With Thanksgiving only a couple days away, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris decided to share her recipe for cornbread dressing.
"During difficult times I have always turned to cooking," she wrote in an Instagram post on Tuesday with her recipe. "This year, I wanted to share one of my family’s favorite Thanksgiving recipes with you."
Harris' recipe is notably Southern in nature. Traditionally, Southern-style dressing is made outside the turkey (hence "dressing" instead of "stuffing") and is often made with cornbread.
"I hope whenever you’re able to make it in life, it brings you as much warmth as it has brought me — even when separated from those I love," Harris added.
To make the dressing, she begins by baking cornbread according to package instructions, then letting it cool and crumbling it. Then, she takes spicy pork sausage out of its casing, crumbles it and browns it in pan, removes it from the pan and sets it aside. Harris then sautés onions, apples and celery in the same pan in the remaining oil and combines that in a bowl with the sausage, cornbread crumbs, melted butter, a host of herbs and chicken broth. Finally, she dumps the mixture into a baking dish and bakes at 375 F for about 40 minutes.
Her recipe comes on the heels of a CDC warning to Americans not to travel for Thanksgiving for fear of "exponential growth" in COVID-19 cases.
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Harris has long been passionate about cooking. Back in April, she took her Senate colleague Mark Warner (D-Va.) to task over a disturbing tuna melt he made in a video, and even helped him with an official re-do.
In a May 2020 interview with Glamour, she said her love of cooking came from her mom.
“As a child, I remember hearing the pots and smelling the food, and kind of like someone in a trance, I would walk into the kitchen to see all this incredible stuff happening,” she said. “My mother used to tell me, ‘Kamala, you clearly like to eat good food. You better learn how to cook.’”
She said that she's in the process of empowering her husband, Doug Emhoff, to take on more cooking duties.
“Because as much as I like cooking, I have realized I can’t do it all the time,” she told Glamour. "It takes him about four hours to do what I do in an hour, but it is delicious so I just have to be quiet and let it happen."
When TODAY Food spoke with actor and showrunner Mindy Kaling earlier this month, she also sang Harris' culinary praises. The two filmed a cooking segment together in December 2019 when Harris was still in the presidential primary race.
"She’s one of those women that can do anything," Kaling said, adding she had been very nervous to film with the then-presidential hopeful.
"She politely ignored my terrible cooking and quietly corrected it," Kaling chuckled. “She was absolutely wonderful. She’s great.”
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