In many families, both parents share responsibility for making meals — especially when both are working. In my family though, I handle the majority of our meals. When we got married, we divvied up the household tasks, and meals were one of the duties that I took on. My husband will help occasionally, but the meal planning and preparation are things that I own. It’s one of the reasons that I wanted to work part-time instead of full-time post-baby.

I’ll be the first to admit that as far as working moms go, I have the easiest situation. I work part-time with a schedule that has me home by 1:00 in the afternoon most days. I only have one child and he’s still mostly bottle-fed (we just started solids a la “baby led weaning” a couple of weeks ago). My situation is much easier than the situation that many working moms have!

In general, I enjoy cooking, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend hours in the kitchen! I also don’t like feeling frazzled when it comes to dinner time. So, today I’ll share my tips for how I manage meals as a working mom. Maybe they’ll be helpful to you. Maybe you have some better ideas of your own!

Plan ahead. I think the most important thing you can do, working mom or otherwise, is to plan your meals! If you plan your meals in advance, you can minimize the number of trips to the grocery store in a week and you can eliminate the “It’s 5:30 p.m. and I have a hungry family, what am I going to make?” stress from your life. I do a weekly meal plan, but I have friends that plan two weeks or even one month at a time. Whatever works for you is the best option!

Prep ahead. Once I have my weekly menu, I prep what I can on the weekends. It usually takes 30 minutes tops to cut veggies, take meat out of the freezer and make sure I have all the ingredients that I’m going to need.

Think easy! Many women love slow cooker meals. I confess that I’m not one of them. I do have a few that I like — roast beef, spaghetti sauce, taco soup, chili, chicken tacos, but I use my slow cooker at most once a week. Other working moms thrive on them. If that’s you, slow cook it up! Instead I try to make easy meals – meals that can be thrown together quickly. Since I have a menu plan, if I have two meals that need hamburger, then I’ll brown the beef for both meals at the same time, storing the other half for later in the week. Same thing with chicken, rice or veggies for salad. We eat a lot of spaghetti, pizza, tacos and soup in our house!

Freeze ahead! Some women do a marathon “cook one day a month and make 20 meals at one time” cooking days, but I’m not one of them. But I do freeze meals occasionally. When I make lasagna, I make two of them and freeze one. When I make chili, I freeze some for later. Then when life gets hectic, I just pull a meal out of the freezer and account for longer baking time. Just about any meal can be frozen!

Love your leftovers! Some meals, I think, are even better as leftovers — anything with tomato sauce like spaghetti or chili just seem to make excellent leftovers! I usually don’t care for the same meal two days in a row, so many times the tacos that I had on Monday get turned into taco salad on Thursday. The chicken that went into chicken fettuccine alfredo becomes chicken quesadillas. The roast beef that we had on Tuesday makes excellent roast beef sandwiches on Friday night. Also, cooking bigger meals on the weekends is another great way to get another couple of meals during the week.

Those are my tips! What does your family do to make meals easier?

Photo Credit: Public Domain Pictures

Still without power because of Hurricane Sandy? Then you’re probably in need of some new meal ideas (unless the thought of PB&J still appeals to you). These no-cook meals are healthy, and can be prepared from pantry items a quick trip to the grocery store.

Get the recipes at The Nest >>

What’s your go-to no-cook meal?

Plus more from The Bump:

20 Ways to Eat Better

7 Quick and Easy Recipes for the New Mom

Fun Ways to Lose Baby Weight

One of the things I loved about being in the hospital after my son was born was not having to make dinner. Not only did I not have plan and make the meals, but I could call food service any time I wanted and order anything I wanted!  For free!  (Okay, not really for free — I’m sure it was accounted for in the hospital bill.) For a foodie like me, that’s heaven.

But eventually, you come home from the hospital. The room service ends. People stop wheeling you food on a platter, right up to your chest. If you want to eat pancakes with a side of mashed potatoes and gravy, a slice of cheesecake, and a chicken roll-up at 2:00 a.m., you gotta make it yourself.

If your post-birth experience is anything like mine you’ll be exhausted. Know that ahead of time and prepare for it. For some couples, he does the cooking in the relationship and that just continues post-baby. But, for most couples that I know, she does the bulk of the meal preparation. If that’s you, you’ve got to try to anticipate the first couple weeks’ meals.  Ask yourself: “What can I do before delivery to make life easier on myself after delivery?”

Maybe it means when friends ask, “How can I help?”, your answer is, “A casserole, please.” Maybe it means asking your partner to take over the cooking. Maybe it means having plenty of cash on hand to pay the food delivery guys. Each family will tackle this one differently.

For me, there were a few strategies that worked:

Freezing meals. I made a few casserole kind of dishes — lasagna, Italian meatloaf and a chicken/broccoli bake and froze them. I whipped up a couple of batches of soup and put it in the freezer.

Stocking up on supplies for simple meals. I planned for meals that come together really quickly without much thought. Boil-some-noodles-add-some-sauce kind of meals.

Freezing ingredients. Before delivery, I browned five pounds of hamburger meat, put taco seasoning in some of it and then froze it all in smaller portions. Then when I wanted to make spaghetti or tacos or chili or soup, that was a big step already done. I did the same thing with chicken for quesadillas, enchiladas and chicken Makhani.

Making a lot at a time. Since there are only two adults in our family, we usually have leftovers anyway. When I did have a chance to cook, I made sure that I had enough to last a few meals. Often we’d get two dinners for two and several lunches for me out of just one cooking session.

Ordering pizza! There were a few times that I was just too stressed or busy. My husband isn’t much for cooking, but he’s very happy to pick up a pizza on his way home from work.

This actually isn’t a whole lot different from  how I usually plan meals — although we don’t usually order pizza as often as we did those first few weeks! You might not think that cooking post-baby is a big deal. After all, maybe you really like cooking and will make that a priority. But I can tell you that the odds of you having a well-rested body, two free hands and a desire to chop and stir at dinner time isn’t too high when you’ve got a new baby. Better safe than hungry!

How did you make your life easier as a new mom? Do you wish you’d done anything differently?

It’s fiesta time! Spice up your dinner this week with this chicken enchiladas recipe. Why eat out at a Mexican restaurant when you can save money by going homemade? In less than hour, you’ll have a delicious meal (with plenty of leftovers for lunch the next day!) And if you’re looking to save more time, you can prep the chicken, peppers and onions on the weekend and just heat them up when you’re ready to assemble the enchiladas. After 15 minutes of baking time, you’ll be ready to plate. Whip up some margaritas and grab a bag of tortilla chips and you’ve got a great night in.

Get the recipe at The Nest.