It’s time for another Stars Hollow food adventure! Those of you who have been around my blog for at least a few years will no doubt remember my reviews of Eat Like A Gilmore and its sequel, Daily Cravings, in which I not only reviewed the books but cooked out of them.
So yeah, we’re going to do that again, only this time it’s official, with Gilmore Girls: The Official Cookbook by Elena P. Craig and Kristen P. Mulrooney. Instead of Gilmore-worthy recreations, we have actual cast photos, fonts, and logos, not to mention the recipes are written a bit more succinctly in some cases. There’s mad variety in this book and everything looked tasty, but for manageability I whittled things down to fifteen recipes. Well, sixteen because one night we did two recipes at once. My husband helped me out in a few places and my curious (and constantly hungry) sixteen-year old son was always available for feedback.
Not to throw shade at Eat Like A Gilmore, but I also tried to make recipes that are featured in both books just for comparison’s sake. It’s always interesting to see different takes on the same thing, even something as varied and popular as burgers and pizza.
All right, here we go, and speaking of burgers…
Luke’s Diner Cheeseburgers (All seasons, all episodes)
Of course we’re leading off with cheeseburgers because the Gilmores ate a lot of them, and this one is kind of Shake Shack-esque, with a loosely-packed patty, cheddar cheese, and minimal seasoning so the flavor of the meat shines through. The texture is fantastic and the burger is very juicy. In the end, though, it’s…a cheeseburger. Although it tastes really good, it’s a little boring.
However, it’s also a blank canvas–the recipe leaves the toppings up to the cook, and my husband and I started brainstorming after the first bite. He’s thinking bacon, sharp cheddar and French’s onions. I’m thinking Worcestershire sauce, bacon, caramelized onions and Swiss cheese. We seem to have a theme going here.
Fluffy Buttermilk Pancakes (Season 1, “The Breakup, Part 2,” and Season 2, “Lost and Found”)
Pancakes are more of my husband’s department but again, the Gilmores ate a lot of them, so I had to try, and it was completely worth the effort. Mostly, anyway. The book gives cooks a choice between chocolate chip pancakes with coffee-flavored maple syrup or blueberry with lemon-flavored maple syrup, and we went for the latter this time.
Eh. The pancakes themselves tasted really good once the butter and syrup were on them, and believe me, the syrup makes these things, but they cook funny. It’s not just because this was my first time making pancakes, either. When my husband tried his hand, he said the batter browns too fast and needs more rising agent.
The final verdict, and this is from my husband, son, and I: Absolutely make the syrup, add the blueberries, but use Krusteaz or some other favorite mix for the batter. It’s much less of a headache with probably better results. I also don’t mind leaving the pancake-making to my husband after this; I prefer making crepes (find one of my favorite recipes here).
Sookie’s Magic Risotto (Season 1, “The Deer Hunters”)
Risotto can be kind of intimidating because there’s always the danger of it becoming gummy or too crunchy or something, not to mention it just sounds fancy. However, the recipe in Gilmore is written out very precisely, which I really appreciate since I’ve only made risotto once in my life and it wasn’t even the real thing.
Anyway, we’ve got layers of flavor here with a minimum of effort–the rice is cooked in vegetable broth infused with shrimp, parsley, garlic and toasted saffron, plus there are scallops, white wine (I used Cupcake Butterkissed Chardonnay) and butter, of course. It takes a little bit of time and patience to come together, but like Anne Burrell’s Bolognese, the process seems to be a matter of getting just to the edge of disaster and then pulling back. The result is not too fishy or too boozy, with just the right amount of depth and freshness.
I don’t know about Sookie’s risotto being truly magic, but it is truly delicious.
Dark Chocolate Pudding (Season 1, “Rory’s Birthday Parties”)
It’s pretty hard to turn down chocolate. It’s also pretty hard to turn down pudding, and Gilmore’s is silky, smooth, and rich. I kinda thought it would be darker, but it doesn’t matter. Oh, my word.
The only thing I would say about the recipe is that it’s unnecessarily complicated. Chopping the chocolate squares makes the recipe a bit more labor-intensive than it otherwise might be. It’s not hard, but I’ve seen other pudding recipes that use baking cocoa instead and the finished product turns out fine. The recipe also instructs the cook to pour the pudding mixture into an extra bowl to stir and then back into the pan to thicken up, but I didn’t have to do that. Since there’s quite a bit of cornstarch, all I had to do was keep whisking it in the mixing bowl.
Oh well, it was all worth it, and the whipped cream is a nice touch.
