I tried Hillary Clinton’s Chardonnay and hot sauce diet for a week
Every time I see a little girl in a pantsuit, I choke up. I can’t help it — I’m a crier — but I also see what that girl in the pantsuit represents: The power of Hillary Rodham Clinton and the importance of having strong, visible role models for little girls.
I would love to be more like Clinton. We share two first initials and an insatiable perfectionist streak, but before I read her new book “What Happened,” I was convinced we were as disparate as a fish and a bicycle. Clinton has courage and conviction, perseverance, and the bone structure to pull off a layered crop. I have an addiction to Desert Island Discs and the ability to speed read.
But then I read “What Happened” and something occurred to me. Clinton and I were more similar than I previously thought. There’s a line early on in the book when she is discussing the salve that soothed her in darkest doldrums of late last year. It was thus: Martha Stewart’s famous mac and cheese, heavy on the Gruyere and pecorino, a glass of red wine and the new season of Gilmore Girls.
Wait a second, wait a second, back up the truck. This was my exact recipe for curing the particular fyg of a bad day. Right down to Stewart’s pasta, which was the only thing my best friend’s dad knew how to cook, and which we used to eat sitting on her stoop in Cobble Hill when I lived in New York as a teenager.
Instantly, I felt closer to Clinton. We both love mac and cheese with grated nutmeg and cayenne pepper and the fast-talking antics of Rory and Lorelai Gilmore. What else might we both love?
I flicked through the book, finding scores of references to foodstuffs and libations that Clinton not only imbibed but actively chose to put into her body. What might I learn if I followed her diet for a week? Who might I be? Who might I become?
Food as medicine
A good chunk of “What Happened” is preoccupied with, well, what happened. And what happened after Clinton lost the 2016 Presidential Election is this: She tried her hand at origami, she watched trashy television and she practiced yoga. “It wasn’t all yoga and breathing,” she writes. “I also drank my share of chardonnay.”
Food as medicine — or more accurately, as balm and salve — is key to the narrative of Clinton. As it is key to the narrative of many women. For me, cooking is a stress reliever and I find the repetitive processes — chopping, stirring, following a recipe — soothing. The other thing that’s medicinal? A glass of wine or three of an evening.
Clinton’s drink of choice is a nice crisp Chardonnay, which I usually avoid like the plague. (I’m a Pinot Gris girl myself). But maybe this is what I’ve been doing wrong this whole time. Maybe I’ve been drinking the wrong wine. Plot twist: I haven’t. Chardonnay is gross and I never want to drink it again. I managed to barely keep down my glass at the bar after work before switching over to my usual drink.
The other soothing food Clinton craves is Indian food, and at least here we’re on common ground. Clinton and her staff ate a mammoth curry feast after she gave testimony in the Benghazi probe in 2015. She also mentions eating Indian food on the campaign trail in “What Happened.”
So on a particularly bad day last week I leaned right into this story, ordering almost $50 worth of curries, samosas, onion bhaji and naan bread. Because I don’t have any internet at my house — which lies at the root of the aforementioned bad day — I was compelled to watch a DVD like it was 2009. And the only DVD I could find was Gilmore Girls. I immediately felt better.
Food as fun
There are also plenty of treats outlined in “What Happened.” Things like ice cream bars and Oreos, chocolate cake with turquoise frosting, pork chops on a stick, burgers and fries, like the ones George W. Bush offers to cook Clinton in the aftermath of the inauguration. And “vodka martinis with olives, as cold as they could make it.”
I love a martini as much as the next Bond girl, and I can definitely get behind anything involving burgers. I looked up George W. Bush’s burger recipe and ended up with the outline for a cheeseburger pizza, famously beloved of the former president in the White House. It’s topped with ground beef, cheddar cheese, bacon, pickles and lashings of hot sauce and sounds like your stomach is cashing checks your heart valves are going to bounce.
Hot sauce is Clinton’s not-so-secret vice. Her favorite brand is Ninja Squirrel Sriracha. When she was First Lady, the White House kitchen was stocked with more than 100 different hot sauces. But in a pinch, Clinton will make do with Tabasco, which she claimed to carry in her handbag on her trips as Secretary of State, like a diplomatic Beyonce.
For lack of a presidential chef, I made Bush’s cheese burger pizza myself. It was, in a word, greasy. Reader, I loved it.
Food as fuel
There’s almost a whole chapter in “What Happened” detailing what Clinton and her staff ate on the campaign trail. Scrambled egg whites with spinach for breakfast, lots of hot sauce on top, protein bars and goldish crackers as snacks, and, when the going got tough, junk food. (“I remember a lot of pizza with sliced jalapenos delivered right to the [campaign] plane,” Clinton writes.)
Breakfast was the easiest meal to follow, even if it meant adding Tabasco to perfectly cooked scrambled eggs. The black coffee was a problem, as I’m usually a soy latte kind of girl. (Clinton does write about enjoying a latte made with honey and lavender from a bakery in Des Moines, but this level of caffeine artistry eludes me.) Lunch – tinned salmon with a basic salad, or those chicken tenders with almond flour – was a sad affair. I’m just not that into salad.
Luckily, Clinton also mentions loving a sandwich every now and then. I could feel my whole week building up to this sandwich. I chose my destination wisely. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a sandwich as much as I did that one. And the cafe has tiny little bottles of Tabasco, just crying out to be shaken all over your sandwich.