| | | Hillary Clinton's deep cuts, what to do about voter suppression, and Election Day recipes. | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | November 8, 2016 | Letter No. 59 | | | | | | | | | | | | Lennys,
It is upon us: Election Day. Ever since Donald Trump — a human fondue fountain of racist epithets and misogynistic behavior — became the Republican nominee, I have been experiencing a hum of anxiety about what reality the polls will bring to fruition, one that makes me want to take a bunch of Tylenol PM and conk out for a while. At the same time, I want to experience every moment, as there's a very strong possibility history is being made. I view almost everything as a story to tell my future grandkids, and that story cannot be that I took over-the-counter sleep aids and Rip Van Winkled till November 9. But after this American Horror Story: Patriarchy of an election, how could we not be fucking exhausted?
When we launched Lenny a little over a year ago (with an interview with HRC herself, see below!) we could not have imagined that this election, with its impossibly horrifying cinematic twists and turns, would highlight every issue we set out to explore in this publication: misogyny, both overt and covert. Racism. The intersection of both, and how we can all become more aware of those intersections, using them to speak sensitively and effectively to each other's needs as women, as sisters. Whether it's getting interrupted at work or being criticized simply for being born brown, or being reminded of the entitlement certain men have toward our bodies, this election had a trigger for you. We will all be parsing this — what we saw and what we felt, what was revealed about our national consciousness — long after the results come in late tonight. But as Jenni said last week, the silver lining (because there's got to be one) is that these conversations are flooding the darkest aspects of our American identity with light.
As I've campaigned for Hillary across America, I've been struck with a surprising new sensation for a girl from lower Manhattan: patriotism. I have met such remarkable people, with such vastly different stories: a young black female cop in North Carolina, looking to redefine the role law enforcement plays in her community. An anti-choice father of two daughters in Virginia who was voting for Hillary despite the pull of his long-held religious beliefs, because he wanted to protect his girls. Geneva Reed-Veal, a mother of the Black Lives Matter movement, who refuses to allow Donald Trump to dehumanize people like her lost daughter, Sandra Bland. I felt what our current dreamboat president Obama calls the audacity of hope: the fact that, when facing impossible levels of hatred and vitriol, these people wake up every day believing they can improve their communities and that their voices matter. That's the America that was revealed to me (along with many, varied carbohydrates).
Inspired by these people, my cynical self is choosing to move through this day with hope, not fear. Until now patriotism has seemed downright Republican, but that's not fair: this liberal wants to wear an American-flag bikini at a rooftop barbecue unironically for once! So today I will act with passion, not anger. With the conviction that, as Hillary Rodham Clinton says, "America is great because America is good." Go ahead and prove us wrong.
Loving you,
Lena | | | | | | | | | | | | Hillary Clinton for President | | | | By Lena Dunham | | |
When we launched Lenny with a Hillary Clinton interview, we were excited, of course. Iconic female politician, soon to be the Democratic presidential nominee, sitting down with us to kick off our little newsletter? Yes, please! It made us feel official, powerful, like we were really in the room where it happens! But I can also say that everyone who was there that day, from our Lenny staff to our video crew, walked away both impressed and moved by Secretary Clinton's careful attention. Not just to us as people, but also to the policies she is committed to enacting. Despite being on the verge of losing her voice after weeks of travel, she spoke with that signature welcoming boom, laughing heartily and causing the room to burst into applause when she responded that yes, indeed, she is a feminist.
Below are some previously unpublished excerpts from our conversation, where she discusses the lack of support we give to working mothers and how politics has a place for millennial women. We loved her that day, and after the past year we have respect for her resolve and tenacity on a level we could not have imagined. As the results of today's election flood in, and we hope for this amazing milestone to be achieved, I will let her words below comfort me: "Whenever I'm talking to young women about politics, I always say, 'Look. You don't have to run for office. You don't even have to be actively involved. But you do have to exercise your brain in deciding what you believe and whom you will support.'"
