Downtime With: Caroline Chambers
The chef and cookbook author breaks down her "chaotic" reading life, the idea of raising your first kid like your third, and shares the magic of a “nap cap.”
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I’ll admit I am a woman who rarely feels like cooking. But given my family of five, and especially during the pandemic, I play the role of short order cook more often than I’d like. Thank goodness, then, for Caroline Chambers, the chef behind the blockbuster newsletter, What To Cook When You Don't Feel Like Cooking, who I and thousands of others turn to for approachable, nourishing meal ideas that won’t break the bank.
While you may already know Caroline as a chef, we wanted to learn more about who she is as a woman existing in this frenzied, chaotic moment.
Below, Caroline gives us a glimpse into her mornings with her family of six, shares the skincare hack that costs less than $10, and dives deeper into the idea of raising your first child like your third.
Caroline’s 3 Good Things
Gap’s VintageSoft™ Sweats: I love a pair of fancy sweats but I always come back to the Gap VintageSoft. They have baggy pants, straight leg, jogger, crewneck, hoodie – pick your poison.
The “Nap Cap”: For new parents out there, when a baby is overstimulated and overtired they have a hard time falling asleep. You can pull a beanie over their eyes like an eye mask, then feed them or rock them, and nine times out of 10 they’ll pass out immediately. They just need help calming their little brains down! This is also the best trick if they’re able to fall asleep in a crowded place – pull their beanie over their eyes so that at the 45 minute mark of their sleep cycle when their eyes flutter open, they are met with darkness and likely to fall back asleep versus seeing all the action and waking up.
Don’t sleep on the nap cap. PanOxyl face wash: The hugest unlock of my late 30s. It’s just a cheap, super strong acne fash wash you can grab at the drugstore. And it’s changed my life. I used to have insane hormonal breakouts around every period, now I maybe have one tiny blemish. You can also use it to wash your armpits and it annihilates body odor! This $9 product has helped my skin more than any fancy skincare!
Downtime With: Caroline Chambers
Talk to us about where you’re from and what you do?
I grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and I now live in Carmel, CA with my husband George and our four sons. I’ve worked in the cooking space for over ten years — I started out as a caterer and personal chef, then moved into a test kitchen in San Francisco, developing recipes for nationwide restaurants like Panera and Starbucks, then went freelance and ghost wrote cookbooks for celebrities and brands and magazines. During COVID I started sharing recipes from my own account and launched a Substack called What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking. I now have a cookbook by the same name, and another one coming out in August called What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking: Make It Fast!
How did you end up in the work that you do now?
All credit goes to my mom, who worked full-time, had three kids, never ever felt like cooking, but always did it anyway because family meals were a huge priority for her. She is the scrappiest, hackiest cook, who can look at a seemingly empty fridge and create a beautiful meal out of it. She taught me that cooking a delicious meal doesn’t have to be hard, and now I teach hundreds of thousands of people the same thing!
Can you walk us through a typical day for you?
I wake up when the baby (eight months old) starts squawking around 7:15. I turn to find out whose in my bed. My seven year old, probably. Maybe my five year-old, too. Rarely my husband, who winds up grabbing our three year old from his crib anywhere between midnight and 3 am and sleeping in one of the boys’ beds upstairs. I feed the baby a bottle in bed, beside whoever my bedmate of the day is. When he finishes his bottle, he squeals the most high-pitched happy shrieks and wakes the bedmate up. We play with the baby for a while, then begin our routine chaos: getting four boys dressed and out the door in about 15 minutes because they all sleep late and we have to drag them out of bed. Perfect Bars or car meatballs in the car on the way to school.
My husband drops our three year old on his way to work, I take our 5 and 7 year-old to elementary school, with the baby in tow. The baby is a celebrity on campus — every child knows his name so it usually takes five to 10 minutes per drop off to escape.
Then we go to The Creamery for coffee, and wind up chatting for at least 20 minutes. This is a small town, and I work from home, so this is basically my “water cooler” chit-chat gossip time. Then we head home, I put Tav down for his first nap of the day, and I get to work around 9:45am. Usually this involves a call with my editorial team, filming sponsored content, writing recipes, testing recipes, calls with my book editorial team or PR team since we are planning the press and tour for my book that releases in August, putting together pitches for brands I want to work with, writing content for the newsletter, planning and executing Substack lives, [and] building relationships with other Substackers to find ways that we can lift up each others work (like what Alisha Ramos and I are doing here). No day is the same!
My nanny also arrives sometime during Tav’s first nap of the day, helps tidy up the kitchen from the chaos routine of the morning, gets him up when he wakes up, and she’s on duty through pickup. She grabs the big boys from school most days, and takes everyone to do something fun after school so they’re usually home around 4:30/5. During the day while I’m on a call I try to prep a simple dinner so that when the kids are home, I can be hanging with them, not cooking. Like I’ll marinate a flank steak and cut up veggies, so that when they’re home I can simply throw it on the grill while they play outside with me.
How do you end your day?
Honestly? My husband and I are both entrepreneurs who work for ourselves, so after the kids get to bed, we work. We wind up working for at least an hour, sometimes very many hours. We keep trying to… not do this. But it’s hard to turn it off when you work for yourself and have a lot of big ideas that aren’t going to come to life on their own.
What does your downtime / “you time” look like?
Getting a foot massage at ComFoot Spa in Monterey. It’s right across from this bakery, Alta, that I love. Their lattes are so good, their pastries are impeccable. So I grab a latte, then I head over to ComFoot to get a nice foot rub. This is my heaven. It’s $30 for a 30 minute massage!
On Raising Your First Like Your Third
How did you like to be mothered, or parented, when you were a kid?
I was a middle child and my parents both worked, so I had a lot of independence from a young age. I am really not afraid to jump in, try new things, launch the project, try hosting a podcast (I failed, it was hard!), etc. because I think my parents were always like, “Sounds great, go for it!” without holding my hand too much. They’re super supportive and gave me what I needed to succeed, but never coddled us. I’ve never really thought about how I liked to be parented, but that’s how I was parented, and I like who I am!
How did becoming a caregiver change you or your perspective?
My kids have two parents who work a lot, and travel a lot for work. Sometimes I spiral about this and really beat myself up. But most of the time I can stay level-headed about this by thinking about my own childhood. I had two parents who worked a lot. I also had two parents who were incredibly involved in my life. I also had a lot of independence. All of those things are true. I have to believe that not picking my kids up from school everyday is only teaching them to respect other adults (our nanny), become adaptable, be more flexible. All of us, as mothers, write our own little scripts that we need to tell ourselves to convince ourselves that however we’re raising our kids, we’re doing it right. Stay-at-home moms are doing it right, working moms are doing it right, part-time moms are doing it right. We’re all just giving our kids the very best version of ourselves that we can.
“The rigidity of modern parenting advice robbed me of my joy."
You’ve talked about raising your first kid like your third. I think we understand what that means, but what does it look like, practically speaking?
With my first, I struggled to let my maternal instincts guide me. There is so much noise: Parenting books, TikTok, Instagram. Once your algorithm finds out you’re a new mom it’s like, GOTCHA. “Feed your kid this way!” “No, if you feed your kid that way they’ll be picky forever!!!” It’s truly so hard to be a mom in 2026 – there is an incessant barrage of parenting advice being hurtled at us.
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