Sookie's Peach Sauce = Gilmore Girls Geekery!

Most of you know that I am a huge Gilmore Girls fan... fan, addict, same thing. Have you seen my Luke's Diner shopping tote? As a true fanatic, I am proud to say that through the years I have recruited several Gilmore Girls fans - ten more recruits and I get a badge! :D

One of my favorite things about the show is that it revolves around food a lot! Not much vegan food, but mostly easily veganizable treats. Sookie, played by actress Melissa McCarthy, is the head chef at the Independence Inn and the Dragonfly Inn. She is an awesome and extremely clumsy chef who is totally obsessed with food. When we first meet Sookie, she is on the kitchen floor practically buried under a big avalanche of pots and pans while her kitchen staff tries to dig her out. She is plastered with band-aids, and her stitches (that she got after she cut her hand making radish roses) have split open. She doesn't even seem upset about the pot avalanche and the split stitches because she's psyched about fixing her peach sauce! Apparently, she was using "too much maple syrup" which "strangled the fruit." So keeping in mind that the peach sauce should be sweetened with maple syrup but not so much that it overpowers the taste of the peaches, I made my own Sookie's Peach Sauce! :)

Sookie's Peach Sauce 3 peaches 1/4 cup fresh orange juice, strained 3 tbsp maple syrup pinch of salt 1/4 tsp ground anise seeds, optional 1/4 tsp vanilla extract 1. Peel and cut the peaches into chunks. No need to dice them perfectly, Sookie isn't looking! :) 2. Whisk together the orange juice, maple syrup, salt, and anise seeds. 3. In a medium saucepan, combine the peach chunks and the orange juice mix. Simmer for 20 minutes. 4. Remove from heat and transfer everything to a blender. Add the vanilla and liquefy for a minute or until you can't see any chunky bits. 5. Strain the sauce through a fine mesh strainer and refrigerate for at least an hour before serving. This recipe makes one cup of tangy sauce. If it's too tangy for you, just add maple syrup to the cold sauce until your taste buds are happy. The anise seeds add a tiny little extra som'n som'n, but you can leave them out if you want.

A few pictures that I took along the way:

I blanched the peaches for a minute
and then cooled them in ice water for easy peeling

The skin slips right off!

Uneven peachy chunks

Simmering the goods

Straining the sauce and catching pesky fibrous bits

The tanginess of the peach sauce goes wonderfully with the mild sweetness of vanilla ice cream. My ice cream here is basically one can of coconut milk sweetened with maple syrup and flavored with vanilla extract. My ice cream maker takes care of the rest! How very un-gourmet! :)

Anyway, if you want to see Sookie in action there is a youtube video with a compilation of some of her funniest moments. Needless to say, the video is full of spoilers!

*sigh* Our long weekend at home went by way too fast, and I was so busy being a psycho baker that I didn't spend much time on the interwebs. I have some serious blog-reading-catching-upping to do now - google reader is about to explode! We have only a couple of weeks of traveling left, then all my blogging habits will go back to normal! YAY! :)