I believe we listened to her. I believe we will show up today. And I believe our voices will be heard.
Lena Dunham: There's such a dialogue now, even now, about whether women can have it all. Whether they can be mothers at the same time they have careers, at the same time they have satisfying personal lives. And obviously that's exhausting. It's frustrating that we still have to talk about it.
Hillary Rodham Clinton: Right.
LD: But we do.
HRC: We do.
LD: And I'm sure many women ask you that themselves. What do you say to those women?
HRC: I say: It's a set of questions everybody, if they're honest, has to admit they struggle with. And there is no one size fits all. But I think there are some guidelines that people can look to. One of the things to be really sure of when you have children is how much help you're going to get from your spouse or your partner, and how much help you're going to get from the rest of your family. It's not easy under any circumstances to become a new mother. Everybody who's been through it knows that.
You need help. You need people you can count on. Too many women don't have that support system. Or they don't ask for help, because they think they're supposed to be able to do it all themselves, or they unfortunately don't have anybody in their lives who's going to actually chip in and do what they can do. So I think it's important that you are honest about what your own limitations are, what you think you can do, and how much help you need to be able to do it.
I also think we do a pretty lousy job in our country of supporting women in work. It's hard to be living that double life experience where you have family responsibilities. Maybe it's a marriage and children, or maybe it's caring for an elderly relative. Everybody has something that they are called upon to try to deal with. And we just make it about as hard as we can in the entire world, as far as I'm concerned. We basically say to young women, "Well, go make these decisions, and then you're basically on your own." And I think that's short-sighted and counterproductive.
Because I want young women to realize they've got a lifespan where they can do so much. I have friends who had their first child at 18, or their first child at 45. It's one of the joys of being a woman in America today. You don't have to have a cookie-cutter progression. You can explore, you can try on different roles, you can push yourself, you can retreat back — whatever you want to do to define your life journey. And it doesn't have to be the journey of your mother or your friends. It can be your journey.
One of the biggest problems I see is young women who, they have an idea, maybe a dream, but they don't know how to organize themselves well enough to go step one, step two, step three. And that's where I think we could do a lot more to help. Peer-group advice, where people can say, "OK, sit down and really ask yourself honestly: Is this something you just want to do, or is this your passion to do it? If it's your passion, what do you need to learn to be able to actually achieve that?"
LD: You know, our typical Lenny reader is a woman in her 20s or 30s who is passionate about politics, but has often felt disenfranchised by the political process, and like there wasn't space for her voice to be heard. And I wondered what issues you would tell young women to focus on today, and how you would convince them that their voice, their vote, can actually make a difference in a climate that can seem so cold.
HRC: It can seem cold. It can seem hostile. It can seem mean. All of that. I'm not sure it's ever been any different, but now it's played out on the global stage, and literally second by second we can follow what is or isn't happening.
I would say a couple of things. First, a lot of young women I know already have passions, but they don't necessarily relate them to politics. So they may be passionate, for example, about young kids learning. If they aren't teachers, maybe they're tutoring in an after-school program. They really care about that. But they often don't make the connection that political decisions will impact many more kids than those kids they can personally reach. Or somebody's passionate about the environment, and passionate about climate change, but they think politics is just hopeless and useless. But if we don't get national plans enacted, and international plans as well, we're not going to make the progress we need to make.
So whenever I'm talking to young women about politics, I always say: "Look. You don't have to run for office. You don't even have to be actively involved. But you do have to exercise your brain in deciding what you believe and whom you will support." And sometimes it is choices between people, none of whom excite you, but studied enough to figure out, OK, if I vote for this person over that person, I'm more likely to see progress on something I care about.
I think politics is also a great learning experience. I often urge young women to volunteer in a campaign. Just go door to door. Meet your neighbors and say, "Hey, I'm here canvassing for this cause or this candidate." You will learn about yourself, and you'll learn about other people. And I think that's always to your benefit, because every bit of that learning adds up so that you can make better decisions for yourself.
