Asian Mama Journal

My husband and I made the mistake of being over-optimistic on what we could accomplish during our first postpartum experience together. Before Little Ray arrived, we saved recipes (in our minds, simple recipes) for dishes we would like to cook and eat during the postpartum experience. And oh boy how wrong did things go!

We realised we had to do things differently when we were expecting our second kid, Mack. Since Ray and I are not really big fans of microwave foods (even though Sweden does provide some really good options for microwave food) and we want to make sure our whole family are properly nourished especially during the postpartum period (for there will be many sleepless nights thus lower immune system), we decided to go with meal prep this time around. And oh boy what a difference it made!

I had decided to type this blog post only after I gave birth to Mack so I could give a more accurate account of our family’s experience with the meal prep food.

Is Meal Prep for Me?

Our family decided to go with meal prep mainly for the following reasons:

• Convenience: Freezer meals are easy to heat up and prepare (only if you pack the freezer meals properly though, read further for details). Food delivered to your table at no time really. It is way faster and easier than taking all that time getting out of the door/pulling up that app on your phone, looking at the menu and waiting for the ordered food to come to you.
• Nutrition: the temptation to buy microwave food or eating out is ALWAYS there. Literally today we were scrolling down a food-ordering app thinking that we could have takeouts delivered to our home. Guess what? After looking at different menus, my husband and I decided that our meal prep food was going to be way better than takeouts that we decided not to have takeouts after all. We have not ordered any takeouts so far since Mack was born (and it has already been more than 2 weeks).
• Efficiency: you are going to wash the same amount of pots and pans anyways, so why not make more food with the same amount of washing?

What are some freezer meals we have made so far?

• Pizzas: try to leave out the mushrooms; I found that they made some of our pizzas soggy today while heating up a mushroom pizza… We decided to buy pre-made pizza bread in order to save time. In that case, we skip the part of making the pizza dough and rolling it out. Huge life-saver.
• Shepherd’s Pies
• Egg Muffins
• Lasagna: don’t involve spinach in lasagnas… ours turned out soggy…
• Marinated Chicken Thighs
• Marinated Chicken Breasts
• Pasta Sauce
• Waffle Mix (not for the freezer)
• Breakfast Burritos (they are our favourite freezer meals so far)
• Chocolate Chip Cookies

How to make freezer meals?

1. Choose your favourite freezer meal recipe It is important to discuss what you and your partner prefer to eat during the postpartum period. Let’s face it, postpartum period could be stressful, and we need food to heal our body and soul. Make sure that while the freezer meals are both healthy and fun for you and your partner, so that you have the energy to face the world again and endure those sleepless nights. My husband likes anything Italian so we decided to make some frozen pizzas as meal prep.
2. Study the recipes and have ingredients ready I started an excel sheet after gathering all the recipes that we wanted. Basically, I typed out all the ingredients needed for the freezer meals to make grocery shopping easier. It is also a good time to look into whether you would want to modify the recipes a bit to either make things easier/ the food more nutritional (by adding additional ingredients).
3. Look into the heating instructions for freezer food Heating instructions for freezer food can be surely different from that of freshly made food. Make sure you understand what needs to be done to heat up the food so that you can properly enjoy the freezer meals when you pull them out of the freezer.
4. Begin the meal prep adventure Trust me when I say you don’t want to meal prep everything all at once. It could get overwhelming! Choose ONE freezer meal to prepare each time. For my preggo friends out there, make sure you are taking the time to take a break while meal prepping, for it might require you to stand for a long time dicing this and slicing that. Try to take a seat when you can when meal prepping. Preparing the meals 1-2 months before your due date would be ideal.
5. Label the freezer meals This part is super important. Are you one of those people who throw food into the freezer and forget what it actually is after a month? Well, I am definitely one of those people. The ice and frost in the freezer could really disguise the packaging and we definitely don’t want any food wasted here. Make sure to label what you made before you put the meals into the freezer. You can either make labels on your own or just directly write on the storage bags. Personally, I prefer typing things out so I downloaded a free food label template that I liked online and printed our food labels. The label I got include the recipe, use by date, ingredients and instructions.
6. Save freezer space by smart storage Lay the freezer meals with sauce flat when put into the freezer. In this way, you will be able to stack them up nicely in the freezer and save that precious space in your freezer.
7. Make it fun! See if your partner is also available to help with the meal preparation process. My husband and I found it a great bonding experience where we could talk about many things that we don’t get to discuss during our normal day routine.
8. Don’t expect perfection Especially if this is your first time making freezer meals, expect that sometimes some of the freezer meals won’t work out as well as you want. Our white sauce lasagna is an example. We made white sauce spinach lasagna and it turned out perfect when we made it fresh. But boy oh boy it sure turned out different when we made it a freezer meal. They were sooo soggy (still edible, just soggy). Just like making any kinds of food, preparing freezer meal requires a trial and error process. You can test out some freezer meals to see if they turn out before you make more of them 😉