A Conversation with Kate Strickler of Naptime Kitchen: On adult friendships, how she grew a 300k+ audience, and why bagged salads always win

The Charleston-based mom of four brings refreshing honesty and perspective to life as a parent, you're going to love her.

Kate Strickler! Thank you so much for joining me. Can you share a little bit about yourself for the folks who are meeting you for the first time?

Hi! I'm Kate Strickler. I'm a mom of four (10, 8, 6, 3), married to my husband Nate. We live in Charleston, South Carolina. About 10 years ago, I started the Instagram account, Naptime Kitchen, where I share recipes, time-saving ideas, and home hacks.

Naptime Kitchen also has a blog, but I still feel funny even calling myself a blogger because the blog was just a means to solve a problem. Back in the day, you couldn’t save recipes on Instagram, so I needed a place for followers to be able to search and access the recipes.

Okay, let’s back up. What made you start Naptime Kitchen in the first place?

It was a creative outlet for me during a season where my son was napping twice a day and I had a lot of time at home. We were on a shoestring budget because my husband was in law school. I like to cook—it's where I gravitate when I have free time—so I would shop the sales at the grocery store, and try making something new and fun for dinner.

Over time, people started to follow along and it just kind of kept growing over the last 10 years.

Right—we met right around when you started out, when your brother was getting married. [Ed. note: Kate’s brother is married to my husband’s cousin!] Naptime Kitchen was growing and you were like, “Whoa, what is happening.”

People are always asking how Naptime Kitchen grew on Instagram. And it’s really putting out good content and being patient. I've been doing it for 10 years. So if you’re wanting it all in a year…

And it really grew. You now have over 300k Instagram followers (322k at time of publication!) and 78k Substack subscribers. Those are big numbers. Was there anything that really made it take off?

Word of mouth was huge. After my third child was born, I was getting a ton of growth. This was still prior to Reels, so you didn't really have that viral side of Instagram. It was people in their Stories literally saying, “Hey, I love Kate from Naptime Kitchen’s recipe for XYZ.”

There were a few big-name accounts people were coming from. I’d hear like, "I found you from this person in Kentucky and this person in California." But to this day, I don’t really know who it was driving so much traffic. It really has been very slow and steady, just chugging along.

What has been the most surprising thing to come out of Naptime Kitchen?

The fact that it's a career that can support my family is wild. It was honest-to-goodness never on my radar. I don't even know anyone who had a business on Instagram in 2015 and I wasn't really in the blogging world where people were making a living off their content.

In 2019, I made some affiliate earnings and I remember being like, "Wow, I made $200. This is incredible." I was so excited and bought a purse I really wanted with that money.

Every year after that, I earned a little more through Naptime Kitchen. I wasn’t like, “This is our projected goal” or “This is our plan.” It just snowballed from, "Wow, okay, this is kind of cool, I can buy a fun purse" into "Okay, this is a sustainable thing."

Then I started working with an agency. So I started to get advertisement opportunities and on top of that, Amazon Affiliates was becoming a huge thing. I think I was just at the right place at the right time.

I mean, look at what it’s become! You're about to go on a book tour. Your book, I Just Wish I Had a Bigger Kitchen, is coming out next week (released 8/26!). Tell me all about it.

It's my deep dive into the discontentment I noticed that I was feeling, in a life that was really wonderful.

While I do blame a good amount on social media, I know that when I'm not on social media, I can still find a million ways to be discontent. There are a lot of ways social media can exacerbate it, but it's not like nobody was discontent before social media existed.

Discontentment isn’t a new thing.

Right! And I started noticing when I would mention anything about discontentment online, I would get an onslaught of messages:

“I feel that way too!”

“My gosh, I would have never guessed that you felt that way.”

“Wow, I thought I was the only one that felt this way.”

So it just started to form into thoughts that became essays that became a book.

And the title, “I Just Wish I Had a Bigger Kitchen” is so good. Instantly memorable and relatable.

