For YouTube star and best-selling author Hannah Hart, becoming an adult doesn’t mean you have to grow up. In her new, funny and festive cookbook — “My Drunk Kitchen Holidays! How to Savor and Celebrate the Year: A Cookbook” — the host is giving fans an age-appropriate, “inclusive, happy guide that kind of takes all the (expletive) out of the holidays.”
“My first Drunk Kitchen cookbook, ‘A Guide to Eating, Drinking and Going with Your Gut’ was very much about surviving your 20s and journeying through childhood to adulthood,” Hart told the Track of her last parody cookbook before taking the stage at The Wilbur this week.
“Now, I’m 32 and this second cookbook is all about being in your 30s,” she continued. “We’re at the stage of our lives, in our development, where we’re starting to create our traditions for the first time … but that doesn’t mean I like the holidays anymore.”
Hart — whose 2014 cookbook as well as her 2016 memoir, “Buffering: Unshared Tales of a Life Fully Loaded,” secured her spots on the New York Times Best Sellers list — is starting to transition from “adulthood-escence” into full-blown grown-up-dom. For one thing, the writer and online personality is set to marry her fiancée, Ella Mielniczenko, this coming May. And the brides-to-be have already made a major, super mature commitment as a couple.
“We just bought a house, so we’re now very responsible adults who own a home and have to learn how to fix things in our home,” Hart joked. “So I have a whole lot of skills to learn — mainly plumbing.”
Besides getting a handle on that whole DIY home maintenance, Hart also recognizes the need to step up and celebrate different holidays on her own. The Food Network vet admits that as she still finds her bearings in this new territory, she’s already managed to suffer an inevitable holiday hosting fail.
“Back in the day, they used to tell you that birds like chicken and turkey were supposed to be rinsed before you cook it,” Hart said. “Anyway, one year, my sister and I rinsed a turkey in a bathtub. We were like, ‘How are we supposed to clean this thing?’”
“Well now, I guess they say you don’t anymore because it’s going to spread more germs,” she added of the apparently pointless spa treatment the Hart gals gave their main course.
Poultry mishaps aside, Hart has nevertheless managed to stumble upon pearls of wisdom that she can now share with fellow Millennials simultaneously fumbling their way through the year’s festivities on their own.
“I am a big believer in having a plan but not stressing out over the plan,” Hart said. “If making the plan is more stress than not making the plan, then maybe just leave it up in the air.”
She explained: “Like maybe I don’t want to have an itinerary for everything I do because I have so many people to see, I’ll just see what happens when I get there. Versus some people who find comfort in, ‘Oh good, I checked off every person I wanted to see and stuck to a schedule.’ I guess the key to every great holiday celebration is self-knowledge and knowing what you need to make it not a stressful experience, but a joyful one.”