And finally, I think the millennial generation is so public-service-oriented. I see it everywhere. I meet young people who are doing incredible nonprofit projects, charitable, faith-based, all kinds of great work. But I always ask them: "Are you going do that work for the rest of your life? Are you going to work in that, you know, that food pantry every day for the rest of your life, feeding poor people? Are you going to tutor that same child every day for the rest of your life?" And they look at me kind of oddly. I say, "Because you're helping one person. But there are many more people like that person who needs help. That's why we need political leadership and decisions that actually lift everybody up."
And if you can think about it that way, you don't get turned off by the negativity and the nastiness that is unfortunately too much in our politics today. You can cut through that and say, "Look, I not only have a right, I have an obligation to make a choice. It's part of the service I pay for living in our country."
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Read the original interview with Hillary that launched Lenny here.
Lena Dunham is excited to show her children her simply astounding collection of Hillary 2016 merchandise. | | | | | | | | | | | | How to Get Illegal Poll Watchers to Piss Off | | | | By Jessica Grose | | |
At a Pennsylvania rally in October, Donald Trump encouraged his most fervent followers to monitor polls, to "make sure that this election is not stolen from us … and everybody knows what I'm talking about." Because Trump's rhetoric is about as subtle as his taste in interior design, it seems fairly clear that he's talking about having his (mostly white) supporters potentially harass and intimidate the (mostly black and brown) voters in places like Philadelphia. A senior Trump official made this plain in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek when he said, "We have three major voter suppression operations under way," aimed at young women, African Americans, and white liberals. This is deeply upsetting for anyone who cares about enfranchisement, common decency, and true American values, and it can make you feel pretty helpless against this possible injustice.
But we're not helpless at all. I called up Jennifer Clark, a counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice's Democracy Program, to ask what individual voters can do to help push back against potential voter suppression efforts, which don't just start and end at the polling places. Clark and I discussed the spate of laws various states have been passing to keep voters off the rolls in the first place, what to do if you are harassed or intimidated at the polls (or if you see someone else being harassed or intimidated), and why voting at the state level matters.
Jessica Grose: What are some of the basic issues we're facing with voter suppression right now?
Jennifer Clark: Since around 2010, we've seen a real wave of restrictive voting laws. Some of those target things like voter registration, whether it's making it more difficult for individuals to register to vote or for groups [whose] mission is to go out and get people signed up to vote. We have also seen laws that are more specifically targeted to those who are already registered to vote, like strict photo-ID laws and rolling back early voting.
There was an increase in 2013 when the Supreme Court issued a decision in Shelby County which brought a lot of states that had a history of discrimination in voting out from underneath what's called preclearance requirements. Those requirements forced states to prove that laws weren't discriminatory before they put them into effect. The new laws make it harder for people in general to get registered and to vote, and in particular tend to make it harder for minority voters.
Another thing that we're seeing, in particular in this election, is calls for policing of polling places. In many jurisdictions there are officially appointed poll watchers, often appointed by both parties. But what we're talking about in this election is self-appointed poll watchers who would want to harass or to intimidate voters that they don't think belong there, or that they think are illegitimate for whatever reason. We'll see if that actually happens on Election Day, but there have certainly been calls for it, and that's upsetting.
JG: What can the individual voter do to push back against these disparate forms of voter suppression?
JC: One, they should try their hardest not to be intimidated or discouraged. Another thing that voters can do to push back is they can get to know the laws in their state around voter intimidation and harassment. If they feel like they're being intimidated or harassed at a polling place, or they feel that someone else is being intimidated or harassed, there are resources. Calling your local election official is a great first step, because local election officials are very invested in this process going smoothly.
You can also call the Election Protection Hotline, which is a nonpartisan, nationwide call center: 866-OUR-VOTE. There are trained people on the other end of the line, most often attorneys and law students, who can help you. If you feel like you're running into a problem where you know you're registered, but you're not on the list, or if you feel like you're being asked for ID when it's not the law in your state, or if you see any harassing or intimidating behavior, that's a great resource.
