recipe(s) of the month: low effort freezer meals
the tried and true meals & snacks that got me through postpartum & return to work
Quick note: today's post introduction includes contextual reference to my experiences of pregnancy. If you’d like to avoid that content today for any reason, recommend scrolling down past the section break to access the recipes.
For context, and for a myriad of reasons: I am someone who is deeply resistant to the performance of pregnancy. There is evidence that social media performance of pregnancy is highly socially surveilled and controlled, and negatively contributes to maternal mental health. I opted not to “announce” my pregnancy anywhere except directly to people in my life until I was nearly 8 months pregnant, and it was a blissful, freeing experience.
This did not, however, prevent the endless scroll of algorithms telling me all the things I needed to do to learn, buy, and do to be a good mom (implied or explicitly). It sparked a not insignificant amount of anxiety: tutorial after tutorial highlighting all the ways I was doing it wrong. I muted and swiped away with abandon but algorithms gonna algorithm, and while I willfully continued not posting #bumpdates more than a few tidbits snuck their way in.
I could opine on the benefits and drawbacks of tik toks for a long time (I quite literally started this newsletter to get away from the scroll and the algorithms and use my brain more, y’all). but for the purposes of this issue, the endless scroll of baby prep tiktok brought up a specific anxiety it hadn’t yet occurred to me to have:
how on earth were Mark and I going to feed ourselves, especially when occupied with baby snuggles, naps, and an as-yet-unknown level of physical recovery and other adjustments.
This stress was both stirred and soothed by the meal prep gals delivered to my FYP: I became mesmerized by a diverse group of warm, maternal ladies calmly explaining how they feed their ravenous kids on a budget, showing all the best tips, tricks and gadgets to eat like a queen, stockpiling reserves of nutritious, delicious foods in their industrial freezers.
I find cooking a personally satisfying and relaxing experience, but I enjoy the planning, the preparation, the process, and plating of a beautiful outcome I immediately eat, not the rote prep of an assembly line. My husband, bless him, is my opposite. He doesn’t mind cooking, but certainly doesn’t enjoy it the way I do, opting for maximum efficiency and minimal fuss. To quell my rising anxiety about the sheer number of times you have to feed yourself a day without losing my mind, I funneled the wisdom of those meal prep ladies into prepping freezer meals with as minimal effort as possible: (more on that in a second).
While my foray into freezer meals was prompted by anxiety fueled prepping for postpartum, the experience was so helpful and such a positive one I begrudgingly but highly recommend it more broadly: I shared many of these recipes with a family member preparing for recovery from a major surgery, in addition to many friends preparing for their own postpartum experiences. Even now, every few months I’ll batch up some of these recipes to restock our freezer to make hectic week nights and mornings a little simpler.
All that is to say: in this issue, I’m sharing the low effort way I made freezer meal prep fit into my busy schedule, and the tried and true recipes I’ve come back to over time. Whether you are planning to make several large batches to gear up for a major life change, or are simply looking for a few small meals you can grab during a hectic week, my hope is these recipes bring some ease to your efforts, and make life feel a little more manageable (and a little more delicious) - no industrial freezer or social media performance necessary.
Okay, that’s it, love you.
Approach & Mindset: My “I’m too pregnant for this” priorities for freezer meal prep were extremely simple: spend as little time and energy doing it as possible. This required a little bit of advance planning, but I accomplished it in two key ways:
Step 1: Work smarter, not harder. Like I mentioned in last month’s cozy recipe round up, I started doubling recipes I was already cooking for regular meals and freezing the additional portions. Doing this a handful of times a month (starting in the middle of my second trimester) quickly built up a stockpile of meals with almost no additional effort. This worked great for dinner options, especially soups, stews and other larger, hearty dishes like lasagna.
Step 2: Prioritize Output for Effort. I set aside very limited amounts of actual time for dedicated “meal prep” time, and focused on recipes that could yield a very high volume with minimal focused effort. I planned 3x2 hour blocks a few weeks apart to prep 2-3 recipes each block. When when possible opted for pre-cut or frozen ingredients to minimize ingredient prep. Then I just popped on a season of a show or a good audiobook, and went to town.
What I prepped:
Sometimes it’s just helpful to know what someone else did. Recipes linked where applicable