Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of Washington Secrets, where we have been cooking RFK Jr.’s contribution to the nation’s diet: salmon cakes. Plus, we scoop that Britain’s new foreign secretary is in Washington to meet with Marco Rubio on Wednesday. Plus, why does Karoline Leavitt sometimes turn to meetings with only half her makeup done?First, kill your bear. That should have been the opening instruction to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new healthy cooking show.But his “Real Food Show” is not played for laughs. It is a deadly earnest effort to get Americans cooking and eating more nutritious meals.
First up is wild Alaskan salmon cakes.Of course, RFK Jr. is not doing the cooking. For much of the 30-minute show, a man famous for picking up roadkill looks like what he is: a cabinet secretary in his 70s who knows that kitchens exist but has rarely actually set foot in one.The knife duties fall to Andrew Gruel, who has overcome his name to open a string of restaurants in California, where he also sits on the Huntington Beach City Council.“This is about taking ingredients that everybody already knows it’s approachable,” Gruel says. “You can get them at any store and maybe manipulating them a little bit with a couple of chef tricks, but nothing overly intellectual, so that we can get that flavor that’s memorable.”“It’s sticky. It’s addictive,” he added.The idea is to conjure plates of food that hit endorphin receptors just like the ultra-processed, packaged products engineered to make you crave more and more and more.So the salmon fillets are baked and then flaked. Mixed with breadcrumbs, herbs, nutritional yeast for its umami pop (“Great for your biome,” adds RFK Jr), red onion, an egg, some mustard and mayo, they are then formed into cakes and fried. This being MAHA, there is a choice of oils you can use if you don’t fancy olive oil.“You can even use a beef tallow,” says Gruel.It’s one thing to cook French fries in beef tallow for that extra meaty flavor. Cooking salmon in saturated fat is something else altogether, particularly if you are keen on the health benefits of a fish known for its omega-3 fatty acids.So long as you don’t use seed oils, which have become target No. 1 for the MAHA movement.Every so often, Kennedy interrupts the cooking with a lesson in adding common sense to food pyramids or a dose of misinformation, depending on your point of view.“The government had been lying to us and telling us that protein caused heart attacks,” he says at one point. “There was no science that supported that.”Indeed. There was no science to support that, which is why the government wasn’t saying that. The message was that consumers should cut down on saturated fat, not protein.Anyway, Secrets dutifully followed the instructions, substituting sunflower oil for beef tallow (because we like to live dangerously), and throwing in tarragon and parsley from the garden to the fishcake mix.There were no measurements in the video, so Secrets had to improvise. But the whole thing held together once the breadcrumb ratio was increased, and the result was a crisp, brown salmon cake that tasted gratifyingly satisfying, all served on a bed of arugula salad, with matchsticks of green apple and canned white beans. All for about $3.50 a serving.No one can doubt that the result is a useful contribution to making America healthy again.The only question is why RFK Jr. thinks he is the best person to front it. Why not get in a food influencer, celebrity chef, or just turn the whole thing over to Gruel? Particularly when there is already a whispering campaign suggesting he has little interest in running the Department of Health and Human Services, beyond promoting his hobby horse issues, such as healthy eating.But if it is time away from undermining vaccines, then who is Secrets to argue?Rubio to meet Britain’s awkward new foreign secretary