JG: Which states have the most stringent laws or proposed laws about registering to vote? And how can our readers who live in those states work to fight those laws?
JC: Some of the states to flag are Kansas, Arizona, and Georgia. In Kansas, for example, thousands of people who were registered, who had sworn under penalty of perjury that they were a U.S. citizen when they signed up to register to vote, were kicked off the rolls, because they hadn't shown documentary proof of citizenship at their polling place. A lot of people don't have that on hand — they don't have ready access to their birth certificate, or they don't have a passport. There has been pushback in the courts against that, and that is a fight that is ongoing. Some of those people in Kansas have been put back on the rolls for November, but some of those people remain off, at least for certain elections. There's this question of whether they can vote in federal versus state elections. It gets very complicated, but basically it's been a huge disruption for voters.
But it's not all bad news. North Carolina, which had previously been covered by the preclearance requirements of the Voting Rights Act, is one of those states that passed a very restrictive omnibus voting law right after the Shelby County decision came down. One of the restrictions passed was the elimination of same-day registration, which was a great resource particularly used by African American voters. Its supporters had the intent of making it harder for black citizens in North Carolina to vote. Its appeal has been a huge win, and those things are now back and in effect.
One of the most important things to do is to pay attention to your state and local races, and to be informed about them, and to make sure that you know where candidates stand, and to vote down the ballot. Pretty much all of these laws come out of your state. Especially after the crippling decision in Shelby County, there's only so much that the federal government can do to respond when a state passes a restrictive voting law.
Another thing that people can do is to make sure that they are connected to their community, and figuring out who is affected by these laws. A strict photo-ID law, like the one passed in Texas, tends to have an outsize effect on [married] women voters, because many of them don't have a birth certificate that reflects their current legal name. So when they try to use their birth certificate to get a photo ID to vote, their names don't match, and they need to go through the process of either finding their certificate of marriage or getting an amendment to an official document to make sure that their names match up. It becomes a huge headache.
We know that young people tend to take advantage of something like same-day registration, for example, because they move around so much, so they might have issues with their address being up to date. Getting the word out is important, because people tend to think that these laws don't really impact them. If you have a driver's license, for example, you tend to assume that everybody else does too. It's hearing stories about actual people who have faced burdens with these laws that can change minds.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Jessica Grose is Lenny's editor in chief. | | | | | | | | | | | | You've Got to Fight | | | | By Kaitlyn Greenidge | | |
When I was growing up, I knew Fannie Lou Hamer as one of the faces on the six videotapes of Eyes on the Prize, the PBS series about civil rights that sat in the drawers on top of my grandparents' TV, beside my aunt's bootleg tapes of '80s shows like Beauty and the Beast and Star Trek: The Next Generation. I listened to her voice break through the grainy footage.
My family trafficked in black-girl role models. My mother had taken the old study on race and baby dolls and self-respect to heart, and so our whole house was a kind of celebration of black womanhood. We read books about black girls and listened to black girls on our tape cassettes and watched any music video with a black girl in it, however briefly, as they flickered across the television set. My mother, second-wave feminist that she was, would have been horrified to know that even our Barbies became a part of this pantheon of femininity — she thought they were cheap. Before she had me and my sisters, she'd sworn a Barbie doll would never make it into our house. But they were as much a part of this uplift as the set of reference books about historical black women that my grandmothers gave us. My Barbie had a bush of nappy hair that floated in a beautiful, black, peach-smelling cloud around her head. She led a crusade of brown and black Barbies against an evil warlord who was trying to take over their island full of women, located somewhere beneath my mother's writing desk.
So, in this abundance, Fannie Lou Hamer, sitting at a desk, speaking into a microphone, testifying about her fight to vote on the grainy screen, was lost to me in girlhood.
