Chef Travis Petersen and Good Day Farm partner for Good Nights infused dining experience in Kansas City
For the second time this year, Good Day Farm and Chef Travis Petersen have partnered to turn Good Day into Good Nights.
Good Nights in Kansas City can be attributed to the friendship between Good Day Farm’s Amy Dailey and Travis Petersen. The pair became fast friends in 2022, when they partnered on an event in Arizona.
What was meant to be a one-night dinner became so popular that three more days of service were added to the original Good Nights dinner date in Kansas City.
“I think when I met Travis, it was an instant fit, that first dinner that we did in Scottsdale kicked off our friendship with a mutual love of cannabis. We’ve worked together ever since hosting many infused dinners, with the intent of making cannabis-infused dinners more mainstream. We also want to try and make cannabis more mainstream here at Good Day Farm. That and being able to give everyone a good day is our motto. [At an infused dinner] people are able to combine something that everybody does, which is eating, with cannabis,” Dailey said. “I’m a foodie. I love food, and so it was a no-brainer to tie my love of cannabis with my love of food,” Dailey said. “Good Day Farm is all about having a good day and good people. There’s nothing better than being able to sit down together and share dinner or a meal. For me, dinner time as a child was always time to talk about how your day was and connect. Our hope at Good Day Farm is to be able to offer this experience to our customers and patients.”
Chef Peterson uses the farm-to-table method when cooking, something that inspired this matchup between the two.
“As I started to tour when I moved to the US, we really focused on the west, to begin with, but I’ve been expanding all over the country, and the first opportunity to sort of tie back in with Amy, I really kind of jumped at it. Seeing Good Day’s presence in Missouri, it was just a smart partnership. A chef wants to go directly to the farm to get his ingredients, so it was a no-brainer to partner with Good Day Farm,” Petersen said.
Travis Petersen, also known as the Nomad Cook, has been cooking infused dinners for five years now, beginning in Canada. Something that was supposed to be temporary suddenly became his new passion.
“When that first cannabis dinner came together, it was 420 in 2018, Canada was just about to federally legalize cannabis. So I turned my house into a restaurant. I was going to do this once, and I had 164 people come to my house over four days. That’s really what solidified it for me, at first I thought this was a niche and a fad that was going to be popular because it had just become legal, and then it would sort of fizzle out, but it was the groups of people coming in because people can buy individual tickets. You have a table of complete strangers, and time and time again, people are becoming friends, trading phone numbers, sharing stories. There’s something really special that brings people together, the sharing component of cannabis, that is really magical when you put it in.”
His excitement about cooking and educating those at the dinner table is infectious.
Throughout his cooking tours and dinners, Petersen has had over 900 first-time cannabis users. Each person who comes gets to pick their individual dose for the dinner. There are five different levels ranging from 5 to 100 milligrams.
“The most important thing is that we’re dosing correctly for every guest, because someone who may be new to this, if they’re not served the proper amount, it could have them write this off forever. It just reconfirms those stigmas. But if we can do this properly and do it safely, then we seem to really put people in a space of, ‘Hey, I really enjoyed this.”
I was nervous going into the dinner, as a kid who grew up on chicken nuggets and pizza, this entire experience was something completely new to me.
The four-course meal started with an Elote Corn Soup. The chili oil added the perfect amount of spice to the dish and by the end of the course, you could see that practically everyone had scraped their bowls clean.
Next, there was a Tempura Lobster Roll with tastes of turmeric, coconut, and crab cake.
The third course, Pierogi Poutine, was a featured dish from Petersen’s cookbook, The Nomad Cook: Introduction to Culinary Cannabis. Pierogi Poutine consists of short rib, maple boursin, and gravy. Petersen told attendees a story about how his mother brought in a cheese wheel from out of the country that he used to spice up the dish.
The last course was a Cookie Crumble that had hints of lime gel made with pickled pears from Petersen’s home in Canada. As someone with a big sweet tooth, this was my favorite dish. I had never considered that lime and chocolate would pair well together, but Chef Peterson did it flawlessly.
Dinner itself was a wonderful experience and helped me to step outside of my comfort zone, trying new things and figuring out that there is so much good food that I have been missing out on.
But one of the biggest parts of the experience is Chef Petersen himself. The Chef was so precise in everything that was added to the dishes he prepared, and from the food to infused products, there was a story behind it all.
“The Dosado Sherbert just had a beautiful terpene profile of Limonene, Caryophyllene, and Humulene. When I am building my recipes out, the terpene profile is the most important thing to me. I go through different methods to create my extractions, whereas traditional methods are about maximizing the THC and kind of sacrificing everything else with the plant. Good Day Farm goes to so much trouble to produce these terpene-rich strains that we want to honor what the farmers and the cultivators have put so much time and effort into and really have that come through with the dishes,” Petersen explained.
“Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect when coming here. But the people really make it. People are warm and welcoming, and we’ve had at least 24 return guests from the last time we were out here, so it’s really cool to see a familiar face at a table when you’ve only been there a couple of times,” Peterson recalled.
Attending my first infused dinner alone was something I thought would leave me feeling uncomfortable at the table, but it was actually quite the opposite. The tables were set for family-dinner style service, helping would-be strangers to meet and converse. I made friends with all of the attendees around me and conversations flowed throughout the night. It was fun, all of us trying the dishes together and discussing each one before moving on to the next. Any sense of awkwardness or anxiety vanished as soon as I sat down with the group.
Petersen said it’s a common experience for individuals to attend by themselves and leave with a new perspective on cannabis dining, that cannabis can bring people together in a way that everyone can enjoy, and that’s exactly what happened to me.
“I moved out at an early age, and I had to learn how to cook right away. For me, cooking was therapeutic in the sense of it was an hour in the day that I would disconnect from technology, from my job, from whatever I was doing. But more so, I think of some of my fondest childhood memories were family dinners, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter dinners. And then as I got older, just sharing special moments. It doesn’t matter what culture, religion, or where in the world you come from, we all share this special moment when we sit around a table, break bread together, and we share stories and we share love. For me, that’s really the part I absolutely love, because I feel that when you really get to know someone or really get deep into a story, it’s around the table with food,” Petersen said.
Destigmatizing cannabis and educating people are important parts of the infused dinner experience, but they’re also passions of Petersen’s. He launched the first certificate for safety and regulation for Culinary Cannabis in Canada and is now bringing that to the United States. His cookbook, The Nomad Cook: Introduction to Culinary Cannabis is equal parts culinary inspiration and cannabis education, diving into the importance and effects of terpenes as well as how to properly dose meals.
When asked what his favorite recipe from the book was, he talked about the Trolly Chicken Sandwich.
“It’s one of my favorites. My wife and I actually created that dish together. That was the first time we cooked together when we started dating. My name is Travis, and she’s Holly. So we call it the Trolly Sandwich. I’ve got dishes in there that have been around forever, but that one I just think is special because it was something that was created on the spot with my wife and I, and it’s one of our favorite things to make when we’ve got people around the barbecue,” Petersen remarked.
Travis and his wife actually met at one of his infused dinners, showing that sharing a meal really can bring people together.
