PITTSBURGH — After suffering a disabling ankle injury in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Desarae Legros left behind her childhood dream of owning a restaurant and became a food content creator instead.

Riding the appeal of her wild and sometimes wacky social media cooking videos, the Ohio native built her audience up to more than 1 million followers across platforms in just five years.

The ingredients are Legros’ comedic personality, served up alongside recipes that usually — but not always — put something tasty on the table without disastrous kitchen mistakes.

“I want people to see life as it is, versus a fake, perfect aesthetic,” she says of the “Make a mistake? Move ahead!” philosophy she imparts on @cooking_comedy_chaos, a channel she started on TikTok in 2022.

One video that didn’t quite work out as expected even earned her a story in the British tabloid The Mirror. In it, she dramatically underestimates the intense, peppery punch of Colman's English Mustard while making a ham sandwich.

Finding laughs where others might accept tears has been the Monongahela resident’s coping mechanism for as long as she can remember. So those who attend the guest chef dinner she’s hosting with personal chef Alekka Sweeney at Community Kitchen Pittsburgh on March 25 can expect some humorous banter along with a health-conscious meal based on Sweeney’s Southern grandma’s cooking.

Legros grew in Akron with a father who was an alcoholic and opioid addict and a mother who struggled to provide her with a safe and stable home life. So by age 9, she was bouncing around the foster care system. Not every parent was kind.

“Those were the years that shaped me,” she says. “It proved how strong I was on my own to survive the viciousness of life and people without anyone by my side.”

Yet there were some good times wedged within the chaos and uncertainty, Legros is quick to point out while eating a sundae at Cookie Cookie Ice Cream in Kennedy.

Among the best times were the hours she spent cooking with her dad when she returned home at age 11. Because they were poor, father and daughter got pretty good at turning mishmash ingredients from the food bank into great meals. As a result, “I really fell in love with cooking. It became my passion.”

She has especially fond memories of the slightly sweet double-patty burgers they created as a cheap stand-in for the famed Galley Boy burgers they couldn’t afford at Swensons, a car hop-style drive-through.

“We spent hours trying to perfect the recipe,” Legros remembers with a laugh. (They didn’t nail it until they tried brown sugar instead of white.)

Seeing how cooking brought people together — her dad’s love language was food — she decided to pursue a career in the hospitality industry after earning an associate’s degree in business administration. She worked as a sales and catering manager for DiBella’s Subs in the Cleveland/Akron area, then moved to Western Pennsylvania in 2016 to become general manager of Aladdin’s restaurant in McMurray. She also worked as a managing owner at Penn Station East Coast Subs for several years.

Legros was contemplating opening a fusion food truck with her husband, Jayson, when she cut her hand in a freak accident in November 2019 and had to have surgery. Two months later, the mother of two shattered her ankle while stepping out a door, requiring three more operations and leaving her unable to walk without use of a knee scooter.

Her hand healed, but her ankle didn’t. And like that, the career she loved so much was gone.

Behind the scenes to front of house

Stuck at home with chronic pain, Legros fell into a depression and back into the “party girl” ways of her youth with excessive drinking. Desperate for work — for anything to do, really — she began posting videos on Facebook.

In early 2021, she started a virtual cooking club that led to the creation of FoodTokTV in September 2021. Then, after receiving a molecular gastronomy kit from her husband for Christmas, she was inspired to start Cooking_Comedy_Chaos on TikTok with the goal of bringing people together through food.

“And then I just let loose in my kitchen,” she says, with her very entertaining “train wreck” style of cooking.

Her page, she says, promotes kindness and positivity while also encouraging people to give back to the community. One of her favorite charities is Lasagna Love, a volunteer-based nonprofit that provides local families in need with a hot meal. She has raised thousands for the cause in throw-down competitions over the last four years and, in the process, inspired more than 100 new volunteers.

“Cooking is a way to love one another,” she says. “It brings us together instead of tearing us apart.”

Legros took fans along on her journey to get sober in September 2024, and lose the excess weight she’d gained over the years from post-traumatic emotional eating and being immobile. To date, she’s lost more than 130 pounds. A new doctor introduced her to Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing psychotherapy, which helped her to build a completely different life from the one she had been living.

