Batch cook or not?

[IsItSummerYet2018]

In two minds as I like being prepared, but dp says hell cook.. But I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to cooking and like to know its done right lol.. If he cooked I'd pretty much be up his ass watching every move anyway..
So my thinking is.. If I was to be ' helping' him cook anyway.. I may as well just cook.
Or do I maybe make a few decent ish meals and freeze ( once I've used up some stuff to make space). Then he can just do quick meals or something like pizza if we've had lots of visitors (very likely as both large families)

If I did. I'm thinking

Lasagne
Curry
Stew or casserole
Bolognese
Spanish chicken

Apart from that I'm stumped as don't like spuds frozen.

Batch cook if you want to. But you really need to stop "helping him cook". He's an adult human being. It's cooking, not brain surgery.

Should of explained he's severely color blind so things like meat would have to be checked.. As what he thinks is cooked really isn't lmao

Buy a meat thermometer - then he can check it without needing to rely on colour.

Batch cook. You’re both going to want life to be as easy as poss! You can always have a mixture of him cooking and freezer stuff then.

Buy a probe thermometer. Sorted.

(I think James Martin is colourblind. One of the celebrity chefs is anyway)

Batch cook, he can then get busy with childcare/ fetching you tea / cleaning. And buy him a vegetarian cookbook if he can't cook meat alone.

Batch cooking was 100% the best thing I did when I started maternity leave. I froze about 21 days worth of dinners, and I'm so glad I did! My OH isn't good at cooking though...

I agree with @pinkie87, batch cooking was the best thing I did with DS1 and I made even more with DS2! I did about 30 days of meals (the freezer was groaning!) so between that, the odd takeaway and DH cooking now and again we had food for 6 or 7 weeks which was great. I bought a load of the foil takeaway containers from Amazon. You can chuck them in the oven from frozen which was very useful.

@IheartCaptainHolt I'm pregnant again with number 2 and will definitely do it again, I even bought a cheap second hand chest freezer to accommodate it all!! Good shout about the foil containers, I'm going to buy some!

Great idea about the thermometer I'll look for one today
And yeah I thought of the foil dishes.. Wilko probably sell them ill have a nosey in there too x

I didn’t batch cook last time, as like you my DH thought l he would just cook (he is competent and willing). However we found we just didn’t have the motivation to cook even simple things or to buy and prepare stuff. So we are definitely going to cook meals this time- being able to shove a spag bol in the microwave will take little effort and at least we won’t be surviving on beige oven food for days on end.

Facebook has pages about doing batch cooking in budgets and I've done a few that worked really well for slow cooker. Think it worked out for 50 meals for £40 and I did lasagnas in foil tins too.

Defo a good way to go when tired etc.

Very true i didn't with my DS but we ate a lot of take away and lots of meals out.
I only need to do a few I'd imagine for the first few days as then we'll prob eat out sndv then when he's back to work ill do it anyway as I'll be bored lol.

Do lunches for yourself when partner goes back after paternity, if that’s the case!

I don't really eat lunch if I do it's toast or something out.
I'll definitely do a few, just off to look for the foil tin things. Xx

We lived off Cook meals and bags of veg

If you have older kids, yes, I think it's worth doing so you have some healthy meals that are easy to prepare. With our first, I planned about 10 days worth of meals, some of them easy store cupboard type meals that we could stock everything for in advance and others things we needed fresh (that I put into an online order that could be delivered as soon as we needed it). That was fine. It was just the two of us. My dh is perfectly capable of cooking and I don't need to hover over him while he does it. I do much of the cooking normally because I like to (he does the washing up and other household tasks), but for the first few weeks (well, probably months actually) he did all/most of the cooking. It didn't really matter what we ate so it didn't need as much planning.

This time we have a 5 year old as well so it was much more important to have easy to prepare, healthy meals around. I don't want to just be feeding her ready meals for a month and she wouldn't like them anyway. So I did batch cook about 10 days worth of dinner, which combined with some ready meals, should give us about 2.5 weeks worth of dinners we don't really have to think of cooking. I also have about a weeks worth of frozen lunches for myself for when my dh goes back to work.

If you have a Cook near you (it's like a posh frozen food shop), they do a 10% new parents discount card for the first 6 months. It is expensive. It's not something you would eat at 7 days a week. But we're also going to get a couple meals from there each week for the first month or two. The food is really nice and though it's more than I could normally justify spending on food shopping, for a few weeks, the ease of nice healthy read meals is worth it.

I batch cooked and yes - it was all used! I had a c section and dh was pretty busy doing all the other stuff so I could recover and look after the baby. Having stuff in the freezer just freed up a bit of time for us and it was very useful.
Well worth doing - you’ll be knackered and sometimes it’s great to have something decent in the freezer you can just nuke and add a bit of veg to

My mom batch cooked for my first because I was admitted weeks before he was born, it was so helpful that I did it when pregnant with ds2. I made loads of lasagne, Irish stew, Mexican stew, chicken curry, porridge bread and low sugar oatmeal raisin cookies for snacks. I also had lots of loaves of bread for toast. Kept toddler and me fed for 3 weeks, dh looked after himself.

Batch cook! We were knackered and eating at odd times for the first few weeks (months) - having something healthy and home cooked in the freezer was a god send.