I've thought about her more recently. Hamer is the answer to nearly every question I've had about the state of the world in the past few years. Born nearly a hundred years ago, in 1917, to sharecropper parents in Mississippi, Hamer was the youngest of twenty children. She received only six years of schooling — she had to leave so she could work in the fields alongside her parents. Hamer married in 1945, but she was unable to have children. This is because the state of Mississippi had performed a hysterectomy on her without her consent — part of a eugenics program at the time to reduce the population of poor black people.
Hamer became involved with the Regional Council of Negro Leadership in the 1950s, and then in the '60s she became involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1962, she registered to vote alongside other activists. The white overseer at the plantation where Hamer worked found out, and she was fired. Hamer eventually traveled around the state of Mississippi, registering other black people to vote. Because of this activism, white police officers detained Hamer and others and tortured them. White police officers ordered black prisoners to beat Hamer for them — she nearly died.
Eventually, Hamer was released and continued to register people to vote. In 1964, Hamer was part of a delegation to the Democratic National Convention called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Mississippi, of course, had a delegation already, but that delegation was all white and fiercely opposed to any civil rights. The DNC refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and Lyndon B. Johnson actively tried to censor Hamer — he scheduled press conferences for when she was giving testimony. Still, Hamer spoke out about the police's attack on her.
The one quote, the quote that was repeated to me growing up, the quote many know Hamer for, is from that testimony: "… I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings — in America?"
Johnson and other Democratic officials continued to block the Mississippi Freedom Party at every turn. The DNC offered half-hearted compromises to the MFP, ignoring their basic request to be seated and vote. It was not until 1968 that the Party was seated, and in 1972, Hamer was elected a delegate. She began a farming cooperative in her county, the Freedom Farms Cooperative, and she was involved in implementing early versions of the Head Start program. The other quote she is famous for, the one that adults liked to quote in a self-satisfied way to me when I was younger, is the one that ended up on her gravestone after she passed in 1977: "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."
A similar Hamer quote has come up in the news again during this election season: it was used by civil-rights activist DeRay Mckesson in his endorsement of Hillary Clinton. "I'm sick of symbolic things. We are fighting for our lives," Hamer said. I've been thinking of Hamer and her story for months, turning it over, feeling that it is connected to this present moment but not being fully able to say why. And there it was, in an endorsement, in a way I am not entirely sure I am comfortable with.
What does it mean that black women's political liberation and work is used to further democracy, when it isn't necessarily extended to us?
"It's a funny thing," Hamer said, "that if you don't speak out ain't nobody going to speak out for you."
I remember watching the Democratic National Convention this year. On Twitter, everyone was saying the DNC owed its life to black women. There was Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, secretary of the DNC, banging the gavel that started the proceedings. There was Donna Brazile, political crush of my teenage years, moving through the crowd as the interim chairperson. And then there was Michelle Obama, the paragon of black womanhood, on the stage, giving the rallying cry of this election season.
I don't know what to make of these women. I know these women are not without agency. I know these women are stronger than I could ever be. But I watch how we, as black women, are consumed. Always symbols for other people — dreams or demons. And I wonder how we can simply be within ourselves.
I think maybe that's why Hamer has been on my mind so much. In an oral history from 1972, she was asked, "Do you have faith that the system will ever work properly?" Hamer answered, "We have to make it work. Ain't nothing going to be handed to you on a silver platter, nothing. That's not just black people, that's people in general, masses … So, you don't ever get nothing, just walk up and say, 'Here it is.' You've got to fight. Every step of the way, you've got to fight."
I think of the wilds of girlhood, where I had my doll proxies play-fight thrilling wars. I think of my life now, how tiring it is to continually feel as though you are in a fight. Hamer reminds me there is no other way. There isn't any certainty in fighting, but there can be conviction, and there can be, in the midst of a battle, the opportunity to define yourself.
