Chloe: Comfort Food for the Normal Working Person

Chloe says she only really reflected on where her love of cooking came from after she started making food content, because cooking was so built into her childhood that she never questioned it. Her mother cooked at home every day. Home-cooked meals were simply the norm.

Her mother and grandparents were the biggest influence. They cooked with real ingredients rather than jarred and canned food, and Chloe grew up eating that way.

She also grew up on a dairy farm, and the farming culture shaped what the family ate. Meals were meat heavy, and she saw the whole process up close, starting with the animals. Cooking was something she loved and something she was around from the very beginning.

Chloe moved out of her parents' house at 17 and lived on her own, which is when she started cooking for herself in earnest. She was on the phone to her mother constantly, asking how to make one thing or another. At the same time she was studying for her teaching degree at university, fitting cooking around her studies.

Then the lockdown came. Like a lot of people, she suddenly had time to lean into her interests. She had moved in with her partner, now her fiancé, and his family. His mother was still working at the time and he has two brothers, so Chloe did much of the cooking.

She used that period to try new recipes and new flavors, cooking for a full household. Without planning it, she was building the habit that would become her page.

Chloe is not entirely sure why she started posting. She credits her partner, who asked her one day why she didn't just post what she was making. She decided to go for it, they came up with the name Chlo Cooks together, and she started sharing recipes.

At first she posted photos as slides. Then she decided to start filming, and taught herself to edit video along the way. She puts the start of the page at roughly two and a half to three years ago, and says it has grown steadily since.

None of it was part of a plan. When she began, she had no idea that food content could be monetized at all.

The restaurant side of her page arrived the same way. Chloe went out for lunch one day, took some photos, and posted them. Afterward, a restaurant messaged her with an invitation to come in and try their food.

"I'm like, for free? Like, for free? I'm like, yeah, sure, let's do it."

That message opened up a world she hadn't known existed. Restaurant visits and recommendations are now the other half of her page, alongside her recipes, and she says the collaborations have opened a lot of doors for her.

She sees part of her role as helping people cut through the choice. When a city offers that many options, it can be hard to know where to start, and she wants to be the person who can tell them which places are worth going to.

Chloe is from Scotland and lives in Glasgow, and she thinks both the country's food and the city's restaurant scene are underrated. She has recently done work featuring Scotch beef, pork, and lamb, and she believes Scotland is one of the best places to find high-quality meat and vegetables. In her view, the fact that so much of what's sold in Scottish supermarkets is traceable is part of that quality.

On restaurants, she compares Glasgow to a mini New York, a city with something for everybody. Since starting her page she has come to appreciate the diversity and range of flavors the city offers, and she calls it the food capital of Scotland.

Comfort food is what Chloe loves to cook and film most: soups, and above all pasta. If she could eat only one dish for the rest of her life, she says it would be macaroni cheese, or failing that, anything with cheese.

She is also serious about health and fitness, and she builds her recipes around whole foods as much as she can. She avoids canned and jarred ingredients where possible and checks the labels on what she buys. She is candid that she still eats a chocolate bar like everybody else, but whole foods are her default.

The other test is whether people will actually make it. Chloe feels that a lot of recipes online look amazing but aren't achievable for someone working full time, and as a full-time teacher she knows that problem firsthand. She wants her recipes to be something people use and enjoy, and she gets a lot of satisfaction when followers tag her or message her to say they've made her food.

The dishes Chloe remembers most fondly from childhood are lasagna, a classic in her house, and bolognese. Then there are scones. Her granny made them for her all the time, and the two of them would make them together. Her granny passed the recipe on to Chloe's dad, so the family kept making them, and Chloe still bakes them now.

"It's very simple, very basic, but it's something that's from the heart, and there's not a recipe for it. You just go by eye."

Her lasagna is already on her page. The scones are not, yet, precisely because the family recipe has never had exact amounts. She is still refining it, trying to write down a version that turns out the way she remembers.

