A Kamala Harris and Tim Walz feast.Recently, my sister and I made a dinner composed entirely of recipes from Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. We cooked Kamala’s famous roast chicken with her cornbread dressing on the side. Then we assembled the award-winning Coach Walz tater tot hotdish, plus a mysterious Walz family dessert called a “cookie salad.” I guess we thought this meal might reveal something about the candidates, about the flavor of America they’re cooking up. I also wanted a quasi-international perspective on the American election: My sister, Hazel—who was visiting from Ontario—happens to be Canadian. What follows are Hazel’s kooky takes on American politics, and our reviews of the candidates’ cuisine. I’ll clarify that we considered including recipes from Donald Trump and JD Vance, but feasting on overcooked steak with ketchup seemed kind of bleak. Kamala Harris’s Cornbread Dressing Hazel and I began by making a cornbread dressing recipe that Vice President Harris—an enthusiastic home cook—once posted on Twitter. It involved packaged cornbread mix, spicy pork sausage, apples, onions, celery, and assorted herbs.  I threw on a Tim Walz-themed dad rock playlist and, to the dulcet tones of “Kid Charlemagne,” Hazel got to work chopping onions. “I need to watch some videos of this ‘Tim Walz’ to get into the mindset,” she announced. That’s how I learned that Hazel, an 18-year-old with internet access, knew basically nothing about the vice presidential nominee. I handed her my laptop. In a YouTube video, she was baffled by Walz’s reference to cat ladies. (“So this has not penetrated the consciousness in Canada?” I asked. “Nobody I know is talking about it,” she replied.) In the next video, he further alienated Hazel by accidentally saying he’d become friends with school shooters. But when she discovered Obama discussing the governor’s flannels, Walz finally connected: “Yes! I love grunge Tim Walz!” my sister cried.  While I made dressing, Hazel got hooked on Walz. She watched a video of him at the Minnesota State Fair and proclaimed him “too happy about the slingshot.” She watched him misspeak on Kimmel, saying he plans on “waking up with Madam President on November 6th.” She literally cried laughing as he told a story about doing the Heimlich on a boy in the lunchroom who was choking on a Polish dog. “He is me,” she concluded. “I would like to say I have big dad energy.” By this point, I was stirring a skillet of onions, apples, and celery, and it was almost overflowing. I was not sure my tiny oven could hold all this dressing. My sister, still watching YouTube, called out to ask what the electoral college is. I was too overwhelmed to answer, so I told her to Google it. “This drained me,” she said after watching an informational video. Shutting the laptop, she opened the fudge stripes we’d bought for the cookie salad, because blood sugar and morale had flagged.  It was 5:17 pm. We’d been cooking for an hour and a half, but the dressing wasn’t in the oven, and we hadn’t even started on the hotdish. Kamala’s cornbread dressing. Tim Walz’s Tater Tot Hotdish When I asked Hazel what she thinks hotdish is, she did not hesitate: “an OnlyFans profile.” Then, “No, I have no idea what it is. It’s probably some kind of pandering.”  In essence, “hotdish” is what Minnesotans call casserole. Tim Walz’s version involves ground turkey, frozen green beans, lots of cheddar, and a coating of tater tots. Allegedly, it’s good: In 2014, it won the Minnesota Congressional Delegation’s hotdish cook-off. As we threw the poultry into a pan, I explained that Tim Walz once told his vegetarian daughter that, in Minnesota, turkey does not count as meat.  On the subject of daughters, Hazel wanted to know if Donald Trump has them. “He does, right?” she said, as she pulled up the video of Trump saying he’d date Ivanka while Ivanka sat next to him on the couch. Hazel was appalled. “Like, that’s her? That’s the daughter he’s talking about? She’s right there?” Quickly, she switched back to Coach Walz and Hope doing a wholesome hands-free driving PSA.  Apprehensively, I asked my sister—a dual citizen who is eligible to vote in Ohio—whether she had ordered her ballot. Hazel grew ashen, then began to babble incoherently. She said she had emailed “Tammy,” whom she described as “the person for Ohio,” who told her that the deadline had passed. There was an insinuation of voter suppression, but when I inquired further, she waved me off: “I’m so far gone from this election, honestly.”  By 6:07 pm, every mixing bowl in my house was dirty and Hazel had asked several times if we had a “backup dessert” in case, for some crazy reason, the “cookie salad” wasn’t good. Around 6:30, my son came in from soccer practice and sprawled atop the rug, exhausted. I’d bought a hundred dollars worth of food, and yet there was nothing to feed him.  