Least anonymous Ask-The-Mineshaft ever.
Pizza? Flatbreads in general freeze well. Pies and tarts freeze OK after you fill them but before you cook the pastry, but freeze them FAST or they go soggy.
Wisdom from friends who just welcomed their twins -- when you say "expecting in three months," hopefully that is building in an expectation that the little guys are gonna be premature. Apparently very, very common with twins, and worth being (mentally, physically) prepared for.
our hands of full of babies.
interesting
My favorite recent tip was to freeze homemade pesto in ice-cube trays, using the abundant basil of the summer. That may be already too much work, but if not, it seems like a good one.
Chili and red sauce (for pasta) also survive a freeze reasonably well.
1: What, it could be any Unfogged commenter who's expecting twins.
4: Oh, definitely. About three months from now is about 36 weeks, and there's no way she's going longer than 38.
Peanut butter, cheese, crackers, ramen, power bars.+
The best food-related tip from my mother-of-twins friend is "get your mother-in-law to come over and make dinner for you every night." YMMV.
I've gotten in the habit of pre-seasoning grillable portions of meat/fish and freezing it, but I don't know how easy even throwing stuff on a grill will be when the munchkins arrive. I would think alot of the Car Cuisine suggestions will work well -- with one baby, I remember having to learn to eat one handed. Food you can not only prepare easily, but consume without much labor is probably good.
Also, semi-digested milk makes a great sauce for all kinds of dessert.
dad-to-be: You may not realize this now, but newborn babies are so helpless that they can't even reheat food from the freezer.
Pesto in ice cube trays is smart because it allows you to heat up small servings. You can do that with all kinds of sauces.
Lasagna can be cut and packed individually. When I make lasagna, we end up freezing it in squares sealed in Glad Press-N-Seal, which works very well.
Another thing you could do, if you think you'll have some time to cook and that you'll get sick of stews, is to prep some stir-fry-type stuff ahead of time. Meats can be sliced thinly, tossed with some spices, and frozen into two serving packets. Green onions can be chopped and put in plastic bags and frozen. Then your prep time is essentially down to 'whatever fresh veggies we want to throw in' plus a handful of onions and one of the meat packets.
Pesto is a great idea. Be sure to leave the cheese out--apparently it doesn't freeze well (never tested this, but that's what all the cookbooks say). Add the cheese at the time of reheating.
Di is correct. The best way to prepare is to have the grandparents live close to you. And aunts and uncles.
Respite is extremely important if you wish to not beat your children.
I vividly remember standing over my daughter's crib with the strong desire to shake her until she stopped crying. I had fed her, changed her, held her, rinsed and repeated. Still she screamed.
my sister eats now mostly cereal porridges, fortified and just regular, and soups, she said she is going to eat that while she is breastfeeding
b/c she wants to avoid any diathesis, food allergies for her baby, so she excluded all kinds of food seasonings and any spicy or sweet food, basically anything tasting good
i think she can do that coz can be really determined
we have a great dish that can be freezed in large quantities, then steamed, it looks like shyumai, but tastes differently, too heavy for the breastfeeding mom maybe
The whole country's agriculture and food industry has developed to meet your specific needs, and yet you seem unwilling to take advantage of it. Why do you hate America? (At least you seem to be willing to freeze things, otherwise it would be right to the terrorist watch list for you.)
Homemade meatballs survive the freeze-thaw-reheat cycle well. When you need some protein, you throw a couple of frozen meatballs into your spaghetti sauce or what have you. You can also freeze entire portions of pasta and sauce, so there's no cooking beyond microwaving involved.
This could also be an opportunity to explore the frozen foods aisle of your local grocery store and start finding some things you enjoy. It's not all bad: various forms of fried potatoes, frozen vegetables, frozen fruits and berries, and even the odd prepared dish (there are some decent ones from the Kashi brand) are easy and nutritious. They have the added advantage that you can continue buying them once your inventory of homemade stuff runs out.
so she excluded all kinds of food seasonings and any spicy or sweet food, basically anything tasting good
Dear God! I don't think we're planning on anything quite so drastic, so I'd love your shyumai-like recipe.