Much of Chloe's inspiration comes from eating out. She likes to take flavors and dishes she has had at restaurants and work them into things she already makes. Some ideas arrive less predictably: she often dreams about food and wakes up with an idea she wants to try.

From there it comes down to trial and error.

"A lot of my time is spent just trying things, and then if it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't."

When something works, it becomes a recipe video. She points out that there is a lot of tasting and testing behind each one that viewers never see. Her partner is her honest taste tester. She remembers a soup she was developing that came out very thick and bitter, and despite her attempts to fix it, he told her it wasn't going on the page. Most of the time, she says, she can rescue a dish if it goes wrong.

He likes a quick meal, she says, while she has more patience in the kitchen. There are plenty of good dishes that take 10 or 15 minutes, but in her view you need at least 45 minutes to get a real depth of flavor in something cooked from scratch.

Chloe tries not to compare herself to other creators. When she does, she finds herself looking at their followers and likes and wondering whether she can really do this. She also worries that looking too closely at other people's work would seep into her own.

"It's almost like when you listen to a song and you can't get the tune out of your head."

So she tries to keep her filming and her recipes as original as she can. That doesn't mean keeping her distance. She collaborates with other creators, comments on their work, and supports them, and she describes the food creator community as a good one for that. She is happy for the people who are succeeding.

She thinks having a niche matters, and says she is still searching for hers. One change she has made is putting more of herself in her videos. As a teacher, she was reluctant for a long time to show her face on the page, but she has built confidence and wants her personality to come through alongside the food.

Time has been her biggest challenge. Chloe works full time as a teacher, a job she describes as overwhelming and time-consuming. She spends the day at school and most evenings filming and editing, and she has kept that routine for around two years.

There were stretches, especially early on, when growth was slower than she hoped and she wondered whether it was going anywhere. What kept her going was seeing a video perform well and seeing people make her recipes. She says she is now at a point where she wants to keep pursuing it.

She also admits she struggles with imposter syndrome and doesn't celebrate her successes as much as she probably should, partly because she doesn't want to seem like she's boasting. But she thinks it's important for people to understand the work involved, because from the outside it can look like luck.

"There's a lot of hours of prep and filming and editing that goes into every single video that goes out."

Her motivation comes from people cooking her food. Chloe has noticed how many people around her say they don't cook at all, and she has watched people in her own circle start putting effort into cooking because of her. Messages and tags from followers who have made her recipes add to that. Her page has also encouraged some of her friends and family to start posting about their own interests.

She brings the same conviction into her teaching, doing health and food tech work with the children at her school. She believes strongly in whole foods and is opposed to the additives she sees in a lot of food today, and she says she gets a lot back from the children.

Even one person enjoying her food, even if it's just her fiancé, Steven, is enough to keep her creating. And she loves to eat, so she gets plenty of satisfaction from it herself.

Chloe doesn't set timelines, but she would like to see how far her page can go. It has already taken her further than she expected, and she feels there's no ceiling on where it could lead. For now, she wants to keep spreading the joy of food, working with brands, and building on what she has started.

Her broader message is to do what makes you happy. You only get one life, she says, so if you enjoy something, pour your energy into it and you will get back what you put in.

On cooking, her advice is to try new things and not be put off. A lot of people see cooking as daunting or as something that will take forever, she says, but following a recipe and getting the main parts right will take you most of the way.

"Just try, just give it a go, and you'll see that once you're actually into it, it's not as difficult as what people might make out to be."

Chloe's cooking starts on a dairy farm, in a family that cooked from scratch, with scones made by eye from her granny's recipe. It carries through to a page of whole food comfort recipes built for people with full-time jobs, a growing collection of restaurant recommendations from a city she thinks deserves more credit, and evenings of filming and editing after a full day in the classroom.

Follow Chloe on Instagram at @chlo.cooks__, and TikTok @chlo.cooks where she shares whole food comfort recipes and restaurant finds from Glasgow. Chefadora spotlights creators like Chloe because the people behind recipes matter as much as the recipes themselves, and her story is a reminder of how much work goes into food that looks easy on screen.

Updated on 04 Nov 2026