It’s a meditative process she can get lost in.

On Sundays-barring national emergencies-Harris can be found near the stove, sometimes starting her prep work hours in advance. When she was running for president just a few months ago, making elaborate dinners for her loved ones was one of the things she missed most. She’s a little earnest about it! Isn’t that part of the fun? “It’s a gift that you can give people,” she says of cooking. The eggs remain one of the better metaphors for what Harris loves about cooking and food: She likes to feed people, to make them laugh, to bring them together around a table. One of Harris’s earliest “little specialties,” as she puts it, was scrambled eggs, which she perfected around the third grade and liked to top with cheese cut into the shape of a smiling face.

So Harris did, from her mother, of course, who had moved to the United States from India in her 20s, and from the woman whom Harris calls her second mother, who lived down the street. “My mother used to tell me, ‘Kamala, you clearly like to eat good food. “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,” Harris says.

The kitchen big game changers