YouTube sensation Hannah Hart manages to mash the stereotypical cookbook with motivational life lessons in her new book “My Drunk Kitchen: A Guide to Eating, Drinking, and Going with Your Gut.”
Hart, who made her fame by filming herself cooking while intoxicated, decided to share her life story and some of her favorite recipes with her fans.
Dividing her book into four parts, Hart lays it out like a road map, using recipes to tell how she had learned different life lessons. Each recipe, normally named something laden with puns such as “Dick-taters,” “Tear… Ah Miss You” and “Collard Back Now,” is accompanied by an alcoholic beverage of Hart’s choice and some life lessons surrounding the dish.
While I would not use the book as a guide for cooking dinner for people I wanted to impress, it contains several lighthearted and valuable lessons. Hart tells of how she grew up in an impoverished family without much food and used her creativity to make meals. From there, she learned the true art of cooking was turning what you have in the fridge into a masterpiece, like her recipe “Cake Pan.”
Being the diligent journalist I am, I decided to try a few of the recipes to see if they tasted as good as they looked. With recommended drink in hand, I decided to cook “Pizza Cake” and “The Saddest Cake Ever.”
“Pizza Cake” is simply several frozen pizzas stacked on top of each other and baked. “The Saddest Cake Ever” truly fits its title, being a rice cake with stale candy decorations on the top.
While the “Pizza Cake” tasted delicious with a drink in my hand, it was very underwhelming sober. As for “The Saddest Cake Ever,” no amount of alcohol could make that taste decent.
The recipes are extremely underwhelming in the culinary department. However, there is a certain beauty in the fact that they are not perfect. These are recipes more suitable for a college dorm room than a dinner party. In fact, that is the intended audience of the book: 20-something-year-olds that are not quite sure what to do with life.
The book itself is a lesson about taking things that may not always fit together and making them into something delicious.
Hart also just released her new song “Oh, Internet,” a funny love song devoted to WiFi, Reddit and all other internet-related joys.
“My Drunk Kitchen: A Guide to Eating, Drinking, and Going with Your Gut” is available at Hastings for $15.91 and for $14.18 on Amazon.
