Easy Snack and Meal Prep During Pregnancy

The past 19 weeks have been a small blur. Some have gone by so fast! I have one thing to be a constant struggle: cooking. As my family has grown with each pregnancy, my to do list seems to as well. I feel so overwhelmed some days, when it comes time to feed myself I opt for the easy routes. The real bummer is I have plenty of food to cook – but cooking it seems to be the issue. Mama problems.

With a background in holistic health coaching, I know what it takes to make life easier in the kitchen: prepping. I have been working alongside a few amazing clients and as I continued to motivate them towards their health goals I had to dig down and find some motivation for myself.

My Motivation

• I want to feed my family (including myself) healthy nourishing meals EVERY meal. I found I was letting my kids snack a lot and skipping dinner because it was too big of a task.
• Get more protein into my diet for my baby bump.
• Feel good about myself – Leaving the house knowing I have my meals ready. One less thing to stress about!
• Save money. Sadly I was throwing out some food every week that had not been used and this was money wasted.

My Focus

Simplicity! If I have too much I get overwhelmed.  I also had my kiddos home when I was prepping so it needed to be quick, one hour tops. Two meals and two snacks. Here is what I worked on:

• Meal 1: Beef Stuffed Peppers with rice, avocado and plantain chips
• Meal 2: Crockpot Cashew Chicken with green onions and rice
• Snack 1: Sliced apples and grapes
• Snack 2: Trail mix for the kids

The results have been life changing! I have prepped my meals many times before but it has been a very long time. I usually will prep my produce or make a large dinner and save leftovers, but actually having a meal that I can take right out and warm up was such a blessing!

The kids snacks where also great. They got the choice to choose from one or the other and saved me the hassle of going through a list on 10 things. They were all ready to go so when they wanted one, I could just grab it and go back to what I was doing.

We ended up eating every single meal by Friday which is great because the weekends are not very consistent. We may be staying with our family or going out to eat, but the snacks can migrate into the diaper bag. And that is exactly what they did.

Here are the links to the recipes I used:

Crockpot Cashew Chicken I will say I cooked my chicken on low for under 2 hours. I did cut them into smaller pieces, but 3 hours would have been way too long.

I made up my own recipe for the stuffed peppers, but here is a good one too! I cooked 1 lb. of ground beef with 1 onion and mixed it with taco seasoning. Then, I cut the peppers in half and filled baked them at 400 for 10 minutes. I filled them with brown rice, beef and a little but of parmesan cheese. A little pinchy pinch 😉

Blessings,