Shrimp from Al’s Pancake World (Season 6, “You’ve Been Gilmored”)
Al is quite the guy, and his shrimp are pretty danged fabulous. They smell, really, really good. They’re a teeny bit sweet, thanks to brown sugar and a bit of vermouth. They’re really spicy, thanks to copious amounts of cayenne and black pepper. And they’re smoke-y, thanks to cumin and cinnamon. That’s only the beginning. It’s Old Bay with a bigger attitude. And as the cookbook says, it’s hard to stop eating them.
Gilmore is a little vague about how to serve Al’s shrimp, but we had ours for dinner, accompanied by NearEast Basil and Herb Pearled Couscous and a simple green salad. The couscous in particular went a long way in cooling the heat of the shrimp. Yum!
Chicken Noodle Soup with Mashed Potatoes (Season 3, “Haunted Leg”)
Lorelai ordered chicken soup and mashed potatoes when she had a cold, but the rest of us don’t need to wait for that. This meal is hearty, creamy, and comforting, with the soup in particular being savory and complex from vegetable broth, chicken bone broth, and lots of veg and meat. I don’t know if this food combo will cure a cold, but my guys and I felt nicely well-fed and sleepy afterwards.
Making the soup required a little faith, though. When I make chicken soup I usually add cooked pasta instead of cooking it in the soup because those little puppies tend to be pretty thirsty and suck up all the broth. Seeing as this soup calls for four quarts of liquid, it wasn’t really a problem. Oh, and The Official Cookbook likes farfalle. This isn’t the only time we see it.
One thing that was definitely needless was that the mashed potato recipe wanted me to heat up the butter, sour cream, and milk before adding it to the cooked mash, but I made an executive decision and skipped that step. There’s always the chance that milk can boil and curdle, so it seems a little too risky for something as simple as mashed potatoes, and these turned out more than fine. And yes, I know Julia Child heated her mashed potato mix-ins, but again, it’s not a must.
Homemade Toaster Pastries (All seasons, all episodes)
Pop-Tarts. The Gilmore ladies ate these constantly at every meal, even serving them up as hors d’ouevres in the “Concert Interruptus” episode in Season One. These tarts are much fancier than the foil-wrapped affairs we get at the store, with butter and shortening in the crust, plus a little sour cream and vanilla to pop everything up, and oh boy, are they flaky and yummy.
They’re not hard to make, either; just a little time consuming. I started mine at one o’clock PM and finished at five-thirty because there’s quite a bit of refrigeration and set-up involved. Gilmore advises baking these things at thirty to forty minutes, but I only needed about half that time because my oven is really fast (We can bake an eighteen-minute pizza in about twelve, for instance).
The recipe, unfortunately, only yields six tarts, which is less than the smaller package of commercial Pop-Tarts and seems like a lot of effort for not a lot of payoff even if they taste amazing. Alton Brown’s recipe, on the other hand, looks vastly more satisfying and makes the equivalent of a box.
Homemade Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies (Season 4, “Luke Can See Her Face” and Season 7, “Gilmore Girls Only”)
Yeah, they’re tasty and milk is a must.
That said, the recipe requires a little tweaking to get the results I got. For one thing, I think I’d make the filling a little sweeter next time and add some vanilla to the cookie part. For another, it’s a butter cookie, and it’s usually better to cream the butter and the sugar before adding the other wet ingredients because incorporation is easier (The recipe says to add all the wet stuff at once).
For yet another, the recipe calls for rolling the dough into one-inch balls and then shaping the balls into a log, but what it doesn’t tell you is that the log needs to be pinched in the middle after adding the traditional crosshatch so that the finished cookie is peanut-like instead of, well, a log. The other thing is that they bake up rather thickly, so next time I think I’ll make the ball log slightly smaller and press it with a glass before shaping and crosshatching.
It’s also a good idea to put the formed cookies in the fridge until the dough is cold before baking because butter cookies spread otherwise. A lot. The book doesn’t say to do this, but again, we want peanuts instead of logs.
Cashew Chicken, Vegetable Chow Mein and Laine’s Wedding Dumplings (Season 2, “Presenting Lorelai Gilmore” and Season 6, “I Get A Sidekick Out Of You”)
Oh my word, these are some good eats. They’re not too heavy on the cornstarch, the textures are perfect, and they’re just garlicky and gingery enough. The chow mein was probably my favorite because it’s very colorful with a hint of oyster sauce flavor. The recipe says meat can be added, so I’m thinking barbecued pork for next time, because there will be a next time.
As for the cashew chicken, while the flavor is fantastic, it could have used a teeny bit more sauce and fewer cashews. There’s going to be a next time for this recipe too, and I plan on adding a little bit of celery and using only about half the amount of the nuts.
