Welcome to Paris Hilton’s kitchen. Where cooking pasta and grating cheese is “annoying,” and taking a time-out to spritz yourself with “unicorn mist” is all part of the process.
In the surreal first episode of Hilton’s new YouTube show — Cooking with Paris — the media personality demonstrates how to make her “sliving” lasagna. Sliving, if you happened to miss her interview with Kim Petras at the 2019 Streamys last month, is Hilton’s latest contribution to the English lexicon: “killing it and slaying in one word.”
Her black fingerless driving gloves, which she wears for the show’s 16-minute duration, handling raw ground “meat” and begrudgingly shredding mozzarella, are usually reserved for sliving, Hilton states: “But now that it’s 2020, you’re still going to see sliving but sliving it in a different way. Like cooking lasagna.”
With her ahem “assistant chef,” Diamond Baby — the $10,000 micro Chihuahua — in her arms, “killing it” in her mini apron (Chanel, naturally), #ChefParis opens with a proud proclamation: “As you all know — well, maybe not all of you know — people who do know, know that I am an amazing cook.”
At the end of the nearly 20-minute episode, you’d be forgiven for seriously questioning whether or not this could possibly be true. Hair long and flowing, she bemoans a lack of no-boil lasagna noodles and pre-grated cheese, and wonders whether ricotta — apparently, her “favourite” — should be “all curly-looking.”
The instruction, as it is, is sparse and her tips, questionable: Eleven grinds of pepper “because I love 11:11 so it’s good luck”; oversized glittery sunglasses for cutting onions, which “kind of helps with tears, or just, I don’t know, ruining your mascara.” But she does manage to pause for a swig of Neuro Trim, posing for a product shot as she testifies: “It’s a trim you. So basically you’re like being healthy and then having lasagna all at once.”
The brief flash of an ingredient list turns out to be mere suggestion. Hilton skips the onions and garlic altogether — but doesn’t miss the opportunity to model the sunglasses in a hypothetical sense, explaining, “I was supposed to chop these onions and garlic, but I feel my lasagna should not have onion or garlic in it.”
Infinitely less educational, endearing and entertaining than fellow celebrity Jennifer Garner’s Pretend Cooking Show , we can conclude that the use of the hashtag #ChefParis is awfully generous. Hilton’s lasagna-related insight amounts to: “I guess it is a lot of steps, comparing it to toast or something.” She stirs a bowl of ricotta with what appears to be a lettuce knife and seems to think that tap water shares a line with the sewers. “Who knows what’s in these sewers. It’s beyond,” she says as she reaches for bottled water to moisten a paper towel and dab salt off of ground meat after an exuberant pour.
The climax of the episode amounts to what turns out to be a fruitful search for a box grater. Do we feel catharsis as Hilton slives away, sighing heavily and declaring the task of shredding cheese “so brutal”? Not exactly, but she’ll be back on Monday with a new episode nonetheless.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
