THE JOURNAL / STAY CLOSE
Cooking together on a video call: one recipe, two kitchens
How to cook the same dish with your partner from two places: choosing a recipe that works on camera, setting up, and sitting down to eat together.
There is something about cooking side by side that conversation alone cannot reproduce. Your hands are busy, so the talk wanders more freely. Someone tastes the sauce and pulls a face. Someone else burns the garlic. By the time the food is ready, you have spent an hour together without having to perform anything. You can have a version of that across two kitchens, with a bit of planning.
Pick a recipe that forgives you
The best recipes for a video call are ones where timing is loose and mistakes are survivable. Look for:
- Few ingredients that are easy to find in both places. If one of you lives abroad, check that nothing on the list is impossible to buy on their side. Agree on substitutions ahead of time.
- Not too many steps that happen at once. Juggling three pans while talking to a phone propped on the fruit bowl gets stressful.
- A dish with a rest or simmer. Those quiet ten minutes, while something bakes or reduces, are often the nicest part of the evening.
Good starting points: a pasta with a simple sauce, a curry or stew, homemade pizza, dumplings if you are feeling brave, pancakes for a weekend morning date, or a soup that one of your families has always made.
Before you switch the camera on
A little preparation keeps the evening relaxed.
- Share the recipe a few days ahead, with quantities, so you can both shop. A shared note or a photo of a handwritten card works fine.
- Decide on the order. Read through together and agree on the steps so you are not scrolling up and down mid-recipe with flour on your hands.
- Prep the ingredients. Chop the onions and measure the spices before the call, or do it together at the start as the first slow, chatty part.
- Charge everything. A phone dying at the moment the oil gets hot is a very particular kind of frustration.
Setting up the kitchen for the call
Put your device somewhere stable, out of the splash zone, at roughly face height if you can. Leaning it against the wall behind the counter often works, or on a shelf. A wide angle that shows you and the stove is better than a close-up of your face; part of the pleasure is seeing each other move around the kitchen.
Kitchens are loud. Extractor fans, sizzling pans and running taps drown out voices. Earbuds help a lot, and so does turning the fan off for the moments you want to talk.
Who leads?
It works best when one person is the "chef" for the evening and the other follows. The chef chooses the recipe, knows it reasonably well and calls the steps. If one of you is a confident cook and the other is not, this can be a lovely way of teaching. Just keep it patient; nobody enjoys being corrected through a screen.
Take turns leading over different evenings. When it is your partner's turn, let them pick something from their own life: what their grandmother cooked on Sundays, the dish they made every week as a student, the thing they ate on a trip before you met. You learn about a person by eating what they love.
The meal
Do not finish cooking and then each eat in front of the screen in silence. Move to the table, set it a little, and sit down together. Compare results honestly. Yours will probably look different from theirs, and arguing about whose is better is part of the fun.
If you are in different time zones, the meal may not match: dinner for one, lunch for the other. Choose dishes that work at both hours, or cook something one of you can save and eat later. A batch of soup or cookies made together on a Sunday afternoon can turn into lunch for the week, with a small reminder of the call attached.
Turning it into something lasting
Cooking together regularly can quietly build a shared repertoire. Keep a list of what you have made, with notes: "too salty", "make double next time", "we laughed so much at the dumplings". Over months it becomes a small cookbook of your relationship, with a recipe for almost every season you spent apart.
When you finally share a kitchen, you will already have dishes that are yours. And one evening, when someone asks what you two like to cook, you will realize the answer started on a video call. If you are looking for more evenings like this, the journal has other ideas.
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