Date Night Idea: 3 Reasons Why You Should Cook with Your Girlfriend

Food can be a powerful thing – sure, it’s there to fuel our bodies but it can also help you score some major relationship bonus points with the girlfriend or wife. That’s right gentleman, cooking with your girlfriend could be that pot of gold at the relationship tunnel that you’ve been searching for all along. Studies show that couples who eat together and have a daily or weekly ritual of a shared meal have happier relationships, and the benefits increase when you add in some extra time preparing the meal and cooking together. We teamed up with Daily Dish to bring you just 3 reasons why you should cook with your girlfriend – and to make your life super easy we’ve also thrown in some ideas on how to spend more time with your lady in the kitchen this week (and before you ask, no, watching her cook while you sip on a beer doesn’t count).

The art of communication:

So what’s the secret? It all comes down to communication. Taking the time out once a week, or even better, daily to cook together and ‘break bread’ opens up the channels of communication and allows a couple to connect on an intimate level, to be creative and strengthen their relationship without all the distractions of daily life. Cooking with someone else requires immense amounts of communication, without it the dish will end up as a hot mess and you’ll probably go hungry. If you are able to communicate in the kitchen then chances are you will be able to communicate well in other areas of your relationship as well.

A love of learning:

Cooking together also allows you to learn together. Not sure what it means to cook until al dente or what it means to cut vegetables julienne? Maybe your partner knows the answer, maybe you’ll have to look it up together. We’re not all professional, which is precisely the allure of cooking with your partner. While the end goal is to make something remotely edible you’re also there to have a good time in a safe, private space. Not only will you learn all about culinary terms and techniques but you will also learn more about your partner as you go – their favourite meal to prepare, their first memories of learning to cook as a child, or even their worst kitchen mishaps. Cooking together will allow you both to learn loads about each and grow as a couple while whipping up delicious eats and treats.

Time to eat:

And, of course, the most important part, taking the time to enjoy your dish together. Take the time to savour that exciting moment when the kitchen timer buzzes and the room is filled with the sweet smells of a delicious, home-cooked meal. Eating together can be a great bonding experience – from the ritual of setting the table, lighting some candles, and putting on some soft music to sitting down to eat, chat and enjoy. And the pay off – knowing that you and your partner can work together, as a team, to complete a project… a delicious project. Spending this time together in the kitchen and eating together afterwards is an experience that the two of you can share and the great part is it’s different each time and you’ll create new memories every time you put on an apron together.

Nice isn’t it? Here’s how to put it into practice:

Before I share these brilliant (and they are brilliant) tips with you I should probably come clean about something … my boyfriend and I share a dirty little secret (ritual, dirty secret, brilliant common indulgence … call it what you will). Yup, we have a snacking problem, there I said it, and often (maybe too often) we spend a night in for what we like to call “fat nights”. Our secret snack nights start off with a trip to the shops for a binge shop of all the snacks we’ve been craving over the week and once we’re satisfied we have enough to meet our needs it’s back home for a night of movies and endless munching. But don’t discount this as just any snack night – we’re those people who get three different kinds of cookies because we can’t decide which ones we’re craving the most (don’t judge us, you know you’re impressed). You might call it over indulgent but we like to call it bonding.

Sadly, we’ve realised that our bonding experience is not the best idea for our waistlines or our health in general so we’ve had to find a less destructive version of said bonding experience. We wanted to keep it food related and then stumbled upon the brilliance that is Daily Dish – which, by the way, is pretty much the closest thing to downloading food that you will ever come across. The food delivery service helps busy people cook and enjoy delicious and healthy meals in the week without having to worry about popping to the shops for ingredients or knowing anything about cooking at all really.

Order a Daily Dish box for two and the next Monday they’ll drop off a box containing all the ingredients and recipes you need for four meals for two people for the week. It’s the perfect solution for couples who want to stay healthy and start cooking together. The boyfriend and I tried it and it really is quite genius and I’d highly recommend it as a way for couples to start cooking together. It also makes your life so much easier – the recipes are super easy to follow and there’s no fighting over what to make for dinner.

Daily Dish allows you to choose from 5 different menus including Classic, Banting, Pork-free, and Vegetarian and the boxes start from R660 for two people’s meals for a week – click here to find out more and explore the menus on offer. You can also say Hi to Daily Dish on Facebook and Twitter.