Kamala Harris
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has started the stuffing — and more — as her California family gathers in Des Moines, Iowa for Thanksgiving.
Harris has recently been emphasizing her cooking skills, inviting reporters to watch as she prepared and ate a meal with a family in Ames this fall. Politics was discussed at the dinner table. She recently made a cooking video with a Hollywood movie star, discovering she and Mindy Kaling keep their spices in old Taster’s Choice jars — just like their parents did.
“This is how we grew up,” Harris told Radio Iowa this afternoon. “You waste nothing.”
Food has clearly become her jam.
“I love food,” Harris said, with a laugh. “When I was growing up my mother was basically like: ‘Honey, you love to eat. You’d better learn how to cook.'”
Earlier this afternoon — in full view a kitchen full of reporters and photographers — Harris started the process of roasting the giblets, the turkey neck and a few other things for the Thanksgiving Day gravy.
“Not everyone understands gravy, I think,” Harris told Radio Iowa after saying gravy was the most important item on the Thanksgiving Day menu.
Her cooking and baking — she made the cornbread for the stuffing this afternoon as “it’s better to have it be a day old,” she said — it’s all about 180 degrees from Hillary Clinton who said in 1992 and emphasized in the closing moments of the 2016 campaign that she decided to pursue a legal career rather than stay home and bake cookies. Harris — a lawyer who’s been a prosecutor, California’s attorney general and now is a U.S. senator — suggests she’s inspired by her mother, who was a cancer researcher, and who Harris describes as a “phenomenal cook.”
“I just love to do it,” Harris told Radio Iowa as sat in the kitchen of the Des Moines home her family has rented for the week. “I think also there is no greater gift you can give people you love than to feed them and feed them a good meal.”