We freeze a lot of Indian and Thai curries. Just reheat and throw it on some rice. Freezing pizza crusts is also very handy.
buuz
we prepare a carrot salad to eat together with this, it's basically carrots minced with garlic, also minced, and in not very thick mayo, tastes good
You might also conside freezing chopped fresh herbs into ice cubes--parsley and basil both work great for this. I'm going to try doing it with tarragon this year. Then, when you're reduced to pasta with garlic and olive oil, you can throw in a little frozen parsley and some dried chili flakes and you're golden.
Bullion cubes, eaten dry, are a no-muss no-fuss taste sensation.
23: I hope that's a joke.
We went through this with just one recently. We did chili (search allrecipes for Boilermaker Chili) and meatloaf. I also suggest freezing something kinda civilized for a treat -- I froze some braised short ribs. Those were a nice break.
25: the best jokes have a grain (or, in this case, concentrated beef essence) of truth to them.
For the first couple of weeks at least, your friends should be bringing you meals. Seriously. Someone else should already be putting together a schedule for this on their own initiative, but it may be that you're bad, friendless people.
Always use low salt bouillon cubes if you're eating them dry instead of food, otherwise it's unhealthy. Bullion cubes are deprecated as food, though they may be OK if minted.
Also, you can't plan for changes in your wife's tastes beforehand, but you might want to play it safe. My wife lost all tolerance for garlic and spicy food after childbirth.
your friends should be bringing you meals
And, because mrs. h will be in no physical condition to fulfill her conjugal duties, your friends should be organizing to provide a steady procession of sweet-scented concubines to satisfy your masculine needs. And the concubines should bring pot with them.
our hands of full of babies
does a Full of Babies to the Twins beat a Dead Baby Flush?
31: You want poor, exhausted, corporally tormented mrs. h to have to subject herself to the pain and hardship? For shame, Blume, for shame!
i recalled a mil joke
so a man complains: my wife got sick and her mother arrived
truly, hardship never comes alone (it's a proverb)
It's important to think of the little ones as trainable kitchen help. You can lternate nights: one on apps station, the other on the fryer or salads/desserts. If they can't do a good tartare by age three, you're probably a bad parent.
My wife woke up at 3 a.m. to eat a nice fresh crunchy carrot.
Pizza coupons keep forever in the freezer.
JP,
The whole country's agriculture and food industry has developed to meet your specific needs, and yet you seem unwilling to take advantage of it. Why do you hate America? (At least you seem to be willing to freeze things, otherwise it would be right to the terrorist watch list for you.)
Very good! It reminds me of what my lesbian sister-in-law said prior to adopting her baby from China.
She announced that *she* was going to hand-make ALL of her baby's food so that it was fresh and healthy every day. At the time we were on our third baby and I knew the Gerber food section like the back of my hand.
Organic, no salt, no sugar, tastes like paste but cheap, small portions, and healthy as hell. I thought, "Yeah, sure, we'll see about that."
I understood that from her single, yuppie, elitist viewpoint all commercially made food was crap but in my experience baby food was one of the first foods to go organic and preservative free, as well as salt and sugar free. The stuff tasted like crap but hey, the kids couldn't argue and the variety was amazing.
The worst thing that happened to my kids was when one son turned orange from eating a lot of the foods with beta-carotene. We thought it was jaundice but the Doc set us straight. If the whites of the eyes are white it ain't jaundice. Seems the little guy simply loved all the orange food and not the green or white food. The Doc said babies are more prone to orange skin but adults could get it from eating a boatload of carrots. If carrots came in boats.
Anyway not all commercial food is crap. Some is good. Some is better than you can make yourself unless the veggies come from your own garden, and even then what do you do for variety or in the winter?
I have a usage question. "Minted bullion cubes," as I understand it, means that the cubes have been minted, that "mint" is a transitive verb meaning "to add mint to." But would one ever say, "Mint the lamb" or "I minted the lamb"? Same with "curried chicken." "Curry that chicken"? "I curried the chicken"?
