I Cooked Through ‘Gilmore Girls: The Official Cookbook’ And I'll Never Be The Same
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In the timeline of Gilmore Girls fandom, I’m a serious late bloomer. Though Rory Gilmore and I are essentially the same age, I never watched the show back when it aired from 2000 to 2007. I didn’t even make my first visit to Stars Hollow until the show was already a throwback, but the lovable cast of characters showed up in my life right when I needed them most. Now, preparing recipes inspired by them—courtesy of Gilmore Girls: The Official Cookbook, set to be released on May 10, 2022—not only reminds me of why they appealed in the first place. They also came to my rescue, once again.
For the uninitiated, the show follows the lives of a mother-daughter duo, Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, through ambitions and disappointments, loves and heartbreaks in a fictitious small town of Stars Hollow, C.T., at the turn of the millennium. The internet existed, but social media didn’t, and theirs was a largely analog existence.
I didn’t meet them until 2017. I was a burnt-out millennial in the midst of a quarter-life crisis. A job at a food media startup that I desperately loved had ended abruptly, when it suddenly folded. My partner had departed for a four-month-long job posting 3,000 miles away. Our landlord had died, so I was packing and dealing with moving logistics on my own. Underemployed and with my confidence totally shot, I was lonely, stressed, and just so sad.
In the midst of it all, one night I was scrolling through my phone to avoid packing another box. My friend, Chris, a diehard Gilmore Girls fan since way back, had posted a request on Facebook. Could someone come help her run a massive Gilmore Girls trivia night at a concert venue? Though I’d never seen a single episode, I said, “sure.”
When I arrived at the sold-out event, Chris wrapped me in a tight hug and handed me a home-stenciled “Rory’s Going to Yale!” t-shirt. I watched, dumbfounded, as hundreds of people paraded into the venue. Way more of them than I expected were dressed in costume. A baby wearing a flannel and a backwards baseball cap won the “Luke” category, the outfit a spot-on homage to the town’s hunky, hardworking diner cook.
That night, I ran around the theater gathering scorecards and bearing witness to the unbridled delight of pure fandom. I needed to know what it was all about, I realized. Afterward, back in my box-filled apartment, I queued up the show’s first episode on Netflix. The nostalgia washed over me in the blue light glow of my laptop: the predictable progress of high school; the gigantic coffee mugs the size of cereal bowls; the glory of a time before social media; the beauty of an imagined small town existence; and a simmering sense of privileged well-being that everything’s gonna be alright.
I knew it was just a show (and a deeply flawed one in many ways), but in that moment, my broken-hearted self needed that escape. In the difficult months that followed, Lorelai, Rory, Lane, Luke, Miss Patty, Emily, Richard, Sookie, Jackson, and even the town weirdo Kirk kept me company. I nursed my grief and slowly moved on with life. I made it through the move and found a new job. My partner and I went on a long road trip and decided to move across the country. Somewhere in the mix, I finished watching the show. It was a bittersweet goodbye to friends who had given me stability when I needed it.
They all came flooding back, though, as I sat down with Elena P. Craig and Kristen Mulrooney’s Gilmore Girls: The Official Cookbook. The book contains recipes for Luke’s Diner Cheeseburger, Sookie’s Magic Risotto, a DIY version of a tube of cookie dough (to be eaten while wallowing, of course), and even the Lime Fantasy Surprise that Rory made for Dean during that whole Donna Reed fiasco. I flagged pages deciding what to cook, texted Chris for what she thought the most iconic Gilmore Girls foods are, and polled friends on Instagram about what to make.
And then, just as I was about to start cooking, and in what I’d like to think is a truly Amy Sherman-Palladino-appropriate plot twist, something in my life changed drastically. I learned that I’m pregnant.
Dear reader, I’m not proud to say that my first reaction to this information was fear. Change is tough for me, and while this is happy news, it also represents such a massive change that I almost didn’t know how to process it. Though the circumstances were quite different, I found myself unmoored in much the same way I did in those days when Gilmore Girls first entered my life.
Still, I trekked to the grocery store, filling a cart with Gilmore Girls ingredients—frozen pizza, tater tots, and Monterey Jack cheese—but my head was elsewhere.
