Laura Fitzpatrick: Cooking One Meal So the Whole Family Can Eat Together

Laura grew up in a large Mediterranean family where cooking was not an occasional event. Her mother and grandmother were both excellent cooks, everything was made from scratch, and the family ate together.

"Life was centered around big family meals and cooking everything from scratch and all eating together."

Her mother had owned a restaurant before she had children, and that seriousness about food carried into the family home. Laura learned by being around it, absorbing the habits and the pace of two women who cooked constantly and fed people well. The idea that cooking, eating, and being together are the same activity was settled in her long before she ever posted a recipe.

Eight years ago, after her first child was born, Laura started an Instagram account documenting baby led weaning. There was no strategy behind it. She simply posted pictures of what he was eating.

Instagram was a different place then, and people began asking for the recipes behind the photographs. So she wrote them out and shared them. The response was warm, and the account grew into something she genuinely enjoyed running, a place where she could help other parents work out how to feed their families.

She kept it up for a couple of years. Then the pandemic arrived, and the tone of posting changed for her.

"I found it really, really difficult to show up positively online."

She stopped in 2020. She never deleted the account, and never formally closed it. It simply sat there, quiet, for six years while she got on with raising her family.

The pull back was not commercial. She missed helping people with their food, particularly parents in the weaning stage trying to find a way to feed everyone the same thing. She also missed the creative part of it, the thinking and testing and putting a recipe together.

In April she decided to see what would happen if she started again. Instagram had moved on considerably in six years. Reels had become the main format, hooks mattered, and the first two seconds of a video decided whether anyone watched the rest. She had to learn all of it quickly, and she is candid that she is still learning. What she describes as a minefield has also turned out to be the most interesting part of the work.

The name of the page is also the argument behind it.

"You cook one meal and everyone eats it."

Laura was surprised to discover how many parents, especially in the UK, cook one dinner for the children and a different one for the adults. That was not how she was raised, and it strikes her as a lot of unnecessary work, two or three meals a night in a household that is already stretched. Her position is that eating the same food as your children is the most effective way to widen what they will try. If the family is at one table eating one thing, children tend to follow.

Her own children are a useful test panel. Her eldest eats everything and always has. Her middle child is fussier, and that is where much of the recipe thinking happens. Laura will look at a dish and consider what her daughter would make of it, what she would eat, what she would quietly pick out and leave at the side of the plate. Her toddler currently eats whatever is put in front of him.

The result is a recipe filter that runs on real conditions rather than assumptions. If something clears her middle child, there is a reasonable chance it will work in other households with a cautious eater in them.

There are two lanes on the page. The first is the quick, easy family dinners: one dish, few ingredients, often thrown together or left to the slow cooker or the oven. The second is snacks, and those have taken off faster, which mirrors what happened when she was posting eight years ago.

Her rule for snack recipes is that the ingredients should already be in the cupboard. People want something they can assemble without a shop, that is healthier than what they would otherwise buy, and that still tastes like a treat. The whole point of the recipes is that they close the gap between wanting to feed your family well and having twenty minutes to do it in.

Laura does all of it herself, and all of it on a phone. There is no equipment, no team, and no separate filming setup.

"I don't watch TV anymore. I just edit or film."

Filming happens when the older children are at school and the toddler is napping. Editing happens in the evening once everyone is in bed. She is aware of the advice that creators should post every day, and she has decided she cannot do that honestly, so she posts good work when she has it rather than filling the feed for the sake of it.

The most useful thing she has learned is that her audience wants the process first. Starting with the finished dish does not hold attention the way starting with the making of it does.

The most frustrating thing she has learned is how little separates a video that works from one that does not. The same recipe, the same footage, the same person, and a different clip order at the front. One of those went viral. The one before it, with the clips in a different sequence, did not. She finds it fascinating and slightly maddening in equal measure, because it means there is always another version to second guess.

Instagram's trial reels feature has helped, letting her test hooks and formats before committing. She is on Instagram and has recently started cross posting to Facebook.

Asked to name one dish she would eat for the rest of her life, Laura could not narrow it down and chose a cuisine instead. Homemade curries, of any kind. She finds them flavorsome and endlessly versatile, and there is a practical reason for the affection too. All of her babies have loved curry, which makes it one of the few things that genuinely works for everyone at the table at once.

Laura lost both of her parents in close succession when she was in her early twenties. Her mother was her closest friend and the anchor of the family, and losing her changed the shape of the household she had grown up in.

What she has been building since is a version of that for her own children. She wants them to have the love of food and the habit of eating together that her mother gave her, and she wants some of it to outlast her.

"If I could inspire them the way she inspired me, that's kind of what I'm hoping for."

Part of the reason the recipes are written down and posted publicly is that they will still be there later. She likes the idea of her children finding her recipes online one day and recognizing them as their mum's. It is the thing she wishes she had from her own mother.

Her message to anyone reading is short and consistent with everything else she does.

"Feeding your family doesn't need to be complicated."

Cooking should be simple and it should be enjoyable, because as a parent you will be doing it for a very long time. If it currently feels like neither of those things, her hope is that her recipes make it a little easier. That is the whole ambition, and she is unhurried about the rest of it.

Follow Laura on Instagram at @cookoncewithlaura, where she shares quick family meals and homemade snacks filmed in her own kitchen just outside London. Chefadora is proud to spotlight creators like Laura who are making everyday cooking simpler and bringing families back to the same table.

Updated on 27 Jul 2026