiday season, but first we want to wish all our readers a Happy Holidays and New Year. It’s time to kick back by the fire and get some relax time on the books.

We’ve had an amazing last 1/3rd of 2008 with our site re-launch and want to thank everyone who visits tFS for making it grow into one of the most unique blogs on the internet.

Posting will be intermittent while we work on new content for the upcoming year, so don’t get too feisty.

We’ve got some big plans for 2009, stick around and you’ll see what we mean. Keep it fresh and we’ll see you on the flip side.

+ theFreshScent Team

Man, that happened quickly.

theFreshScent has hit its 500th post. It wasn’t always smooth sailing, but we’re glad to still be here and serving up fresh content for all our readers.

Talking about fresh content, theFreshScent reviews department is going to start ramping up production in the near future. We know you all love our strain reviews, so expect those to start coming out within the next 2-3 weeks, along with our product reviews.

So, how have things been going with our official re-launch?

How about a couple stats, since 9/15/08 we’ve:

• Dropped 101 posts (not including this one)
• Served up 96,000+ pageviews
• Been found 1,102 times by people searching for ‘medical marijuana’
• Reviewed 17 MMJ strains
• Tweeted 15 times
• Dropped an average of 5 posts per day

Not too shabby, but it’s only the beginning. As we keep this ball rolling, expect more and more original content and a few other tricks up our sleeves.

Until then, thanks for keeping things on point and reading theFreshScent.

+ tFS Team

Our entire team is both happy and relieved to say the following…

Welcome to theFreshScent v3!

It’s been a long time in the making, some might say too long, but hey… we’re not perfect.

Instead, we’ve taken the time to completely re-design, re-think and re-execute theFreshScent. From the bottom to the top, we’ve got a new editorial team that’s going to deliver the freshest news, reviews, videos and everything else on this green planet of ours.

So what’s changed after all this down time? Let’s go over it…

The Entire Damn Site

As you can tell, we’ve undergone a slight facelift. The site is now fluid, up to 1280 pixels, to accomdate for larger browsers. We’ve switched from a 2-column to a 3-column design and revamped our color scheme.

The goal was to create a site that’s got good readability, but still retains the tFS style. No animated weed .gifs around here, just clean design and plenty of stuff to keep you busy.

The Footer

Our footer now has the most commented articles on tFS, the most recent comments on tFS, and links to our social footprint – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc…

Safe For Work / Not Safe For Work

Take a look below the header, on the right hand side, and you’ll see two small-ish buttons: SFW and NSFW. Short for ‘Safe For Work’ and ‘Not Safe For Work’ – this feature removes all the post images from the main column of the site.

Listen, we know there are plenty of people not cool with the contents of this site, especially bosses, but this is our way of getting you past the PC filter. Switch to ‘SFW’ whenever you need to fly below the radar. This feature remembers your setting from page to page, so don’t worry about it browsing around.

The Dailys

This one’s simple, but still fun. Each and every day we’ll put up a fresh set of links for you to check out; one to an article, one to a picture and one to a video.

We plan on making it a good mix… sometimes funny, sometimes thought-provoking, but always interesting.

tFS Quarterly

This is a new experiment of ours. There is plenty of stuff we just can’t get onto the site – whether it’s more subjective pieces, content with unique styling, behind-the-scenes stories or even special deals.

So, we’ve decided to create a quarterly PDF magazine. This will be an outlet for tFS staff to create articles and other types of content that don’t quite fit into the blog mold.

Want to check out the first issue? Sign up on your right and we’ll send it as soon as it’s finished.

Collapsable 2nd Column

Don’t want to see The Dailys? Already signed up for the tFS Quarterly? All good.

Click the arrow next to the title of each module in the 2nd column and it collapses. This brings the content up that you want to see and removes the items you might be bored of.

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re going for a trend, choice for our readers.

Special Features

Right now, our main special feature is theFreshForums. Our other new experiment – a lightweight approach to improving the way our readers can interact with each other (and us).

No more being stuck to the comments on this site. Now, you can take conversations over to theFreshForums, or start totally new ones. Who knows. It’s not a revolutionary feature, but it’s part of our natural progression from being a one-trick pony to creating the online community for intelligent smokers everywhere.

There isn’t much over there just yet, but that part falls on your shoulders, so get busy.

Twitter

We like Twitter. It’s 140 characters of goodness. It’s also a way for us to post links, comments or other bite-sized pieces of information that don’t quite make it onto the main site.

Check out our module to the right and you’ll always see our tweet stream. Or, go to our twitter page and add us as a friend. We don’t do any spammy bullshit, so no worries on that front.

The Rest…

A lot of the other changes have happened where you can’t see them… behind the scenes. We’ve got a whole new, and bigger, team of writers and we plan on pumping out much, much more content.

This is still a work in progress for us, but we’re ridiculously excited to finally re-launch the site. It’s been a long journey, and everyone here is looking forward to making this place the freshest site on the internet.

Questions, insights, comments or marriage proposals, let us know what you think and we’ll keep improving this thing.

See you on the green side…

Update: We are aware that some images from previous posts appear to be missing. It will be taken care of soon.

So far, the responses have been great. We’ve gotten some funny ones, some weird ones and some reassuring ones. Turns out we’re doing a thing or two right as it stands, but we can definitely improve in other areas.

Let’s start off with something simple that I doubt will surprise anyone…

Yep, mind blowing right? A nice, round 100% of you think it is Ok to use marijuana for recreational use, with a slight caveat of 13% choosing the ‘It Depends’ option. Exactly zero people chose ‘No’ on this one. A real eye-opener right?

The next mixture of questions was designed to get your opinions on both features and content.

Let’s start with features, we created two major parts of the site – the tFS Headshop Locator and Feed Valley. We called them ‘Feature Elements’ and put them right below categories in the sidebar.

Turns out we either didn’t build them well enough or no one can find them, because the majority of responses were on the negative side. A whopping 14% of people use Feed Valley to grab news from other sites and an equally massive 22% of viewers used the tFS Headshop Locator (when it was still functional and not mangled by our hosting providers).

The amount of ‘Don’t Know What It Is‘ responses (54% for Feed Valley and 38% for tFSHL) really opened our eyes to how important navigation is and making it easy for all of you to spot the larger projects that we work on. You can bet the next featured aspects of tFS aren’t going to be as easy to miss. Count on it.

Next we wanted to get some ideas about our content. Asking which category you read the most was a no-brainer and the responses pretty much followed what our site stats show – you all love looking at Medical Marijuana. The MMJ category posted a 46% total, which is an impressive 20% difference between the next closest choice, News, clocking in at 20% of our responses.

Funnily enough, those responses totally contradicted how you felt about the next question – Marc Emery or Tommy Chong? Marc Emery is heavily involved with the legalization movement and seed cultivation. This would translate into readers being more interested with the deeper aspects of marijuana, both legal and structural. Tommy Chong, well known from his comedy movies, represents the lighter side of pot. Jokes, taking life easy and making fun of a few people or places along the way.

You guys favored Tommy by a pretty sizable margin – 65% to 35% – over Marc Emery. What does this mean to us? We’ll keep the news and strain info coming, but you also want to see some more humor and things to make you laugh. No problem, we can handle that.

There were some questions hard for us to put into graph form, but don’t worry, we’re paying attention to every one equally. The one consistent, major complaint has been over the lack of updates since the site last went down. We know you want to see more from us on the content front, and that won’t be an issue when we re-launch. Until then we have to keep quiet on the details.

So sit tight, know that we’re on top of it, and we look forward to dropping some development news in the coming week.