Couple Sets Out to Cook 365 Recipes Together. After Their 259th, Her World Came 'Crashing Down' (Exclusive)

Tabitha ParentTue, April 7, 2026 at 10:00 AM UTC

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Laura cooks a recipe from her copy of 'Healthy Dish of the Day' by Kate McMillan.Credit: Laura (Bitter to Better Challenge) (2) -

In 2015, Laura, who posts under the handle @bittertobetterchallenge online, was gifted a cookbook by her husband

The cookbook, Kate McMillan's Healthy Dish of the Day, featured a recipe for every day of the year, and the couple planned to cook through the entire book in about three years

However, after they had cooked their 259th recipe, something happened that knocked the trajectory of their lives off course for good

In 2015, Laura's then-boyfriend gifted her a copy of Kate McMillan's Healthy Dish of the Day cookbook for Christmas.Inside the front cover, he wrote a note to her, detailing how, for the next however many years it took, the couple would embark on a journey of cooking the recipe listed in the book under each date.So, on March 4, the couple would cook the recipe listed under the entry for that day, and on July 13, the same thing. However, each recipe, he specified, could only be cooked on that specific day. So if the couple missed the Aug. 6 entry, or didn't feel like cooking it that night, they would have to wait until the next year."We figured we'd finish it in maybe three years because there's 365 recipes," Laura tells PEOPLE. She remembers how they weighed the odds — statistically, the pair of them cooked a few times a week — so that seemed realistic.

Laura with one of the meals she cooked from Kate McMillan's 'Healthy Dish of the Day.'Credit: Laura (Bitter to Better Challenge)

The cookbook wasn't the only part of the gift. For every recipe they cooked, he was putting $20 into an account. When the couple eventually finished the cookbook, he was going to take the recipe and take Laura "anywhere in the world" that she wanted for dinner.So, the couple set off on their quest to complete the cookbook, all the while building a life together. They eventually got married, and his work took the couple to another state. The couple eventually had a daughter together.What Laura had no way of knowing was that, all while the couple was continuing to grow and build their life together — and tick off recipes in their book — her relationship was about to come to an end.

The day after Christmas in 2023, eight years to the date of when she had been gifted the cookbook, Laura realized that her relationship was, perhaps, beyond repair. Laura and her husband had just cooked their 259th recipe."It's more than your heart sinking. It's really just your world crashing down," she describes the moment she realized that she could no longer continue in her relationship.

One of Laura's meals from Kate McMillan's "Healthy Dish of the Day" cookbook.Credit: Laura (Bitter to Better Challenge)

Despite how she may have felt about the state of her world at the time, Laura maintains that the most "unhinged" thing she did in the moment was... nothing at all. She didn't tell anyone, not even her family. She didn't want to spoil their Christmas. "I just knew once I let that cat out of the bag, there was no going back," she explains.For Laura, divorce was not the immediate option — in fact, she initially told her husband she didn't want one. The couple had a daughter together and a full life.In January 2024, Laura and her ex cooked their last meal together — their 260th recipe.

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Laura with another one of her meals from the cookbook.Credit: Laura (Bitter to Better Challenge)

"Looking back, I was still in a total state of shock, but I think I was grasping at straws to remind him, 'Hey, remember what we have? We love each other so much. We've cooked 260 unique recipes together.'"Another facet of it all was that the recipes weren't just simple mac and cheese concoctions that could be whipped up on a regular basis."These are complicated recipes in some instances, and unique ingredients, things we've never heard of," she says. "Completing the cookbook, it was going to be this big challenge that we set out to do together. How do you not want to finish this with me? Was I not seeing this whole time that you weren't loving this with me?"Cooking that final recipe was not the closure that Laura thought it would be.It took her seven months to work up the courage to open up McMillan's cookbook again and try one of the recipes. However, Laura refused to let her ex-husband take the challenge from her.She recruited friends and family and, eventually, somewhere along the way, Laura started an Instagram account documenting her progress called @bittertobetterchallenge."I really wanted to finish [the cookbook]," she says. "I thought documenting the journey would hold me accountable to actually finishing it, [and] would be a wonderful way to reflect down the line."Laura has noticed a marked difference in herself in old videos from when she first resolved to finish the challenge.

One of Laura's meals.Credit: Laura (Bitter to Better Challenge)

"It's just lighter now, laughing," she says. "I wanted to document it and also hopefully turn my pain into purpose. I've held that little statement for a while, thinking if I can share this with someone else and they can feel a little bit less alone, how great would that be?"In cooking with her friends and family, and now her over 30,000 followers on Instagram (she's even in touch with McMillan, whom she sometimes messages for clarification on instructions in the cookbook), Laura hopes her followers will take away one thing."I hope they know that they're not alone, first and foremost," she says. "I hope they know that if they're seeing me happy and joyful and cooking and healing, that it didn't start off this way."When she first began cooking, Laura didn't realize it at the time, but she says there were "three big things that were going to happen.""I was going to have to heal from... the end of that relationship, then there's the actual divorce piece and dealing with the logistics and the pain of the divorce, and then there's becoming a single mom," she says.

Laura with one of her meals.Credit: Laura (Bitter to Better Challenge)

A good portion of the healing has happened. As of March 2026, she has 39 recipes left to cook.Her divorce, she says, will eventually be over. Being a single mom is, in a sense, "forever," she says. "Her dad and I will never be raising her together," she says.But Laura doesn't want her young daughter to look back on this time period and think, "'Oh, I can't believe my mom did A, B, and C.' I want her to be like, 'I can't believe how well she handled this.'""That's what I want her to say. So I think showing people that you can keep your chin up and while not diminishing what they did, but just knowing that you have the choice of how you want to move forward," she continues."There's light at the end of the tunnel. That initial pain and shock and grief, some of that will pass if you put the time and energy into healing," Laura says.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”