The Winners And Losers of My Pre-Baby Freezer Hoard: Second Breakfast #4
Hello! This is Meghan McCarron, and you're reading my newsletter, Second Breakfast. There's a lot of new faces here, so I wanted to do a quick re-introduction. I'm a journalist covering food and culture, and I also write weird, queer fiction. If you no longer want to receive this newsletter, you can unsubscribe here.
Many of you (kindly) signed up back in January when I was laid off from my media job while 9 months pregnant. Great news: My partner and I now have a baby! His name is Felix. Here he is chilling on the kitchen floor, wearing one of his Philly-food-themed onsies. We live in Los Angeles, but I'm from Philadelphia, and his family there wants to make sure he knows his roots (cheesesteaks).
As I come back into the world of writing, I'm still figuring out newsletters. I do know that I want a home on the internet where people can keep up with my work no matter the vagaries of social media platforms. For now, Second Breakfast will be that space: a free monthly newsletter focused on cooking and food, but with space to play. I hope you'll continue to join me.
When I was pregnant, actual baby prep overwhelmed me. J. built his crib; a friend assembled our stroller; another coached me through organizing and folding all the baby clothes. We arrived at the hospital with a spreadsheet that still had 68 names.
Instead, I cooked and froze a tremendous amount of food. If I'd had to pick one thing, hoarding food was a strong move. The baby's first few months wiped my brain. I could not plan a meal to save my life, and even when J. is well slept and lucid, she gets stressed out boiling an egg.
Cooking for early feral babytimes comes down to your skillset and your family's needs. A chef I follow on Instagram folded neat rows of tortellini for her and her wife's impending child; I've also read suggestions to make nothing but casseroles. I found this Kitchn guide helpful, and used some strategies described by the NYT here. For us, whole, simple meals with vegetables worked best. Also, some treats.
WINNERS
BEAN SOUP
Last year over Thanksgiving break, when I was about seven months pregnant, we made a different vat of bean soup every day and froze it in quart-sized baggies, for a total of 6 or 7 soups. J. did the chopping, and I did the cooking. Four months later, after the baby went to sleep, we ate bean soup for dinner most nights.
Many of the recipes came from the surprisingly wonderful cookbook The New Mediterranean Diet, which I might write more about someday. Two recipes available online are 100 Cookbooks' lima bean stew and Rancho Gordo's take on pasta e fagioli, which I froze sans pasta. An important note: These soups would have gotten old much sooner without Fat Gold olive oil drizzled over top and a side of Trader Joe's naan, which I discovered while working on a story about campsite cooking.
BEAN AND VEGGIE BURRITOS
For about four months, I could not make myself cook any vegetables. I wanted vegetables. But preparing them felt impossible. Thank god for these burritos. I riffed off of this Kitchn recipe but put in only freshly cooked beans, roast veggies, and cheese.
LACTATION COOKIES
Any cookie can be a breakfast cookie if you want it to be, and this Bon Appetit recipe was mine. I tended to skip chopping up the chocolate in favor of using chips, but I always chopped up the dried figs — they add something earthy and caramel-y that raisins don't match. Scooping the dough in heaping quarter-cup portions leaves the center a little tender, which is nice. My freezer was bursting with gallon bags of these cookies before I had the baby, and I made multiple rounds postpartum. Did they help me lactate? I have no idea.
SOURDOUGH BAGELS
I've written before about the bagels I've locked myself into making every week because they're too good. I don't recommend starting a sourdough bagel making practice while pregnant if that's not already your bullshit, but it sure was nice to have 40 of them in the freezer.
GROCERY STORE MVP: TRADER JOE'S SPANAKOPITA PIE
My sister is a Trader Joe's devotee, and when she came out to help during the first few weeks of Felix's life, she introduced us to many new delicacies. Our favorite discovery is this Spanakopita Pie. It's not quite a meal, but it is an amazing big snack. There's four in my freezer right now.
LOSERS
INDIVIDUAL PROTEINS / MEAL COMPONENTS
I made big batches of shredded barbecue chicken and baked beans with the plan of adding them to rice or some other easy carb. Instead, they languished. Having a new baby wrecked the planning part of my brain for anything beyond planning to keep the baby alive. That included starting up the rice maker.
FANCY SAVORY HOT POCKETS
I'm not going to lie, I ate all eight of these that I made. But I screwed up the recipe, so they came out mostly puff pastry, and I was too overwhelmed to try it again. Probably the real move was to buy Hot Pockets.
FRITTATA MUFFINS
I think frittata muffins might be a lie? I can't find the recipe I used, and I messed with it, so some of this is on me. But baking eggs, feta, and broccoli in muffin tins resulted in a dried exterior and wet interior, and freezing them did not improve things.
THE "MAKE EXTRA AND FREEZE IT" STRATEGY
In the interest of saving time and energy, I kept trying to make bagels slightly more often, or freeze extra dinner, rather than making baby meal prep into its own project. But that made every meal a potential thing to hoard, a constant low-grade stress. My biggest successes were foods I made in dedicated sprints.
I'm not sure if this exercise has brought me around to meal prep lyfe, but I do see its value. When bean soup season swings around again, I could see doing another mini-run. A freezer full of bean soup is a balm.
All of this food would have gotten old much faster if we hadn't had friends regularly bringing us homemade meals and sending us food delivery gift certificates. I can't recommend doing a Meal Train highly enough. A friend just asked what meals we liked the most, and honestly, any home cooked meal, paired with an hour of gentle company, sustained us, whether people brought lasagna, a crudite plate, or chicken and rice porridge. That's especially true for months two and three. The urge is to drop off a casserole the moment the baby comes home! But that casserole is even more needed when the baby is 6 weeks old and the sleep deprivation is no longer novel.
Now that Felix is here, my struggles building a stroller or putting away his clothes seem honestly, a little funny. Even as I write that sentence, though, his travel crib sits off to my right, next to the mini-crib he outgrew last month. The full size crib parts are leaning against our kitchen bookshelves, as they have been all week. The transitions are tough.
FICTION CORNER
Over the spring and summer, sometimes with a newborn asleep on my chest, I finished my first new short story in years. It's set on a small, private Mars colony and, specifically, the colony's scrappy farm. This meant I got to research space labor and space farming. Some things I read that were great:
Martian potatoes (by the International Potato Center, what a name)
Deep Space Food Challenge for chefs
My friend Lynn's excellent podcast series, which undoubtedly subconsciously inspired me
When the baby stopped taking an early morning nap, the fiction halted, too. I'm trying to carve out that space again. Transitions! They're hard!
READING CORNER
My first freelance story has run! It was so fun to call archeologists and geneticists to ask about the weird and complicated history of why we drink milk. Thank you to Friend of the Breakfast Amy McKeever for the assignment. Much more TK, and yes, I'm taking assignments : )
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Happy 40th year to me AND the plum torte
Thanks for reading Second Breakfast. You made it to the end! Have you made a plum torte yet? Consider a plum torte.
Meghan