I really wanted the title to include the phrase “I just wish” because it's not like I’m saying, “I hate my life. I wish for a different life.”

Rather, it’s sneaky little thoughts: “No, everything's good. I just wish my husband were more thoughtful” or “I just wish that we had marble countertops.” Small phrases that eat at the beauty of life around you.

Do you have a favorite chapter in your book?

One of the hardest chapters to write that’s also generated the most feedback is the friendship chapter. It’s a very vulnerable place, especially as a grown woman to admit, “I'm struggling with friendship.” Or, “I don't have good friends.” Or, “I had good friends, but then I moved.”

After writing it and talking with people, I realized adult female friendship is a huge topic. Women are lonely. Women are feeling insecure or left out.”

In another chapter, I wrote about body image and that felt vulnerable. But also it's kind of like, women struggle with body image in a million different ways and aging and all that. I wasn't prepared for the whole whoa—adult friendship is a big deal.

Yeah. We're used to women associating shame with body image and sharing about it. It doesn’t make it easier per se, or less vulnerable, but it does make it more commonplace. On the other hand, we're not used to associating shame with friendship—and we’re certainly not talking about it.

Yes! Exactly.

Tell me where you are personally with friendships in adulthood.

I’m entering a really sweet stage in friendship because we live in a neighborhood with a ton of kids—so a lot of our friendships form around our kids

My kids’ friends are also my neighbors. Therefore, we're hanging out with their parents more often.

But for me, I think that the desire to be included butts up against the desire for margin in my life. You know how half the time you get an invitation, you almost dread it? You're like, "Another thing on the calendar…"

But it's funny how those juxtapose so much. They’re both in your heart, the desire for friendship and the desire for margin. I always say I want to be invited and then turn the invitation down on my terms.

I hear that. You’ve got the best of both worlds then. On the other hand, if you’re not invited, even if you can’t go or don’t want to join, it sucks.

Right, I might drive down the street and see three neighbors’ cars at one of our friend’s house and be like, "Oh, they must all be hanging out."

For all I know, somebody left something by accident and went to pick it up. Or they have kids on the same soccer team. But in my mind, it’s like, "They're all together. Maybe they're really close. Am I as close with them?"

And honestly, I think more than wanting to be included, we just want deep friendships. We want to know there are people we don't have to dress up for, both physically and mentally. We can be fully honest, “I can't hang out tonight. I'm just not up for it.” A deeper level of friendship.

Do you feel like you have those deep friendships, at this point in your life?

I feel like we're really starting to get there, but it's been eight years since we moved to Charleston. In college, I had such sweet friendships. Those are still my best friends that I talk to all the time, and they formed so quickly.

It's been double the length of my college experience and my relationships here are still not as deep as my college friendships. It just takes us so much longer as an adult.

Sometimes it feels like we're going to explode out of our house and Nate and I are both like, “We cannot move. We cannot start over in a new neighborhood. We don't want to make new friends. We're gonna stuff ourselves into this house because we don't want to do it again.”

We moved from Philly to the suburbs a year ago and finding my footing in friendships has been so tricky as a working mom. So thank you for sharing that truth. I think a lot of women need to hear it!

Symphony Brownies—on the blog!

Pivoting slightly: on Double Dutch, I share stories and conversations to help motherhood feel a little bit lighter. What’s one thing that helps make motherhood feel lighter for you?

I think the number one is owning who you are as a mom. Motherhood feels so much lighter when I admit that don't like crafts, but I make a killer brownie.

My kids probably won't remember us doing crafts together, but when they come home from college, I bet they're going to ask for my brownies.

There's such a weight to perform in all these areas of motherhood and it's just miserable. I have really had to fight against comparing myself, especially to moms that don’t work.

That's not a good territory for me to be in because our time and how and when we spend it is so different. What we're giving our time to is so different. So why would I ever compare what she did for her first day of school breakfast to what I did for my first day of school breakfast?

That's a small example, but I need to be okay with my capacity. If I see someone with a higher capacity or love for things that I don’t love, it's okay if I don't love them. But, of course, it's so much easier in your head than it is in practice.

