Meal Prep for Baby and Family

Meal Prep for Baby and Family

My husband and I love cooking and sharing good food.

So you know we were excited when our baby started trying solids last month.

I won’t stretch the truth and say we cook fancy meals every day, but we do try our best because it’s fun. Even though it’s extra effort. If we do ever want to eat out, there are only two local restaurants near us in the small town we recently moved to.

Luckily they’re super good. These burgers can beat up any burgers.

But we have found that we’re eating out a lot less and cooking more since moving, which I’m really not mad about. It’s saved us some money and has helped us get in the zone for including food for another little family member in our meal preparations.

Alright, so I definitely had to look up the actual difference between “meal prep” and “batch cooking”. I realized we do a lot of both!

They have many similarities, but the main distinction is the cooking part. We love cooking large portions and saving leftovers for future lunches and dinners. For our baby girl, I tend to lean more to the meal prep side and prepare her food to be cooked later right before she eats it.

I think it’s because I’d rather cook something small than keep more miniature servings of leftovers in the fridge than I have to.

We like her to eat what we eat whenever possible (BLW) so we’ve been finding ways to incorporate foods she hasn’t tried yet into our meals so we can all enjoy it together. The only difference is keeping her portions separate from ours so they can be intentionally cooked and cut in a safer way. And to avoid extra salt and spices for now.

So… I have big heart eyes for my Instant Pot.

Baby food is so easy to prepare while doing other things. Steaming veggies takes like no time at all and they’re perfectly soft for my little two-toother. Mom and dad’s food is cooked at the same time on the stove. This has worked great for us.

Can I share a few of my favorite dishes? I swear everything is different every time I google a recipe (unless I remember to bookmark it) but here are some of our go-to meal ideas that we love to enjoy with our 7 month old.

French toast, stir fry, meaty sauce, pot roast, and pork and rice all make amazing leftovers. Same with basically any soup, which is easy to make 10 servings of in one go.

As a first time mom it’s still kind of hard to come up with these types of meals, but who are we kidding? It’s always hard to decide on what to eat, right?

We’ve got this!