I don't know what 37 means, but it's freaking me out. It's like a moment from a David Lynch movie dialogue.
My mother made all her own baby food for us by preparing fairly normal meals (less spice and salt) and running them through the food mill by hand, God bless her. For her, it was a cost thing. It drove her nuts to buy meals for her babies when she was already making dinner for herself and her husband.
Minted bullion cubes means that the bullion was sent directly to be cut and stamped into coinage. You wouldn't do that with lamb, or at least, it would be non-standard.
39: I was going to object to the first part of your post by saying that homemade baby food is remarkably easy. Cook up things like carrots, squash, sweet potatoes until tender, puree, then freeze -- I used the breast milk freezer bags for portions of vegie puree, very easy.
The latter part of 39, however, reminded me that I never figured out pureeing anything that wasn't ridiculously high in carotene. Still, when they start teething, those frozen little portions of vitamin A mush double nicely as a soothing and nutritious teether.
Pizza coupons keep forever in the freezer.
Technically they have an expiration date, but the freezer retards the spoilage, so they're safe to keep for up to a year in a 0-degree Fahrenheit freezer. Also, it is a pharmacoepedemiologicamanagerial fact that pizza delivery personnel suffer from impaired reading comprehension and chronological sensation.
BTW, maybe there is a commenter or lurker out there with relevant experience who can answer me this: do pizza delivery guys routinely use coupons from the Sunday paper to defraud their employers? Seems like they could trade one of the $2 off coupons for two bucks out of the till, and no one would be the wiser. Maybe the coupons are deliberately structured to prevent this (i.e. a free topping or a free drink instead of $ off)? Or maybe there is a requirement that the coupon be mentioned at the time of the order?
I'm reminding myself of a former colleague--nicest, sweetest pasty-faced Ivy League Jewish boy you'd ever hope to meet--who was an incorrigible schemer, always thinking up the (purely hypothetical, AFAIK) scam that would take advantage of whatever business process he encountered. He would have made an excellent forensic accountant, I bet.
My mom home made all our baby food, also for cost reasons. Rice, peas and bananas are easy to puree, and won't turn your baby orange.
||
I'm listening to a German union guy give a presentation on a conference call. He apologized in advance for his English, which is of course extremely fluent and fairly colloquial. He just said something about "unfolding" computer folders, which I find charming for some reason.
|>
Di,
I don't want to discourage anyone from making their own baby food.
The problem I had was if I was making my own how did I really know that the veggies I didn't grow myself were fresh and organic? I'd heard stories about so-called fresh produce sitting for weeks before being sold. It came down to who did I trust - Gerber or the produce providers without names.
Things are probably better now with more Farmer's markets and those kinds of things.
That's all I was saying.
47: I love that. If I were less discreet, I could share some adorable ESLisms from papers. Totally charming.
Tasty Bite is a good brand for dinner-in-a-box. Their Indian stuff is good, and my SIL raves about their multigrain pilaf.
do pizza delivery guys routinely use coupons from the Sunday paper to defraud their employers?
From my high-school pizza-making days, it seems the most common form of malfeasance was filling in an un-filled-in tip section on credit card slips. Cutting coupons would require foresight, and these are mostly guitarists we're talking about here.
jms,
My mom home made all our baby food, also for cost reasons. Rice, peas and bananas are easy to puree, and won't turn your baby orange.
I must say once we knew the orange was harmless it was kinda neat. It sorta looked like a tan but not exactly. He never got into Oompa Loompa territory, and he has turned into quite the handsome young man, although he'd kill me for saying it and for telling his baby story.
"unfolding" computer folders
That's a little odd. The standard terminology is "to open", just like in English.
All the same, the German word for "unfold" does have very broad connotations unknown to English (though hinted at by the phrase "the story unfolds"). The German constitution guarantees to individuals the right to the "free unfolding of the personality", which phrase is the closest analogue that German political culture has to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".
preparing fairly normal meals (less spice and salt) and running them through the food mill by hand
I knew a guy whose mom did this, but kept in all the spice of her southern Indian cuisine. She said she couldn't stand to feed her children the blandness of American baby food.