Kaitlyn Greenidge is Lenny's contributing writer and the author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman. | | | | | | | | | | | | When They Go Low, We Go High: a Movement, a Mantra, a Menu | | | | By Nicole Bailey, Anna Dunn, Jennie Lupo, and Zahra Tangorra | | | |
| (All Illustrations by Keara McGraw) |
What have been your basic reactions to these complicated political times we live in? Screaming fits? Overindulgence in alcohol or eating an entire pizza? Adjusting your makeup to better complement the now-permanently affixed expression of dumbfounded shock on your face, then researching Botox to counteract the constant perplexed frown? A creeping, deep anxiety that manifests physically in tension headaches? Laughing maniacally for no reason? Maybe that's just us.
As women living in America today it is entirely fair to feel as though we are under attack. The current hostile political environment — what we see on TV and on Facebook and hear everyone talking about everywhere all the time — feels personal and immediate and scary as hell. It's easy enough to feel helpless and turn to the relative comfort of apathy in the face of this vehemently anti-woman presidential candidate. But as Michelle Obama taught us, WHEN THEY GO LOW, WE GO HIGH. We will not be quiet. We will not ignore how bad or how angry we feel. We will do what we do naturally, which is to nurture and empower our communities, whether they're small friend groups or whole neighborhoods, by banding together, laughing in the face of terribleness, and cooking some delicious food. And then we will come out in droves to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton, and in doing so say WE WILL NOT STAND FOR THIS.
And if, by some ethical fluke, some kind of collective moral floundering, Donald John Trump wins the election for United States president, we should eat like it's our last day on this spectacular earth. Let's eat with conscience and with abandon. Rice balls stuffed with pork ragu. Tomato anchovy toast. Potato pancakes with pickled Prince Edward Island mussels. Spears of deeply bitter greens. Let's have a martini and a Bellini. Fuck it, I want pollo y salsa verde tamales too. Labneh and flatbread rubbed with za'atar. Naan and yellow dal. Momos stuffed with ginger and carrots. Sticky crispy rice with saffron and apricots. There is so much beautiful food in this world to love. Lamb and pumpkin tagine. Le grande aïoli! Pink wine! Don't forget Neapolitan pizza.
Let's stand in the room and cook everything together. Let's cook to make the clock stop, and defenestrate together. No, let's cook to make the clock stop, to turn around and love one another.
In this spirit, may we lovingly present a menu for this Election Day: When They Go Low, We Eat High (not like that, but you can if you are into that sort of thing):
THE SEVEN LAYERS OF HELL "BAD OMBRÉ" DIP
Ingredients
1 cup refried beans
3 cups crushed Doritos
1 1/2 cups chopped pimento peppers
1 1/2 cups sour cream
1 small can chipotle peppers
1 1/2 cups chopped tomatoes
1 1/2 cups of your favorite corn salsa
2 cups Mexican-blend cheese
Serve with:
Quartered limes
Dipping chip of your choice
1. Let's start burning through these layers of a Donald Trump metaphor recipe one tier of hell at a time.
2. Spread the refried beans along the bottom of your glass bowl of choice. Bonus points if you can somehow find a glass blower to create a Donald Trump–faced bowl.
3. Next, crush the Doritos with your bare hands over the refried beans. Wash the orange stain from your hands as quickly as possible.
4. Top the crushed Doritos with the pimento peppers.
5. Mix the sour cream and chipotle peppers until they are the shade of rose-colored glasses.
6. Smear the sour-cream mixture gently over the crushed Doritos. Remember, we go high, no need to rub it in.
7. Next, layer the chopped tomatoes.
8. We are almost through these layers of election hell now, so pile on the corn salsa!
9. Now, with your soul starting to lighten, add a healthy layer of cheese. Cheese has the power to bring us all together again. No fact-checking needed.