At 6:45, my husband, clearly hungry, found me melting two-and-a-half cups of cheddar cheese into a bechamel. Calmly, I explained that I was about to pour this cheese sauce over ground turkey and green beans, top it with a layer of tater tots, and bake it. He stuck out his tongue in disgust. “The fuck?” he said. He had never heard of hotdish, and insisted on calling it “hot pot tater tot.” The tater tot hotdish bakes. Kamala Harris’s Roast Chicken At 7:35, the hotdish still needed to bake for 25 more minutes, and the chicken wasn’t even in the oven yet. My husband and son were hungry. Hazel and I were hopped up on fudge stripes. “Is she an INFP?” my sister asked of Vice President Harris, then suggested releasing the candidates’ Meyers-Briggs results as a way to win Gen Z votes. The chicken didn’t require much prep, since I’d rubbed it the night before in Kamala’s signature blend of lemon zest, herbs, and garlic. Only I’d rubbed the wrong side of the bird, so it wasn’t going to reflect the Vice President’s cooking. Such incompetence is why I’ll never be president. In my defense, I was catatonically tired when I prepped the chicken, and also I’m a moron. When I threw in the chicken at 8:07, Hazel was on FaceTime with our brother in Montreal. She told him that Harris is going to win. My son inhaled a big gulp of air. “This is America,” he cautioned. “Weird stuff happens. People love Trump.” Kamala’s roast chicken. Walz Family Cookie Salad We chose to make the “cookie salad” not because it looked good, but because there wasn’t much else when I Googled “dessert recipe” plus various combinations of the candidates’ names. In 2020, Harris made monster cookies with an Iowan teen who was caucusing for her, but the recipe belonged to the girl’s grandma. There’s a “Kamala-inspired” coconut cake, but again, the recipe is not the Vice President’s. Recently, Tim Walz’s YouTube channel posted a video of his wife making gingersnaps, which I would have devoured. But two weeks ago, the top result for “Tim Walz dessert recipe” was cookie salad, so cookie salad it was.  My sister prepared dessert while I was making hotdish, so I have no insight into how it came together. But Hazel was squeamish about its components: instant vanilla pudding, buttermilk, whipped cream, and mandarin oranges, topped with crumbled cookies. She felt strongly that this was not the makings of a hit.  Despite her skepticism, she did—while whipping the cream—express gratitude that a responsible dad-type was running for office. She herself would be a horrible Vice President, she explained, because she would “forget to keep track of deadlines and then suddenly there would be no abortion.” I love her, but she’s probably right. As I puttered around the kitchen, piling dirty mixing bowls into the sink, I heard Hazel on FaceTime with our dad. He’s aggro about politics, so he was yelling at her: “You can vote up until Election Day as long as you get the ballot in the mail.” Hazel texted him the email from Tammy, which actually seemed less like voter suppression than a result of her own mistake. “I checked the wrong box,” she admitted, and our dad looked shocked. “You’re not registered to vote? There’s a deadline to register?” In Canada, this isn’t a thing.  This, in case you were wondering, is a “cookie salad.” Review Ideally, this meal would have been served together: chicken as the centerpiece, with cornbread dressing and tater tot hotdish on the side, the cookie salad to finish. But my family sat down to eat while the chicken was still roasting. We had no choice. It was almost 8:30 and we were starved.  CORNBREAD DRESSING “Cornbread-forward” was my husband’s skeptical review. When Hazel tried it, she said, “Well, I seem to keep consuming it.” Then, “Actually, yes. It’s good.” For me, the dressing was the highlight: flavorful and interesting, a beautiful kick from the sausage, whose fennel seeds paired well with the apple. It was sweeter than I wanted, and also missing acid—cranberry sauce would have fixed it, which I guess we should have bought. TATER TOT HOTDISH For the hotdish, a mixed reaction: My son gobbled it, my husband liked the tater tots but not the morass of turkey and gravy below. Hazel lit up and said, “I actually really love this. I dig it.” [During fact checking Hazel denied saying this.] Personally, I felt that the Tim Walz hotdish lacked flavor; it seemed true when he’d said that “black pepper is the top of the spice level in Minnesota.” When I mentioned that this hotdish won a Congressional competition, my husband looked haunted and said, “I can’t imagine what the other ones tasted like.”  COOKIE SALAD I will be blunt: The cookie salad is not a keeper. The buttermilk was an interesting twist—a slight tang, a dairy taste. But the pudding wasn’t very flavorful, and the mandarin oranges were, depending who you ask, either too many or too few. The pudding was also an odd texture: both fluffy and watery somehow, not thick enough, not right. My husband didn’t like it, and my son took just one bite: “I am a self-described sugar fiend, and it’s even too sweet for me,” he said.  ROAST CHICKEN  Finally, at 10:27 pm, the chicken was ready. I shook my sister awake on the couch to ask if she wanted some. She did not. But my husband and son loved it—the chicken was a tawny brown with crispy skin, the meat citrusy and herby and well-brined. It was a touch more garlicky than I wanted but still delicious, even though I botched the rub. I had a few bites standing over the stove, filled my dishwasher for a second load, then went to bed.  And did I learn anything substantive about the candidates from this exercise in prepping their food? No, I did not. They’re not on Top Chef, they’re running to be the leaders of the free world. I’ll spare you the jokes about “kitchen table issues”; the food stuff is irrelevant, we’re voting on other things. Well, I am, at least—Hazel will have to work that out with Tammy.The post I Made Dinner Using Kamala Harris and Tim Walz Recipes first appeared on Washingtonian.