We cooked Monica Geller's best dishes from 'Friends'
She’ll be there for you, when your stomach starts to roar.
Before celebrity chefs ruled Bravo reality series, Monica Gellar was easily the best chef on TV. From her dinner parties to the endless weekday breakfasts she hosted, Chef Gellar is still one of television’s greatest foodies.
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Here are some of the dishes Friends fiends everywhere drooled over every Thursday night when the new episodes aired.
1. Chandler’s Righteous Mac and Cheese
This dish teenage Monica made to impress college-age Chandler back in the 1980s is the whole reason Monica became a professional chef. “This is great, you should be a chef,” Chandler suggests, over Monica’s cheesy, buttery noodles.
2. Tiki Death Punch
After a long day of work and whatever Phoebe did circa 1994, Monica pours out a pink blended “Tiki Death Punch” for the ladies. The pictured recreation is made from blood orange sorbet, a splash of mango liqueur, rum and seltzer, but Monica’s version would be precisely measured and seriously boozy, because she doesn’t mess around.
3. Monica’s Job-Winning Sauce
During Monica’s short stint as a food critic for a local newspaper, in which she calls restaurant Alessandro’s sauce “inedible swill," she shows the restaurant owner how to make her own delectable tomato sauce.
4. Lasagna
Monica always has a lasagna on-hand. Sure, Rachel left her engagement ring in an early rendition of Monica’s lasagna (“The One With the Sonogram at the End”), but that baked pasta looks tantalizing enough to risk choking.
5. Nestle Tollhouse Trial Cookies
Drop the French accent and Phoebe’s favorite cookies are just the recipe on the back of a disposable chocolate chip bag. The 22 batches Monica makes before realizing what recipe is correct are all probably pretty incredible.
6. Jam
In a sticky attempt to get over boyfriend Richard, Monica activates the jam plan. Using fruit she found “at the docks” at the crack of dawn (the nearest 24-hour bodega, really), Monica makes lots and lots of jam. She shares an excessive quantity of blackberry currant jam with Joey, but at $17 a jar to break even, Monica's jam-making plans are short lived.
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Sarah Spigelman Richter is a contributor to Mashable's Food channel. Sarah covers everything edible, from the food industry to D.I.Y. recipes. She was previously the community manager for Tastemade NYC and her writing has been seen on The Today Show's food blog, Refinery 29, the Food Network, and Gothamist. She has also developed recipes for Tabasco and other nationally recognized brands and has blogged for 5 years at "Fritos and Foie Gras." Sarah is obsessed with "Orphan Black" and chili-cheese Fritos and is still depressed that Loehmann's closed.