“I still have a million things to work out, but I can see the change in the brightness in my eyes,” she says. “I’m coming to life as me.”

Dinner with laughs

While they followed each other on social media, Legros and Alekka Sweeney, a chef who specializes in private events and cooking classes, didn’t actually meet until they competed against one another at a mac and cheese cook-off at Big Sewickley Creek Brewery in Economy in December 2024. (Legros won with a recipe for beef birria mac.)

A Navy brat who moved to Pittsburgh at age 7, Sweeney shares Legros’ commitment to community. Known as the “Red-Haired Culinary Firecracker,” she has a similar outsized personality.

She’s looking forward to sharing the culinary stage with Legros at Community Kitchen Pittsburgh on March 25.

“It’s like we were old friends. We have the same positivity on life,” says Sweeney, who graduated from Pennsylvania Institute for the Culinary Arts and was classically trained in French pastry at Le Cordon Bleu.

Meeting Legros in person, the chef adds, “was like meeting my other half. We just love people.”

Both women say there are drawn to CKP due to its mission of providing people with a second chance through its free culinary jobs training program. Sweeney taught youth cooking classes at Common Threads while running a cake-decorating business and cooking school in Chicago for more than a decade, “so the vibe with Community Kitchen is the same. I have been begging to do something with them forever!”

She and Legros have come up with a healthy spin on a traditional Southern meal that eliminates a lot of the butter associated with the cuisine.

The menu will include a salad version of fried green tomatoes in a remoulade-style dressing, a crab bisque with cornbread croutons and a protein-based mac and cheese made with bone broth, cottage cheese and nutritional yeast. There will also be Nashville hot chicken sandwiches and either bread pudding or a tart-sweet Nantucket cranberry pie (a cross between cake, pie and custard).

Many of the recipes will be based on dishes Sweeney, who was born in Italy and came to the U.S. at age 4, grew up eating at her Italian maternal grandmother’s house in tiny Grifton, N.C. While her dad’s mother, an archeologist, made “bougie” foods, her nonna dished up guilty pleasures like mile-high chocolate pie and fried chicken.

“I just wanted to honor her,” says Sweeney.

Along with a soulful, good-for-you meal, Legros says attendees will be treated to candid storytelling and a lot of laughter in a high-energy environment.

“The energy will be there” she says.

Brinner Burger

PG tested

Desarae Legros, a food content creator who lives in Monongahela, planned on serving this burger at the food truck she and her husband hoped to have before hand and foot injuries left her disabled. It’s a two-patty burger made with American cheese on a griddle and topped with bacon and a drizzle of cayenne-kissed maple syrup.

She insists it is just as good for breakfast as it is for dinner.

For maple cayenne drizzle

¼ cup maple syrup

Pinch each of salt, cayenne pepper and black pepper

For burgers

1 pound ground beef

¼ cup brown sugar

1 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon pepper

6 slices American cheese

3 brioche buns

3 eggs

6 slices cooked bacon

Prepare sauce: Mix maple syrup with a pinch of salt, cayenne and black pepper in a small, microwave-safe container, and microwave until warm, 15-30 seconds. Set aside.

Prepare burgers: In large bowl, mix ground beef, brown sugar, salt and pepper until well combined. Ball them up — get your mind out of the gutter!!! It’s meatballs! — and smash them down as thin as possible in between two pieces of parchment paper. You should get six balls out of each pound of meat, which will make 3 double cheeseburgers.

Heat a skillet on the stove over high heat. Add burgers, and cook without moving until well seared (roughly 3 minutes per side). As soon as you see them start to brown on the edges, give them a flip, and place a piece of American cheese on each burger immediately. Cook another 3 minutes.

While burgers are cooking, lightly toast the buns. To make a dippy egg for each burger, melt a little butter in the skillet, add eggs carefully one at a time and cook for 1-2 minutes, until the eggs whites are set. Carefully flip (trying not to break the yolk) and cook the second side for another 30 seconds.

Stack each bun with two burgers, an egg, 2 pieces of bacon and maple cayenne drizzle. Serve immediately.

Makes 3 double burgers.

— Desarae Legros, @cooking_comedy_chaos

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