Am I too old for this? How do you get ready for this? Am I going to be a good mom?
Watching the show, I had always thought of myself as a Rory: bookish, ambitious, maybe a little self-absorbed. All of a sudden, I’d Freaky Friday-ed into Lorelai; still a little self-absorbed, but now I needed to be the grown-up in the room—even if, most days, I still feel entirely like a teenager.
Let’s be clear, I’m no teenager. I’m now several years older than Lorelai was in the first season of Gilmore Girls, but I still feel as though I’ve got a long way to go in terms of building a life with the same stability as hers. It’s a common refrain for millennials; we without pensions or houses of our own or hopes of retirement. There are very good reasons so many of us in the Rory generation are skipping having kids at all.
I stewed over these worries as I mixed up batter for Fluffy Buttermilk Pancakes (pg. 19) “with a side of pancakes,” my first Gilmore Girls cookbook recipe. I thought about how Luke would put blueberries in the pancakes for Rory when she was feeling down, and added some to mine. I thought about my own parents: When they made pancakes for me when I was a kid, they would flip the drips of batter that landed on the griddle and serve them up alongside my pancakes as a tiny short stack for Mousie, my imaginary friend. I sipped my one allowed cup of coffee for the day and smiled.
The recipe was solid, if not particularly special. But eating it felt like taking care of myself.
Tackling recipe number two, Frozen Pizza with Tater Tots (pg. 118), I studded a frozen pizza with, well, tater tots. (A serious Lorelai move and a softball of a recipe.) I opted for Cajun tots, a specialty at a local restaurant in my current small town of McMinnville, OR—my own Stars Hollow—and opted to make the frozen pizza a supreme (aka topped with everything), for you know, health. And because the Gilmore household delivery pizza order is “one with everything.” I figured this was close enough.
My partner and I ate this ridiculous pizza from the couch while watching a movie. It seemed a little bit like cheating to call this a recipe, but it was a good reminder that I don’t need to make things harder than they need to be. I tried to convince him to try another Lorelai creation, Emergency Salad, referred to in the cookbook as Complete Salad in a Bag (pg. 119)—greens doused in ranch dressing and eaten directly out of the bag they came in—but he insisted on eating salad off of a plate like adults.
Later that week, I met with a midwife and I liked her immediately. We started to share our news with friends and family and I began to feel their happiness on our behalf reflected in my own heart. I felt like I could finally breathe a little bit.
What better way than to restore shortness of breath than to eat a burger covered in a quarter pound of cream cheese?
For the grand finale of my “eating like a Gilmore Girl” experiment, I had decided to make not just a Luke’s Diner burger, but the famous Luke’s Diner Santa Burger (pg. 25). This particular burger has a brief but stunning cameo in season one, episode ten, the first of what could be thought of as the Gilmore Girls Christmas episodes.
The episode goes like this: Lorelai, uninvited from her parents’ fancy Christmas party after a spat, goes to see Luke at the diner. Though he’s always pushing her to eat more healthily, on this particular night he cooks up a dish that throws caution to the wind. It’s an open-faced burger—one half of the bun is generously slathered with a cream cheese and Monterey Jack beard and, on the other half, the patty is Santa’s face, complete with onion eyebrows, olives for eyes, and a roasted red pepper hat.
The cook in me considers cooking a burger patty before even beginning to roast the red pepper (a lengthy process!) a red flag, but with a few adjustments I was able to pull off a pretty faithful version of the dish. I don’t think I’ll make it again, but in the moment, it was pretty satisfying. The best part was the laugh it elicited from my partner. Sometimes, you just need something silly—and calorie-laden—to get you through. That said, I cannot say I would recommend this particular dish to anyone with even a touch of morning sickness.
Will I turn to the pages of the Gilmore Girls: The Official Cookbook again? I don’t know. But between the lines of the recipes, I learned a deeper truth. The Rory years of my life might be long gone, and the Lorelai phase soon to begin. I hope that when it does, I can get one thing right: a love for my kid above all others and a commitment to joy, even when that joy looks like Pop Tarts and takeout pizza and being there, together.
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