cookin' and freezin'

In the weeks after Jude's birth, Shawn and I ate a lot of take out food and frozen pizza. We have an amazing church family who dropped by and brought us dinners for several days, and when our parents were staying they were awesome about cooking dinner while we snuggled with our newborn or grabbed a shower or nap. But once we were left to fend for ourselves...our eating (and spending) habits were not very pretty.

We'll obviously have less time to prepare meals with a newborn and a toddler, and we have less expendable money to eat out this time around, so I wanted to make sure we had some meals that we could just pop in the oven once our families head home and we're on our own. I've been doing some reading about an idea called Once A Month Cooking - or batch cooking on crack. You basically take one day a month and cook up to thirty meals to freeze. The concept is a good one, in the long run you save time to get all your cooking done at once, and you save money because you can plan many meals using the same ingredients and buy in bulk. But I can't lie - cooking thirty meals at once seems thoroughly intimidating to me.

So I aimed to make a total of nine meals - dividing it up into two days of cooking (separated by a couple of weeks so as to stick to our grocery budget). Firstly, I made four casseroles while Jude napped one afternoon (from start to finish, it took me a total of two hours). A couple of weeks later, I made another five meals while Jude ran around under foot (taking significantly more breaks to care for or amuse Jude). I'm definitely not ready to cook thirty meals at once, but I was surprised by how easy batch cooking could be. Once my hormones and our schedule are a little more stable, I'd love to cook and freeze a handful of meals every couple of weeks.

One of my favorite things about batch cooking is that I could throw some spinach and carrots into the food processor to add to each meal. Eating healthfully postpartum is not an easy task - I remember forgetting to eat until I was famished, and then craving carbs or sugar for energy. I'm thrilled to be able to add an extra servings of veggies to each meal since I doubt I'll be clamoring for some carrot sticks in my spare time!

The spinach did manage to add a yummy green hue to each dish, but that thankfully doesn't weird out Shawn:


Cooking up ground turkey for two of the dishes, chicken for one of the dishes, and boiling water for pasta for the last dish:

Thanks to our fancy schmancy new-to-us chest freezer, I do hope to eventually make batch cooking a habit. I'm really looking forward to being able to feed Shawn, Jude, and I food that is homemade and healthy with no more effort than thawing and throwing it in the oven!