Then there are Laine’s Wedding Dumplings, which sport mung bean sprouts, onion, extra firm tofu, and oyster mushrooms. They’re also a little bit time consuming, but once I got the hang of pleating the gyoza wrappers it all went pretty fast. The dipping sauce, though, is what really sets them off, because it’s garlic Sriracha, soy sauce and rice vinegar. We could have made a meal just off of the dumplings.
Caesar’s Salad (Season 6, “The Real Paul Anka”)
The apostrophe is very important. So is avocado. Like, really important. The dressing has avocado oil in it. The whole shebang has a big dollop of guacamole on top. Serrano chile, cilantro, and red pepper flakes heat the salad nicely, with tomatoes, red onion and apple cider vinegar adding a touch of acidity. The butter lettuce complements all of it without trying to steal the show. It’s got great flavor.
That said, the salad is also a little monotonous. All of the elements, from the actual salad to the guac, to the dressing, have a lot of the same flavors and the same ingredients, so it feels like guilding the proverbial lily. It tastes good, but it’s a lot of trouble for what it is.
I think if I ever made this again I would probably add salad shrimp or crab to give all the spice a little bit of sweetness, or maybe use the salad as a side dish for a roast chicken or something.
Nachos and a Slushie (Season 5, “Norman Mailer, I’m Pregnant”)
Homemade Slushies…whoodathunk it, right? They’re surprisingly easy to make–just mix cold water with Torani syrup (I used raspberry) and freeze, scraping and stirring the dish every hour until frozen. Zoikes, they’re sweet.
The nachos are also real stars, and while the all-important cheese sauce seems too mild on its own, once it’s paired with chili beans, onions, and jarred jalapeños there’s plenty of flavor and heat going on.
Gilmore calls its Slushie and nacho pairing “the perfect Lorelai snack,” but they’re really dinner and dessert. My husband had about half of his plate cleaned before I even sat down.
Johnny Machette’s Pasta Casserole (Season 3, “Happy Birthday, Baby”)
Next to burgers and Pop Tarts, Johnny Machette is one of the more infamous foods of the Gilmore Girls universe, probably because of Richard’s sudden nostalgic impulse to make it and Emily’s chagrin at finding an open can of cream of mushroom soup on the counter.
The other thing is that there are literally dozens of recipes out there for Johnny Machetti, although the cream of mushroom soup seems to be a pretty standard ingredient. Other than that, the sky’s the limit as long as the finished product is served in a heap. The recipe in Eat Like A Gilmore had chicken, broccoli, zucchini and rotini, but Official‘s recipe is more of a fancy tuna casserole with farfalle, red bell pepper and, again, zucchini.
It’s really tasty and really filling, but I think it could have used a little more green, maybe from chives, and probably a little more sauce. Browning the veggies was a nice touch, though.
Frozen Pizza with Tater Tots (Season 6, “You’ve Been Gilmored”)
Official has plenty of Gilmore-worthy smorgasbords and this one is part of the Wallow Board, which also includes edible cookie dough and homemade butter brickle ice cream. Since no one at my house is in a wallowing mood at the moment, we went straight for the pizza.
While the show has Lorelai dumping the frozen tots on the frozen pizzas, Gilmore advises partially baking the tots separately at first for obvious reasons–tots have to bake longer–and then adding them to the frozen pizza to bake the rest of the way. The tricky part is getting the topped pizza into the oven without the tots rolling off, but we did good.
Pizza with Tater Tots is strangely intriguing, if a little bland, so pepperoni is probably a better choice than cheese. I will say this, though–this pizza had better flavor the second day. I don’t know why.
So there we have it. Overall this is an excellent and impressive book, with a lot of humor and fun all though it. Some of the ingredients, however, are a wee bit daunting–a lot of the cake and pastry recipes use vanilla paste, which is not only hard to find, but can run anywhere from roughly six dollars to around a hundred (See Amazon’s selection here).
Only one of the recipes I made was an outright fail, so much so that I didn’t show it here–the Chocolate Cake with Raspberry Bavarian Cream. The recipe calls for adding two cups of hot water to the cake batter before baking, which completely ruined what would have probably been a very dense, fudge-y cake. I was bummed, but tried to salvage things by making cake pops. It might have worked except there was so much cake that we still had to throw half of it out. Sigh.
Other than that, I think I’ll be using the Gilmore Girls Official Cookbook pretty often. Who knows, we may even need to do a Part Two of these recipes.
All right, thanks for reading, all, and I hope you’ll check back on Monday for a special announcement. Have a good weekend…
The complete series of Gilmore Girls is available on DVD as a set or as individual seasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. A Year In the Life is also available (DVD and Blu-ray).
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