I'm not sure if this makes me a bad person as an uncaring mother, or if on the other hand I'm bragging about being crunchier than thou, but while we didn't have a rule against jarred baby food, we didn't buy much of it, and didn't really do the blender/food mill thing either (we did stew and blenderize prunes). A lot of real food is pretty soft as it is -- like, baked sweet potato mashed with a fork, chicken pulled apart into shreds, chopped spinach, and a baby old enough for solid food can 'chew' to a certain extent with its gums.
Mostly, my guys got whatever was soft that we were eating, or soft stuff prepared for them but not particularly "baby food". (This has not magically made them not picky eaters.) (And we did do that powdery baby-cereal that you mix with milk to make paste, although for Sally more than Newt.) Newt, specifically, hated being spoon fed. Under a year, he got breast milk and things he could pick up and put in his mouth -- hardly any purees.
I'm not arguing this as better parenting, but it's the lazy parent's way to go, and didn't do them much harm.
||
Note to guy down the hall, whom I fervently hope is not an actual reader of unfogged:
Using the urinal while holding the newspaper in front of your face with both hands? Gross! You gotta point that thing with a steady hand. Have you ever seen what happens when you turn on a garden hose that's lying loose on the driveway?
|>
blandness of American baby food.
An understatement. I'm from MN, where even the 'mild' picante sauce is too spicy and they have an 'extra mild' just for us but baby food has got to be the blandest of the bland and so bland that even a died-in-the-wool Norwegian who only eats white and yellow foods would beg for a little seasoning. Either butter or brown sugar, or maybe both.
Yeah, I tasted all of the foods I fed my kids, out of fairness if nothing else, and that stuff is pretty much colored paste without the pleasant paste taste.
The meats were especially horrid. Eww.
Using the urinal while holding the newspaper in front of your face with both hands? Gross!
I dunno, now that man's kind of my hero. I'm wistfully looking at my half-read copy of the FT and the bathroom door.
Plus, it's not like urinals require great aim. They're almost literally like hitting the broad side of a barn. If he's got long enough anatomy and strength of stream to cause a hose-like whiplash effect, he's got bigger problems to hide than his pants getting a little damp.
I'm sure baby's palates are different than those of older children, but I remember as a girl thinking my baby sister was making exactly the right faces in response to baby food. It tasted nasty!
Using the urinal while holding the newspaper in front of your face with both hands? Gross! You gotta point that thing with a steady hand. Have you ever seen what happens when you turn on a garden hose that's lying loose on the driveway?
Now what I would do is presume that the man is inadequately equipped to the extent that it doesn't hang at all, just sort of shoots straight out even when flaccid.
KR: Set up the bathroom with one of these.
Knecht,
. . .what happens when you turn on a garden hose
Paging Dr Freud. Dr Freud to the men's toilet please. Paging Dr Freud.
Knecht: say hi to ben next time you're in the loo, won't you?
The meats were especially horrid. Eww.
Just the memory of it makes me want to retch. I'm not sure which was worse, the meat itself or the poop that resulted. Diaper changes took a serious turn for the worse when our kids ate that stuff.
Hey, since other people have the storable meals covered, I'd like to ask a question. I discovered last night that RoadRunner will no longer be providing Usenet as part of its internet package (due to "lack of use"; they clearly weren't examining *my* activity logs). Any suggestions for a replacement newsgroup service? I only use it for binaries, don't need posting capability, and the closer to free, the better.
Diaper changes took a serious turn for the worse when our kids ate that stuff.
Oh yeah. From no-smell yellowish-green slimy stuff to incredibly stinky brown stuff.
And, a note to any parent's to be - when you buy the disposable diapers, and you know you will even though you may swear you won't, please note that the weight range on the package (for example 10-12 lbs) refers to the baby's weight. It is not, I repeat *not* the diaper capacity. That is all.
I'm not sure which was worse, the meat itself or the poop that resulted.
Flavorless meat still tastes better than baby poop, Jesus.
