I wasn’t always a home cook, but home cooking was always around me. Growing up in Lebanon, my working mother still found time each day to prepare us a hot, home-cooked meal. In Arabic, we call this hot, home-cooked meal “tabkha.”

But it wasn’t until decades later, when my husband and I moved with our young daughter to San Francisco, that I entered the kitchen. Tabkha was a way of preserving our culture, a way of staying tied to our home country while away from it. And through two master’s degrees, a professional career, and raising three children, tabkha remained at the center of our home, family, and tradition.

On a recent trip to London, over tabkha prepared by the dear friends we were visiting, a conversation arose around what my next endeavor might be. Looking around at my friends’ smiling faces, hearing the laughter in the room, smelling the warm aromas of the meal we were sharing, it occurred to me that what I wanted to be doing was creating more of this—community created by tabkha.

With a background in the social sector, the lack of economic opportunity and gender inequality faced by women around the globe, particularly those in the global south, are issues near to my heart. Millions of women spend countless unpaid hours cooking and preparing meals for their families. Studies estimate that women spend nearly one thousand hours cooking each year, the value of which is equivalent to 2.2 trillion dollars USD per year.

And that’s when the idea for Tabkha Live was born: a platform that would pay ordinary home cooks for their unpaid labor at the same time as it provides a new and unique opportunity for those interested in learning how to cook at home.

Tabkha Live is a social enterprise whose mission is to make the invisible labor of home cooking visible, and to turn the unpaid labor of millions (particularly women in the global south) into a source of income and economic opportunity. Live and interactive cooking sessions hosted on our platform allow home cooks to transform their daily meal preparation into tutorials where users can cook alongside the home cook, asking questions, learning techniques and interacting with them in real time.

Tabkha Live connects home cooks around the world to users who want to cook authentic, ethnic meals while supporting a social cause. But this is just the beginning of the story. When home cooks and users interact with one another on live cooking sessions, they not only share new recipes and cooking techniques, they share culture, traditions, stories, laughter, and human connection. Tabkha nourishes more than just the body, it nourishes the mind and the soul. Tabkha creates community as people from all walks of life, from all corners of the world, are united by the shared experience of preparing a meal together.