Stock Your Kitchen For Recovery

There’s a lot of prep that goes into having a baby. You’ll want to adjust what happens in your kitchen, in addition to everything else in life you’re adjusting to fit your new life that’s on it’s way. In this moment there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding food availability and while you could order takeout for every meal, it might be difficult to get the nutrients you need in this special time.

You don’t know this yet, but the period right after giving birth is not a time when you will feel like standing for long periods of time to cook. And you shouldn’t. You will have very limited bandwidth postpartum. Newborns require and deserve your constant attention. Stay in bed with your baby for at least 3 weeks if you can. 

Doing routine life things, like making yourself a meal is challenging with a newborn. But also one of the most important things to do, because you also have to feed your little one. And if you’re not nourished, you won’t have anything to nourish baby. 

Luckily, pregnancy is long, so there’s plenty of time to prep your post-baby pantry, refrigerator and freezer. Freezer meals can be stored for up to 6 months, but we recommend starting meal prep around the 32-week mark. Doing this work now makes those first few days at home a lot easier. Eating well means eating simply and gently. Some of this advice may seem counterintuitive to what you already know about nutrition but try to remember that your body is still not in its normal state. 

The guidelines below take this into account. We’ve rounded up 21 recipes that employ the guidelines and use healing ingredients. One last thing, when shopping for ingredients opt for wild, free range, grass fed and organic options when you can. Shop farmer’s markets over supermarkets and spring for the fancy eggs. The idea is to get the best quality food you can afford, in the freshest state you can find for maximum nutrient exchange. Eating is about supplying your body with nutrition and in this moment, your body needs to replenish itself. There are things you can do to minimize costs while still eating organic. Learn about the clean fifteen and other penny pinching tips here. 

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Guidelines for Postpartum Eating from Heng Ou’s The First Forty Days

  1. Think Soft. Postpartum traditions around the world favor food that is soft, soupy, warm, moist, creamy, oily and fairly mild--for the initial period after birth. After having your digestive organs stretched, squeezed and pulled for the last ten months your digestion is considered slower and weaker than normal. You can work up to eating heavier foods after your digestion gets stronger, but in these initial days give your system a break so your body can focus energy in other places where you need healing.

  2. Nix the cold. This may sound like an old wives tale, but consuming cold food and drinks is one of the few actual no-nos of postpartum eating. Aim to keep your body as warm as possible is this healing period as heat increases the circulation of blood needed for optimal healing. Eating cold foods slows down digestion, forcing your spleen and stomach to work unnecessarily hard, which is what you want to avoid. You may also avoid “cooling” foods like cucumber, watermelon, zucchini, berries, and celery.These foods have a lot of water and minerals that help with hydration. Hydrating is important postpartum, postpartum eating is all about staying warm and eating cooling foods impedes the warming process.

  3. Love your Fats. Traditionally, the postpartum diet includes meals rich in saturated fats and key omega fatty acids that are essential for baby’s nervous system development. These things come from animal fats, quality eggs, and oily fish. Studies show they quantifiably enrich breast milk, helping baby’s brain grow and thrive. These “good fats” are also critical for you to thrive. They give your more energy than any other food source, boost your metabolism and enhance circulation. Opt for pasture-raised or wild proteins when you can for the most beneficial sources of these good fats.

  4. Observe how your food might affect your baby. But don’t obsess about it. Some foods can aggravate a baby by causing gas in her tiny belly after she drinks your milk. These range from large beans and legumes to cruciferous vegetables and cold pasteurized milk to fermented foods like sauerkraut and more. But no one can tell you more about your own body than you. Foods that irritate you may also irritate your baby. Focus on baby and notice how he reacts after certain meals. 

  5. Drink up. Replenishing liquids lost in birth and creating a whole new kind of liquid food: breast milk are at the top of your to do list for throughout the 4th trimester. Keep jugs of room temperature water near your bed and nurshing chair and take a sip at each feeding. You can also sip broth and herbal teas for hydration. Our Milk Made tea blend is an herbal lactation enhancer rich in iron and protein for nutrient-rich milk and plenty of it.

What to Buy 

  1. A rice cooker. Makes more than just rice and stops cooking at just the right time, in case you forget when that it is.

  2. Instant Pot or Slow cooker or both. Great for making soups and stews. Which you’ll be eating a lot of the next few weeks. You’ll use these kitchen workhorses well beyond your postpartum period, now that you have kids.

  3. Funnel - Makes pouring broth into containers easier. 

  4. Storage containers - We recommend glass storage containers for portioned meals and mason jars for broths. Plastics come with all manner of health concerns and have a shorter useful life-span than glass. 

  5. Muffin tin - Great for freezing small portions of broths to sip or use in recipes for grains and other goods. 

  6. Water filter - You will be drinking a lot of water postpartum and it’s important to stay hydrated so that your body can produce milk. If you don’t already have a water filter, now is the time to invest in one. Water filters remove chemicals from drinking water, and removing chemicals from your water also means you’re removing chemicals from baby’s water too. We like Zerowater filters because they filter out lead, which other filters do not. Lead is a known toxin that can cause pregnancy complications and at high levels of exposure, attacks the brain and central nervous system of children which can lead to slowed growth and development, learning and behavior problems, and hearing and speech problems.

Stock Your Pantry

  • Grass-fed or pasture-raised meat and butter

  • Oily cold-water fish like sardines

  • Unpasteurized Oils (coconut, olive, walnut, sesame and avocado)

  • Nut butters

  • Raw honey

When to do What

Cook and freeze some of your meals now. Batch cooking meals and portioning them before popping them in the freezer, makes postpartum meal prep as easy as defrosting something. 

Make lots of broth. Broth is extra versatile, freeze well and you can mix and match ingredients to suit your tastes as they change. It can be consumed on it’s own or used as the base for other things like stews, or cook grains in it for extra flavor and nutrition.

If you’re not the cooking type, organize a meal train where friends, neighbors, family, whomever you trust to cook for you brings food by. Use our google doc template to coordinate everyone so that you don’t end up with 30 different pans of lasagna. Use the recipes below to assign different people different dishes you’d like to eat. Remember to share the link to the recipe with them.

recipe, birth prepLauren Jones