Anyway not all commercial food is crap.
True. Just most of it.
I'm more amused by the foods that pass through a baby totally unaltered. In the past week, I've seen diapers with enormous amounts of black-eyed peas and grapes (cut in half) that probably could have been rinsed off and recycled.
Posted by: passing through
It's the passing through that turns commercial food into crap.
I was just now thinking about having some breakfast, but somehow after 67 and 69 my appetite has vanished. A slimmer me thanks you, Apo!
I'm more amused by the foods that pass through a baby totally unaltered. In the past week, I've seen diapers with enormous amounts of black-eyed peas and grapes (cut in half) that probably could have been rinsed off and recycled.
apostropher,
Hence the term "picking raisins out of a turd," which I have found very useful upon occasion.
IIRC poop is brown(ish) for the same reason dirt is brown(ish), no?
IIRC poop is brown(ish) for the same reason dirt is brown(ish), no?
Because it contains poop, right?
Poop is brown due to bile and bilirubin.
I read somewhere once, long ago, that the Native Americans of the Soutwest referred to the retrieving of undigested corn kernels from feces for washing and re-eating as the "Second Harvest."
The largest local food shelf is also called "Second Harvest." It's given me endless amusement/squicks over the years.
75: Our own Evacuation Artist, Ben W-lfs-n, has already come up with a more creative use for some varieties of recycled corn. Here and here.
43: Minted bullion cubes means that the bullion was sent directly to be cut and stamped into coinage. You wouldn't do that with lamb, or at least, it would be non-standard.
WHAT'S WRONG WITH IT? BIMEATALLISM IS A GREAT IDEA!
Richard Cohen wants all you tattooed kids to get off his damn lawn already.
The first link in 76 reminds me that more than once I've been freaked out by the color of my pee only to recall, seconds later, that I ate beets the night before. The last time I had a urine test, I thought about loading up on beets and asparagus beforehand just for the benefit of the folks at the lab, but I was too busy drinking gallons of water and cranberry juice to flush out the THC.
79: From Wikipedia, this (the references are fun reads too): It has been claimed that most people produce the odorous compounds after eating asparagus, but only about 40% of the population have the autosomal genes required to smell them.
This surprises me, can we get some votes? I always assumed that everyone (or just about everyone) experienced this, but realize my sample size has been limited.
80: Yeah, that's weird. I'm a producer and smeller. Producing but not smelling seems like cheating, while not producing and yet smelling seems conducive to resentment if not outright nihilism.
80 comments in an no one has yet mentioned that the title of this post makes no sense? It's eating for three, or perhaps four (depending on how we're counting), but in any event certainly not two.
Count me as an asparagus "smeller". That was my favorite part of "Love in the Time of Cholera", that the doctor insisted on asparagus for dinner every night because he like the smell the next morning.
Also, if anyone wants to see pictures of the new LandersBaby, here are some.
You had another baby? I didn't realize y'all were expecting.
His hair had to grow in eventually.
88: Precious!
Yeah, the Baby Futures market has gone nuts!
Mmm. That new baby smell. Om nom nom.
bilirubin.
Ohhh. (Someone needs to tell the EN webmaster that the link to the studio version of that song from the "Stella Maris" single page is broken.)
79: As a country doctor my dad dealt with beet pee on a routine basis.
Flavorless meat still tastes better than baby poop, Jesus.
Maybe people who don't know how to cook it right think so.
Ooh, babies. Was I right that the second baby's much easier to manage? (That is, in itself. Juggling two is hard, but the actual baby management seemed wildly easier once I'd been through it one time before.)
95: Juggling two is hard
Start off with lacrosse balls and slowly work your way up to heavier stuff. Sedation is recommended the first few times you go to actual babies (as well as something to keep the babies from wiggling around too much).
On the subject of the post, I'm not sure if this is the most productive approach. Fill up the freezer, sure, but you'll either find yourself coping well enough to cook without fretting about it too much in advance, or if not (which, with twins, could be), you'll eat through the freezer pretty quickly, and probably won't have the energy to refill it. I would be planning out no-trouble meals that you can buy and eat without working at them, that aren't too depressing. Whatever the local takeout is/your favorite brand of hummus with a prewashed salad/fried egg sandwiches with cheese -- whatever you can buy, keep in the fridge, and eat without planning.
