For years, I paid someone $150 a month to batch-cook meals for my busy family of 4

Outsourcing some of the cooking meant my husband and I could spend more time with our kids and have delicious meals ready to reheat on our busiest days.

Elizabeth Wong After our second child, my husband and I were struggling to balance our jobs and household admin.

To outsource some of the cooking, I found a local chef to batch-cook meals for us once a month.

Having a freezer packed with homemade meals saved us time, and I learned a lot from the chef.

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.