Batch cooking before the baby arrives

When to start

A few weeks before the due date. Spread it over two or three cook days rather than one long one: each is an ordinary Sunday afternoon, and the freezer fills up whether the baby comes early, late or on the day.

Make room first. In the month before, eat down what’s already in the freezer, oldest first, so there’s space for what you’re about to cook.

If you haven’t done a cook day before, batch cooking for beginners covers the basics, and how to plan a cook day has a worked example with times.

What to cook: bowl food and one-handed dinners

In the early weeks, dinner may well happen with a baby in one arm. Cook things you can eat from a bowl with a fork or a spoon, and things you can pick up.

Bowl food

• Chilli con carne, with rice or a jacket potato
• Tikka masala or korma, with rice
• Lentil bolognese, over pasta or a jacket potato
• Soup, with bread
• Cottage pie, shepherd’s pie or fish pie, portioned into containers once it’s cool
• Mac and cheese

One-handed

• Muffins, baked by the tray and frozen singly
• Flapjack, sliced and frozen
• Loaf cake, sliced and frozen
• Savoury swirls, baked and frozen

All of these are among the 42 dishes in Nomstash. One to skip: carbonara. Eggs and cream don’t freeze, so it’s a dish for the night you make it.

How much to make

Count backwards from the nights. Say you want 5 freezer dinners a week for the first 4 weeks, for two adults:

Two cook days, one of three dishes and one of two, would do it. In containers of two, that’s 20 containers, so check they’ll fit before you start.

Freeze in the sizes you’ll eat: twos for dinner together, and some single portions for whoever is up at odd hours. If family are coming to stay, add their portions now.

Labels anyone can read

In the first weeks, someone else may well be making dinner: a partner, a grandparent, a friend who’s come round. Make the freezer easy for them.

• Write the dish in big letters, the date it was made and how many portions are in it.
• Keep the oldest at the front, so nobody has to dig.
• Leave one instruction on the fridge door: move tomorrow’s dinner to the fridge the night before. It’s the safest way to defrost.

A Nomstash label carries the dish, the date made and the portions, with a code and a QR. Scanning it marks the container eaten, so the count stays right even on the nights someone else did the heating up. Here’s how Nomstash labels and keeps count.

Friends who want to help: one dish each

When people ask what they can do, give them a dish. One batch each, in containers you hand them so everything stacks the same, labelled with the dish and the date it was made.

• Give each person a different dish from your list, so you don’t end up with four lasagnes.
• Ask for the portions in the sizes you’ll eat, twos or singles.
• Send them the safety basics below, so it’s cooled and frozen the way you would.

The safety basics

For you and anyone cooking for you. Each rule comes from the Food Standards Agency.

When the baby starts on solids

Batch cooking carries on into weaning. The NHS has a page on storing and reheating food for babies, and the freezing guide’s section on cooking for a baby puts its rules in plain words, with the NHS’s own.

Nomstash counts baby portions separately from adult and child ones, so the baby’s dinners don’t get lost among yours.