Couple’s new cookbook for 2 takes stress out of sharing kitchen with recipes to bond over

A Couple Cooks: 100 Recipes to Cook Together has recipes from pizza to sides in which the labour is split to make things ‘more fun together’

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A recipe for salmon piccata in A Couple Cooks: 100 Recipes to Cook Together, in which married food bloggers Sonja and Alex Overhiser take the heat out of sharing the kitchen and promote “bonding moments”. Photo: Chronicle Books via AP

Published: 4:15pm, 27 Oct 2024

Husband-and-wife food bloggers and podcasters Sonja and Alex Overhiser have a new cookbook that uses a simple step to keep the kitchen a less heated place for two chefs: clear, alternating roles.

A Couple Cooks: 100 Recipes to Cook Together lays out ingredients and directions for a wide array of dishes, like any other cookbook, but also divides the cooking tasks – one home chef is designated a square, the other a triangle – so neither cook becomes overwhelmed or resentful.

“Everything is more fun together, we think. And so we found that about cooking,” Sonja Overhiser says from the couple’s home in Indianapolis, in the US state of Indiana. “You’ll stay doing it if you’re doing it with someone else.”

To make their Meatballs with Fire-Roasted Marinara, one chef preheats the oven and then starts to make the marinara sauce while the other prepares the meatballs. They come together at the end to coat the cooked meatballs with the sauce and add Parmesan cheese and basil.

Sonja and Alex Overhiser, the authors of A Couple Cooks: 100 Recipes to Cook Together. Photo: AP

“We’re hoping to break down that factor where people are intimidated by being in the kitchen, where all they want to do is wash dishes because they’re afraid they’re going to burn something,” Alex says.