UCB’s Stephanie Streisand On The New Season Of “Worst Cooks In America”
UCB LA performer and comedian Stephanie Streisand is great at comedy, but she can’t cook at all. At 25 years old, she’s afraid of knives, and doesn’t cook at all unless you count eating almonds as cooking. This past fall Stephanie got brave and signed on to compete in the upcoming new season of Food Network’s “Worst Cooks in America”.
“Worst Cooks” looks for people who are kitchen disasters and tries to turn them into confident cooks. Stephanie was raised on take out and restaurants and so she has no experience going into the competition. She once tried to make a salad, but bought cabbage instead of lettuce by accident, and didn’t even realize she had made a mistake until she had served it to friends.
So last summer, when UCB sent out an email saying the show was looking for comedians who can’t cook to be on the show, Stephanie answered the call. She’ll be one of 14 people hoping to turn their culinary lives around this season.
She feels like her lack of experience will give her a slight advantage over the other 13 competitors, because while they have bad habits, she has none. “Somebody talked about how they made a horrible meatloaf,” Stephanie said, “and I was like, how do you do that? I don’t even know how to make a horrible meatloaf.”
Going in to the contest she was most nervous about using knives, “It was so surprising how sharp the knives are. I know that’s so stupid to say, but because its food network, they give you the best tools. I am such a bad cook that when I try to cut a tomato, it comes out squashed because I saw it, while pressing down on it. So I was expecting to saw whatever it was that I was gonna chop and the knife just went through like it was butter. And that terrrrrrified me.”
But it turned out that knives didn’t turn out to be Stephanie’s biggest problem. We asked her if she suffered any major injuries while trying to learn to cook. “There’s definitely a point early on where I just burn myself on the same pot over and over again forgetting,” she told us, “…and the third time I do it I was like, okay third time’s a charm, I wont grab it without grabbing an oven mitt and then sure enough I go to grab it again.”
She’s much better at comedy than she is in the kitchen. Stephanie has studied at the UCB theater since 2004. She writes for the CBS Diversity Special and she created the show the 2017 Tony Awarz: A Parody of Musical Proportions which has had runs in New York, and Los Angeles as well as at festivals around the country.
This Sunday “Worst Cooks 6th season premiers, and Mentor Chef Anne Burrell is back and her competition this season is first timer to the show, Chef Tyler Florence.
Find out whose team Stephanie ends up on and if she’s up to the challenge, when “Worst Cooks in America” premieres Sunday, January 4th at 9 pm et on Food Network.
You can check out a lot of Stephanie’s comedy work on her YouTube channel, Streisand and Friends and follow her on Twitter @StephStreisand.