Has anyone said pot roast yet? Pot roast.
95: the second one is virtually effortless, so far. But it's only been around about 2 days; our first waited about 2 weeks before turning into a demon (a condition from which it didn't recover for about 4 months).
YMMV, but taking care of Sally as an infant was major stress, while Newt was a snuggly little pet I could cuddle and take care of with a quarter of my attention while thinking about managing (then two-year-old) Sally. And they were both objectively about the same on the difficulty scale, I was just worried and confused my first time through.
you'll eat through the freezer pretty quickly, and probably won't have the energy to refill it
True, but if you can put away a couple weeks' worth, by the time you've gone through it you'll be that much closer to sanity. Based on our experience, I'd say that if you can get friends and family to cover you for the first couple of weeks and then eat out of the fridge/freezer for the next couple, you'll have gotten through the most energy-depleting stretch. Do keep the numbers of your local take-out places handy, though.
FWIW, it was three months before I got three hours of sleep in a row. That said, our neighbors' triplets were sleeping six hours at a stretch after the same period, so YMMV. (I asked the dad about their sleep schedule at three months, and when he told me I was like, you FUCKER wow, that's really great.)
Speaking of which, have I ever mentioned the fact that this was probably the worst counsel I'd ever received in my life? It literally left me pondering whether the less-immoral course of action was to kill myself or to kill my baby. (A surprisingly diffcult question to answer when one has been sleepless for several weeks.) My baby was a nightmare; he's (almost) two now and since about the time he started walking he's been nothing but an absolute joy.
I'm guessing neither of your kids has colic as babies, and probably slept well to boot.
I guess I can't say "my baby" anymore, can I. "My first baby..."
95: Yeah, the second one is easier even if, as ours was, she's more difficult. There's nothing like getting the first kid to two or so without breaking it to take the tension out of dealing with the next one.
Which is not to say I didn't have the urge to hurl them against the wall at times. IMX the difference between parents and abusers is sometimes just a tiny bit of self-control.
100, 102: Our traverse through our three was:
#1—Good for a month then absolute hell for 4 months or so.
#2—An absolute joy, gosh had we gotten better!
#3—Known as the baby from hell for first 9 months (in fairness he was hospitalized with pretty a pretty severe respiratory illness in the first couple of weeks that made him get all goopy and strangly-sounding when he cried). Now that I am part of the Flickr pool I have a picture I should scan in which shows me on the couch with all three at that stage that would be suitable for a Planned Parenthood campaign. The sliver lining was that his first 3 months coincided with the Pens first Stanley Cup run and that worked well to hook non-hockey fan me as I sat/walked around with him glued to my arm every night.
I'm guessing neither of your kids has colic as babies, and probably slept well to boot.
Yep, pretty much. I was getting a reasonable night's sleep most nights by two months or so, both times. Sorry about the bad advice.
A family favorite, but one that you will likely eat too much of to freeze and save for later:
Enchilada Pie, aka Refried Bean Lasagna
3-4 cans of refried beans
1 12-oz can of enchilada sauce (red or green)
flour tortillas (or corn)
one medium yellow onion, chopped
16 oz shredded cheese
any veggies you wish to add, chopped
large rectangular glass cake pan
1.) preheat oven to 375
2.) starting with bottom layer of tortilla in cake pan, top with refried beans until tortillas are completely covered.
3.) add on 1/3rd of your chopped onions and 1/4 of your can of enchilada sauce
4.) add on 1/4 of your cheese
5.) add veggies of your choice
6.) cover with second layer or tortilla
repeat steps 2 through 6 until top of pan is well nigh
7.) put all remaining non-tortilla ingredients on top of last layer of tortilla, including any extra cheese and sauce you may wish to add
bake for 30-45 minutes depending on sauciness and veggie quantities
serve with toppings of your choice