I love that example. Their truth doesn’t make yours untrue.

The other thing that makes motherhood feel lighter for me is learning how to love my kids differently from each other. I know if I scratch my third born’s back for five minutes, that is worth what a shopping trip means to another one of my kids. That's what she craves.

Paying attention to what each kid enjoys and learning how to love them in their specific little ways, not only does it fill them up—it saves time and energy. Because then I'm not wasting energy scratching the back of my second who actually doesn't care that I scratch her back, It's putting the energy in the right pockets.

Such a good reminder and you’re so right. You both save time and build deeper connection.

Maine <3

Can we talk about family vacations? Do you do them as a family? What tips do you have?

We travel a good bit with our family of six. My husband and my favorite weekends are weekends at home with no plans. So we like to rent a house, have very few plans, and just kind of live life in a different place.

This summer we went to Maine and rented one house for the whole time, three weeks We lived like we do at home, just with a change of scenery.

Granted it was a million degrees cooler and therefore we were outside way more than we are in Charleston, but we don't over complicate. We don't over-schedule. It's more “how can we just give ourselves a lot of margin, but in a new place.”

I am obsessed with this mindset. It’s exactly what my husband and I try to do, too. Scrap the sightseeing, let’s just live.

We take little day trips, but it’s very low stakes. Focus on the change of scenery and then keep it simple versus scheduling every day out.

It actually felt so much like home when we were in Maine, and I think that’s because I still cooked dinner most nights. I really enjoy cooking in Airbnbs. It feels like way less precious, like if it gets a little dirty, who cares? I'm leaving in a week.

Greek-ish Chicken | The Daily Green | No-Chop Chili

What are a couple meals you always make when you're on vacation?

Chicken sausage with microwave rice all the time. Those microwave rice packets are so great. All I have to do is cut the chicken sausage and microwave the rice and the kids will eat that meal.

When we travel and eat out, the kids tend to only eat pizza and chicken fingers—we’re not eating at the fancy restaurants. To have anything outside of that is so helpful. I also do chicken cooked in a pan in barbecue sauce, again normally with rice.

I always do rice because when we eat out, we get way more bread and pasta. So at the house, it’s a simple protein, rice, and a vegetable, like a side salad or broccoli. I love pre-made salad kits. If we’re traveling, I’ll buy multiple salad kits because then we get a great salad, but I'm not spending time cutting up a bell pepper and lettuce and carrots…

[Laughs] Yeah, all that rinsing and chopping.

Yeah, I'm always going to buy the kit that comes with multiple things in it and you just mix it all together. So, rice plus chicken sausage or chicken cooked in barbecue sauce. Bagged salad. Done.

Brilliant. So simple. Okay, last question: You have a whole day, an unlimited budget, and travel time does not count. How are you spending it?

Travel time doesn't count is huge! I would definitely be somewhere with gorgeous mountains. I would probably go to Banff. Hike from Chateau Lake Louise to Lake Agnes Tea House.

I would basically spend the morning doing something active that's outside and beautiful and then I would come back and have a massage and a fabulous dinner.

That sounds perfect. We want to get down to Charleston at some point. So when we do, I’m going to reach out.

Don't come in August! Come in January when it's sunny here and cold in Philly.

Noted. Thank you so much for being here and sharing with me, Kate. You’re an absolute delight and I am SO excited to watch you continue to soar. Where can everyone find you?

I’m Naptime Kitchen on Instagram and on Substack. My book I Just Want a Bigger Kitchen is available wherever books are sold: Amazon, Target, Kindle, Barnes & Noble.

Guys, isn’t Kate such an inspiration? I’ve been making one of her OG recipes, The Daily Green for years. Give her a follow, subscribe to her newsletter, and order her book! x NP

Thank you so much for reading Double Dutch. It truly means the world. For more, follow along on Instagram. Connect on LinkedIn. Let’s work together. Buy me a coffee!

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