We found ourselves playing games, creating art, baking banana breads, bouncing up and down to Joe Wicks, and establishing digital makeup filters on zoom to hide the just-rolled-out-of-bed-look. 

Now that our freedom is back, and while friends are gathering and people are traveling, many aspects of life have fundamentally changed. It may seem that we are picking up where we left off, but the numbers tell a different story. Seated diners in UK restaurants are down 32% year-on-year from February 2019 to February 2022, meaning we are still eating at home more than we were pre-pandemic.  

However, with the increasingly faster paced life we are living, and with the rise of food delivery companies, young adults, particularly in urban areas, are not setting aside time for preparing food.  As a result, they are cooking less than any generation before them. This is giving rise to unhealthy food choices and contributes to our current health crisis, with the reports of 'out-of-home' meals being 21% more calorie dense than those cooked at home.  

There is also the fact that cooking at home can be a lonely and isolated task because recipes are, and have always been, written for one person to complete. It was 1845 when Eliza Action published the first cookbook for home cooking titled Modern Cookery for Private Families. As well as inspiring and teaching many people, often women, to become home cooks, this seems to have been the catalyst for the next 180 years of cookbooks to be written exclusively for one person to complete alone. It is only in the home that dishes are designed to be cooked this way. In a restaurant or delivery kitchen you would almost never have one person complete a dish from start to finish. With nearly 90% of the population of the United Kingdom living in combined households (rather than alone) why do we continue to put the whole task of preparing food on one member of the house at a time?

Fortunately, an innovative food brand, You.Me.Kitchen has launched to address these issues. Female chefs and co-founders Dorothy Woods and Olivia Abrahmsohn are determined to disrupt this out-dated format of cookbooks by publishing the first ever recipes split for two people to complete at once. Each person has their separate set of tasks which come together to create one meal. This allows a healthy home meal to be created in half the time and with a shared sense of accomplishment between two people. And they are not doing it alone! Using social media as their primary platform, the two entrepreneurs are releasing recipes and videos weekly and building a global community sending in their videos cooking You.Me.Kitchen recipes with their friends and loved ones.

A perfect pair to kick off this movement, Dorothy and Olivia bring symbiotic knowledge to the project. Dorothy, a Le Cordon Bleu trained chef and nutritionist with over 10 years of private chef experience, brings the backbone of technique and order to the recipe writing process. Olivia comes from a food science background and has been a product developer in the food industry for 10 years. Her scientific knowledge of ingredients combined with a honed sensory understanding brings every dish balance and taste. Their goal is that all You.Me.Kitchen recipes are crafted to technical perfection, timed perfectly for two people and the final product is a delicious, healthy, sensory experience.

In a series of upcoming articles for Start Up Magazine, they’ll cover all kinds of culinary topics; from everyday challenges like reducing time and expense, to bigger questions you might never have thought of, like communicating and collaborating better in the kitchen. Keep an eye out for more tips and tricks from these two food mavericks.