Postpartum Meal Planning

One of the things that I was most worried about postpartum was food. I'm not really a meal planner; I tend to decide what to make for dinner based off my mood, the weather, and what looks fresh. Our grocery store is so close we generally walk to it 3-5 times a week and buy things as we need them rather than stocking up. But I knew that approach wasn't going to work well with a newborn, so I decided that I needed to meal plan for postpartum.

I wanted to be able to take a nice long break from cooking. I had no idea what Theo would be like or how I would handle delivery emotionally or physically, so I decided to prepare for postpartum as generously as possible (I was probably a boy scout in a previous life). I tried to imagine myself completely bed-ridden for weeks and planned accordingly. Luckily I bounced back from delivery pretty much immediately, but thanks to my obsessive planning I was able to take a six week break from cooking. Then during weeks seven and eight I gradually eased back into cooking as I figured out how to juggle both meal-prep and a baby.

This is absolutely something I intend to do again with any future babies. The ability to have meals off my mind for such a long stretch, able to spend all my time figuring out motherhood was incredibly liberating. And, by the time I returned to cooking, I missed it and was ready to start. It was also a relief, because although several dear friends brought us meals, due to timing, we didn't get any for the first five days home. Without the extra-meals we had on hand Andrew would have had to be constantly running to take-out restaurants.

I started planning out my postpartum meal plan about midway through my second trimester but I didn't start making them until 32 weeks to avoid the risk of freezer burn (three months is the best-before timeframe for freezer meals, and I wanted to factor in the risk of being overdue). I did a bit of research on what doesn't do well in the freezer (here is a list of foods to avoid freezing), and then tried to come up with meals that could be frozen but also included simple sides that Andrew could make (e.g. A curry dish that was reheated in a pan, that had fresh rice made in the rice cooker, and Indian style bread that Andrew could pick up from grocery store on his way home) so that it didn't feel like we were only eating frozen food.

I made the meals by making double/triple batches at dinner and then freezing half. That way I didn't tire myself by cooking all afternoon and then having to make dinner (especially near the end, my feet would get very tired). I stored everything in freezer bags as flat as I could get them so that they would fit in our tiny freezer, and I wrote down the reheating instructions, and any sides that should be bought onto the bag with a sharpie so that Andrew had all the instructions in the same place. 

Andrew and I like a lot of ethnic food, so I imagine the meal plan for most people would be a bit different. But I'm sharing what I made to illustrate the variety that is possible. I didn't want our diet to become radically differ so I tried to figure out freezer-friendly ways of making the things we already liked to eat. Since Andrew didn't mind doing a little bit of straight forward cooking that also broadened my options. But it's all about what works for you and what makes the early days as easy as possible.

Italian Zucchini Soup
I made several double batches. When the soup was almost done simmering, but the vegetables were still somewhat undercooked, I separated out half and let it cool while the portion for that night's dinner finished cooking. That way the vegetables didn't become mushy and overcooked by the defrosting and reheating process.
We pulled out one of the bags to thaw in the fridge when we headed to the hospital and it was ready to dump into a pot and heat when we got home. We had a crusty French baguette on the side.

Indian Curry (Kheema Matar)
This recipe has you cook and season the meat and then add frozen peas as the final step. So I excluded the final step and froze the seasoned meat. Then when Andrew reheated it in a pan he added the peas (so that they weren't wilted from recooking). He also made a batch of basmati rice in our rice cooker. Whole Foods sells the Indian style bread, Naan, so Andrew picked it up on his way home. That way we had a full Indian Curry dinner with minimal cooking and prep.

Sloppy Joes
This was the one meal I made just because it was freeze-able and not because we ever ate it previously. I wanted to add more variety. Andrew doesn't consider sloppy joes a favorite, but we ended up being glad for the variety. I liked having something so high in protein for lunch that was easy to reheat when Andrew went back to work. It just required Andrew to pick up some hamburger buns and a quick reheating in a pan.

Chicken Pot Pie
I made two, but if I did it again I'd make four because we love chicken pot pie. We put the pot pie into the oven still frozen, covered with aluminum foil for the first hour, then we removed the foil and baked it for another hour.
One tip I learned from a cooking blog to avoid losing your pan to the freezer for months by lining your pan with saran wrap when you make the pie, once the pie is frozen you can take it out of the pan and just keep it in the freezer wrapped in saran wrap until you're going to bake it, then you remove the wrap and put it into the pan to bake. Or you could just buy an aluminum pan from the grocery store.

Chicken Lettuce Wraps
This just required reheating in a pan, with rice made in the rice cooker and iceberg lettuce.

Hamburgers

We add an egg, onions, and some spices to our hamburgers (and sometimes eat them with rice [its a Japanese thing]. So I made (I think) around 16 hamburger patties, wrapped them in sets of two in some wax paper, and stored them eight per freezer bag. We would take them out to thaw as we wanted them.

Spicy Korean Pork
Since cooking this recipe is simple, I sliced the meat, mixed it with the marinaded, and froze it raw. When Andrew got it out, he just sliced up an onion, added it to the bag, and then stir fried it in a pan. This was another meal that we had with rice.

Beef Bulgogi
This meat was bought frozen and its marinade includes kiwi juice to tenderize the meat. But it's very simple to cook and one of Andrew's favorite recipes, so I really wanted to figure out a way to make it freezer friendly. I didn't want to damage the meat by thawing and then refreezing it, nor did I want to damage the meat by marinating it too long, so  I made the marinade in a freezer bag and rubber-banded the bag to the package of beef. When Andrew got it out to thaw he did so two days ahead of time, one day for the meat to thaw, one day to marinade. Once the meat had defrosted he added it to the ziplock bag of marinade. Then he just put everything into a pan and cooked it. We ate it with rice and kimchi.

I know there were at least five other kinds of meals that I had in my freezer, but somewhere in my new mom haze I deleted the list that I had on my phone. And no matter how hard I rack my brain, I cannot remember what they were. So lame.

We also had a couple meals that just involved a few ingredients that Andrew could pick up from the store and put together pretty easily, like roast beef sandwiches au jus, but we only made things like that a few times. I had also thought about making a batch of chili and having Andrew pick up corn bread from Whole Foods, but since Whole Foods makes very good chili, and cooking was beginning to wear me out we just decided we could pick it up.

Breakfast note: one of the hardest meals for me eat when Andrew went back to work was breakfast because things tended to need to be eaten quickly and that didn't usually happen. I had a stash of protein bars and beef jerky near my nursing chair for emergency hunger moments, but neither option was particularly healthy or appetizing unless the situation was feeling dire. So for me, a life saver was eating cottage cheese mixed with a pineapple-pear fruit cup (Dole's fruit cups are the best, fyi), it had enough protein to sustain me through all the nursing, and if I had to put it down for 15-20 minutes it didn't get inedibly cold, mushy, or any of the other things that breakfast foods tend to do. Greek yogurt would be another good option, I'm just not crazy about yogurt. Of course, this means praying that your baby won't have any issues with your eating dairy products (so if you're hardcore, maybe try to also come up with a non-dairy option as a back up. If Theo had had trouble with dairy products I might possibly have then died of starvation).

 Another thing I'm really glad we did was decide to use paper plates and bowls during those first 6 weeks. We talked about it and although Andrew was completely willing to wash the dishes, we decided that he could use the time much better by spending time with me and Theo or working from home. It reduced kitchen clutter and was one less thing to do. It might sound silly, but those days go by so quickly and can sometimes be so crazy, that every little bit of reduced work is worth it.