When I returned to work after my second maternity leave, our family of four found ourselves very short on free time.
Back then, my husband and I had jobs in finance in London. We were working long hours, with video calls stretching from seven in the morning to nine at night.
On weekdays, like most families with young children, we felt like we were in a never-ending cycle of rushing everywhere. Our plates were filled with nursery drop-offs and pickups, Teams calls, making dinner, cleaning up, and getting the kids ready for bed and baths, with household chores and personal admin to be completed in what was left of our free time.
Though we had full-time childcare, we had little else in the way of daily support, as our families were not local.
In our social circle, we knew that dual-career parents with young children often bought supermarket-ready meals or ordered takeout. However, these options often felt too high in salt and sugar, and limited in their selection.
That was how I found myself posting in a Facebook group for Malaysian moms in the UK, desperately trying to find someone to cook for us.
I wasn’t envisioning a personal chef who would shop and make three meals a day — our budget didn’t stretch that far — rather, I hoped to find a decent home cook and had a few hours to make big, batch meals that we could freeze, then reheat on our busy weekdays.
That was how we found Evelyn.
For $150 a visit, we paid for someone to batch-cook meals for our family
Elizabeth Wong
Evelyn was an experienced pastry chef on furlough, like many in the food-service industry at the time — we connected in 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
She lived in a neighboring borough in London, which made our arrangement convenient. Equally as important, she was good at cooking Chinese-Malaysian dishes.
She would visit once a month, for about four to six hours. Our arrangement cost us around $150 per visit at the time. Before she arrived, we would discuss the menu over WhatsApp. Crucially, the dishes had to be easy to freeze and easy to reheat.
I would then shop for the ingredients she needed, which meant a combination of online grocery shopping and trips to Chinatown for less-common items.
On her visit, she would cook large portions of three dishes, which she further subdivided into another three family-sized portions. In total, we had around nine portions, which were then packed into containers and frozen — like a supermarket-ready meal, but tastier and probably healthier.
The meals she cooked were Malaysian Nyonya or Chinese-Malaysian dishes: ayam tempra (chicken dish), chai boey (a delicious sour and spicy stew with leftover roast meat), babi pongteh (a braised pork dish), and chicken with ginger and spring onion.
The 4-year arrangement had both expected and unexpected benefits
Elizabeth Wong
As a result of Evelyn’s visits, we did not spend precious hours batch cooking on the weekends. We could spend our limited free time with our children.
Although her meals did not completely replace the need for us to cook, the constant everyday drudgery of preparing food was partially mitigated. On weekdays, after a long day of work calls, I would grab a container out of the fridge and pair it with plain white rice.
And the biggest unexpected benefit was that she taught us more of my culture. Though I’m Chinese-Malaysian, I was never taught how to cook growing up. When I started living independently, my cooking repertoire did not extend much beyond pasta, curry chicken, and whatever I could learn from YouTube videos.
Nothing compares to being shown what to cook and how to do it by a more experienced person. It was a learning experience for me to hunt for the ingredients that Evelyn had asked for in the local Chinese grocery store. On one of my trips, I had gotten a vegetable that I believed to be kai choy (Chinese mustard green), only to be told by Evelyn that it was choy sum (Chinese flowering cabbage).
By watching her, I also learned about different types of tofu and which work best for various dishes, plus how to get a good sear on meat (very high heat and a willingness to tolerate oil splatter).
Evelyn continued to come to our place every month or so until we left London about four years later. We did not restart an arrangement like this in our new place, as the kids were older and our jobs were more flexible.
I am a firm believer that you have to make your own village in this modern world, especially for those of us who have found careers far away from our families of origin. So I am forever grateful to Evelyn for her help in the intense years with babies and young children.
We had been looking for a “batch-cooking service,” but instead we got a stand-in “aunty.”