10. Blissfully serve yourself a generous portion, and pour yourself a giant margarita. You deserve it.
SAUSAGE-STUFFED PORK LOIN WITH PICKLED CHERRIES AND WIKI LEEKS
Serves 4 to 6
Ingredients
1 2-pound pork loin, butterflied
Filling:
1⁄2 pound sweet Italian pork sausage, or any kind that looks fab
1 cup torn bread
1/4 cup cream or milk or water
1⁄2 cup grated pecorino
1⁄2 teaspoon nutmeg
2 eggs
Salt and pepper to taste
For the Wiki Leeks braise:
5 leeks, washed and cut into roughly 4-inch pieces (try to keep them together if you can)
3 cloves garlic
Lots of rosemary and sage
2 heaping teaspoons Dijon mustard
1⁄2 stick of butter!!!
Juice and zest of one lemon
4 cups chicken stock
1 cup Pernod
Salt and pepper to taste
For the pickled cherries:
1 cup dried cherries, yum, extra for nibbling
1⁄2 cup cider vinegar
1⁄2 cup boiling water
2 teaspoons salt
Greek yogurt to dollop on top
1. First things first, find a good piece of pork. It makes a real difference — taste-wise, environmentally, politically, globally. When you're buying your meat, ask the butcher to butterfly the loin for you. This will make everything easier.
2. Brine the pork loin in your brine of choice. After two hours in the brine, rinse the meat off, dry it with paper towels, and lay it flat on a cutting board.
3. In the meantime, make the pickled cherries. Combine all the ingredients for the cherries together, and allow to sit at least 4 hours. Or up to forever. They don't really go bad, and they're so good.
4. Mix the torn bread with milk, cream, or water, and smush the hell out of it with your paws! Then add the rest of the filling ingredients, and smush some more until well mixed.
5. Spread filling evenly onto pork loin. Roll it up the long way. Tie with butcher twine at each end and three times down the center.
6. Grab your favorite roasting pan. Not the most gigantic one you have, but one that this fat pig will feel comfortable napping in. Slather the bottom with olive oil, and place that loin down!
7. Toss the rest of the ingredients into the pan. Add half the butter in small chunks. Combine in a reasonable way, cover with foil, and cook at 250°F for 2 hours.
8. After 2 hours, remove cover, and bake for another 20 minutes.
9. If the liquid in the pan is getting real dry, add more stock. If it's too liquidy, move the pan to the stovetop to reduce the liquid and make the sauce nice and gravy-like.
10. Remove the loin and leeks, and add remaining room-temp butter to the sauce in the pan (muahahaha). Whisk until sauce is as thick and amazing as Donald Trump's hair isn't.
11. Allow the loin to cool for about ten minutes, and then cut the twine. Slice into 2-inch medallions. Serve with Wiki Leeks, a few sour pickled cherries, and a dollop of yogurt. Drizzle good EVOO on top for good measure. And please, whatever you do, enjoy the hell out of it! Lick your plate, make noise, get seconds.
NASTY BLOODY MARY
Serves 4 to 6 people
Ingredients
2 cups vodka
1 quart tomato juice
1 cup clam juice
1⁄4 cup lemon juice
1⁄3 cup pickle juice
3 tablespoons Crystal hot sauce
1 tablespoon coarsely ground black pepper
2 heaping tablespoons horseradish
Salt to taste
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
Grated lemon zest
Suggested garnish:
Clams casino
White Castle slider
Blazing-hot tiny French onion soup in a tiny bread bowl
A pickle, an olive, and a caper berry
Mix all ingredients together. Stir well. Serve over ice! Add your fave nasty garnish.
Zahra, Jennie and Nicole met at Zahra's restaurant Brucie, after the restaurant closed last year they formed HighFive Girl, a company offering catering and restaurant consulting, branding and concept development. They are launching a feminist food blog by the same name this winter!
Anna Dunn is a writer and the co author of the recently released "Dinner at the Long Table", and a long time employee/family member of the Tarlow restaurant empire. They all met through eating and drinking and shooting the shit at Romans, Marlow and Diner. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
From Lena Dunham + Jenni Konner. | | | | | | | |  |  | | |
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