8 Reasons to Start Cooking Together
“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is a progress. Working together is success. - Henry Ford”
WE TEAM COOK AND WE LOVE IT!
Each weekend, we review recipes, grocery shop, and team cook/meal prep for the entire week.
Team cooking like this may not be suitable for everyone’s lifestyle. That said, see if you can experiment with this practice every now and then or even as a family.
Here are 8 reasons to cook as a team:
It gives your relationship a psychological advantage: Team cooking builds rapport. In Dr. Shawn Achor's book, the Happiness Advantage, he discusses the advantages of building real rapport with people, like when best friends or long time colleagues become so attuned to one another that they achieve the ability to complete each other’s sentences. It’s a real psychological thing! The bottom line is that life partners who build rapport think more creatively and efficiently. We feel like we’ve lived this and built this through our team cooking practice.
It’s a creative way to connect: It's become a time when we chat, catch up on each other's weeks, and talk about what's coming up in our lives. We even turn it into a date sometimes. Not only that, but we’ve become much more creative with our actual meals. David used to have 2 meals every single day: pasta, chicken and veggies with literally nothing else on it, except for the occasional stir fry. Lindsey had the ability to make any delicious meal with veggies and pesto, but that was pretty much it! Now, we make new or favourite meals on a weekly basis which not only influences our creative ability in our cooking, but in our lives in general!
It frees up time: Planning, preparing, and cooking as two saves us hours each week! Think about it: only 1 trip to the grocery store per week, a couple hours in the kitchen on a Sunday versus an hour each day, and framing it as an afternoon date. This means we have more time for other life priorities like our relationship, personal development, or whatever else throughout the weekday evenings.
It saves money: Team cooking once for the entire week allows us to take advantage of buying “in bulk” in one go (i.e. family packs, larger sizes, 2 for 1 promos, etc.) AND cuts down on the amount of times we go to the grocery store and come back with junk food or excess. In the long run, it allows us to save money for other priorities (like trips and date nights!) And, because it’s such a consistent practice, we find we waste a lot less food.
It builds communication and teamwork skills: Team cooking encourages us to practice effective communication to get the common vision done. Makes communication hella easy for real.
Guarantees delicious food made with double the love: Team cooking allows us to have delicious food made with both of our love each week. Doesn’t food made with love taste SO MUCH BETTER?
It teaches us about one another: For example, Lindsey learned that David likes to focus on one task at a time and is usually more comfortable when he follows cooking instructions to a T. David learned about how creative Lindsey can be and how much she prefers to go with her intuition rather than follow cooking instructions. Safe to say: a combination of both approaches has been (unexpectedly) awesome!
It creates a positive ripple effect: All these benefits spill over into other aspects of our relationship, which strengthens our ability to be “two wholes sharing a path”.
What do you feel are the benefits of cooking together? Have you tried it? Are there alternatives? Any recommendations?
Try it out this week and let us know what you think/post about it so we can see your delicious food!
If you need support setting this practice up in your life and you aren’t sure where to start, connect with us on our Facebook group, by tagging our social media accounts, or by using the #RelationshipZen hashtag.
Don’t know where to start with recipes? Here’s one of our favourites:
https://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/heathers-quinoa-recipe.html (minus the corn)
Sending you and your relationship(s) love and light,
DL
“It’s not the strengths of the individual players, but it’s the strength of the unit and how they all function together - Bill Belichick”