POSTPARTUM FREEZER MEALS | Hearty Indigenous Meals from Native Chefs to Enjoy Postpartum
Image from The New York Times
We’re back with another freezer meal prep guide for postpartum! We’ve said it before, but prepping meals to have once your baby arrives can be an easy way to ensure you’re taken care of as a new parent. As Gather Birth co-founder Gina is preparing for her new baby, she’s been busy prepping nutritious and delicious meals for her freezer.
And because November brings Native American Heritage Month and Thanksgiving, we thought we’d start with this piece from Sean Sherman (the chef we tip our hat to in many of the recipes below!) on how “The Thanksgiving Tale We Tell Is a Harmful Lie” and “a Better Way to Celebrate the Holiday”.
Never one to simply do something for the sake of doing it, Gina decided to dig deeper into the foods that built each Gather founder’s roots. She’s chosen several traditional recipes to highlight the cultural heritage of each member of our team, and this week we’re honoring Brooke’s Indigenous heritage. Each recipe was crafted by a Native chef and represents multiple regions of Indigenous cuisine. As you go through the recipes, look for local, in-season ingredients. Don’t be afraid to switch things up a bit if that means getting the freshest food possible. Honoring where your ingredients come from is a big piece to this week’s meal guide. If you don’t have local ingredients to choose from, you can order online from Indigenous folks, such as the Ziibimijwang Farm from the Odawa community.
Check out the recipes below, as well as Gina’s tips for prepping and freezing the meals for later, and why she chose each dish for her postpartum time. For postpartum doula support rooted in Anishinaabe traditions, please contact Brooke to set up a consult.
Image from Indian Country Today
Nokake (Blue Corn Cakes) with Wojape
Like I did with the previous Scandinavian recipes, I wanted to choose a recipe I could eat earlier in the day. The Nokake, or blue corn cakes, served with wojape, a warm berry sauce, seemed like the perfect choice. In fact, when my family and I were prepping the cakes to freeze for later, we made an extra batch to eat right away. Let me tell you, they’re absolutely amazing. The corn cakes call for blue cornmeal, which can be challenging to find at many traditional grocers, but the recipe does say swapping for yellow cornmeal is just fine. The wojape is a traditional sauce made of berries local to the region where it’s produced. The recipe gives several amazing recommendations, and I opted for blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and cranberries.
I chose this particular dish for postpartum because it satisfies many of my requirements. First, the corn cakes are easily digestible, which is so important in the early days postpartum when digestion is slower. The wojape is traditionally served warm which is also a postpartum essential in many cultures. It’s recommended in traditional teachings to skip cold foods and drinks for at least the first few weeks postpartum.
Together, the blue corn cakes and wojape are simply amazing. I made the corn cake ahead of time, then individually wrapped each corn cake so we could thaw and fry them in a griddle rather than warming up in the oven. Likewise, I made the wojape ahead and saved the sauce in several glass mason jars. I left an inch at the top of each jar to allow for the sauce to expand when it froze. The plan is to eat the corn cakes and wojape multiple times throughout postpartum, so freezing into several batches will make that much easier. Bonus, the berries in the wojape provide great blood-building nutrients. Traditional teachings tell us to pair like with like: in this case, the redder the berries, the better they are believed to aid in healing the wound created from the detachment site of the placenta during postpartum!
The Nokake recipe is from Chop Onions, Boil Water, based on that published by Wampanoag Indian chef Sherry Pocknett.
The Wojape recipe is from Indian Country Today, created by Lakota chef Sean Sherman (local to Minneapolis!). You can order his cookbook from a local Indigenous-owned bookstore here: The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen
Image from Arctic Grub
Three Sisters Bowl with Hominy, Beans, and Squash
Another amazing recipe by Native chef, Sean Sherman, is this Three Sisters bowl and it’s absolutely perfect for postpartum. A Three Sisters dish is traditionally made with either hominy or corn, one or more varieties of beans, and your choice of squash. The Three Sister dish is more complex than being a tasty meal; Indigenous Peoples who knew how to get the most out of a harvest learned that growing corn, beans, and squash next to each other made each crop more bountiful. The original permaculture.
This warm, comforting bowl is especially wonderful for postpartum because it’s comprised of roasted and tender vegetables, ingredients that are easy to digest as well as nourishing. Warming foods are a particularly important aspect to many indigenous cultures during the early days of the postpartum period, as they not only provide much-needed nutrients but they also the birthing parent from experiencing “cold womb”. Warmth, both inside and out, encourages the body to heal this womb space where the placenta recently detached after the birth of the baby.
If you’re using hominy, be sure to soak the kernels overnight before cooking them (this was a step I didn’t read closely enough). Once my hominy was soaked, I made the entire dish, let it cool, and placed it into an aluminum baking tray with a lid, labeled it, and slid into my freezer. I plan to thaw the dish for several hours before warming on low heat in the oven when I’m ready to enjoy it.
A pro-tip from Brooke and her training with Raeanne Madison of Postpartum Healing Lodge: make this recipe a soup with homemade bone broth (perhaps with your bones from the bison pot roast below)! The extra collagen further supports this healing after birth. Raeanne has a wealth of knowledge in traditional bone broths and other Anishinaabe recipes made specifically for those in postpartum!
Three Sisters Bowl is a dish by Lakota chef, Sean Sherman, for The New York Times.
Image from HuffPost.
Red Bean Soup
This traditional red bean soup is an amazing addition to anyone’s postpartum freezer meal menu. The protein-packed soup is wonderful for giving you the energy needed to transition to parenthood, while also being easy on your digestive system. Soups reheat like a dream, either quickly on the stove, or slowly in a crockpot, making them a simple option for a new parent.
While I’ve adjusted other soup recipes to be “dump into the crockpot” dinners, I chose to make this soup completely ahead of time. Once the soup was finished, I placed it into a large, sterilized mason jar, leaving enough space at the top, and slid it into the freezer. I should be able to thaw the soup overnight and heat it up when it’s ready! I chose not to make the topping because I wasn’t sure how I’d freeze it. I always have sunflower seeds and the other ingredients on hand, so I’ll have my husband do that step before we enjoy the soup.
Beans can be tricky for some in the postpartum time, and in some cultures, beans are often avoided for the first couple of weeks postpartum until digestion is stronger. However, we find that this recipe offers the protein-packed benefits while pureeing the beans makes sure to keep it easily digestible in this time when the organs are slowly finding their way back to full capacity.
This warming soup is courtesy of Cree chef, Quentin Glabus, and found on HuffPost.
Image from The New York Times.
Bison Pot Roast with Hominy
It’s hard not to think of warm and cozy when you think of pot roast. Bison has important, sacred roots in Indigenous cooking. The flavors in this roast are also incredibly warming, like the sage and juniper berries. It’s not super easy to find juniper berries, but I felt it was important to include them in this traditional dish, so I did a little digging around local stores.
This bison pot roast from Lakota chef Sean Sherman absolutely fits the needs of a postpartum parent. A bison roast is high in iron and protein, both important for a recovering postpartum parent as they heal. The meat became so tender as it cooked, it was really hard not to eat it right away.
For this dish, I completed the entire recipe before freezing. The meat breaks down during roasting, leaving you with delicious shreds to eat with the hominy. Like other dishes, I placed the entire roast into an aluminum baking pan, allowed it to cool, then covered with a tin lid, labeled it, and placed in my chest freezer. I truly cannot wait to dig into this.
Bison Pot Roast by Sean Sherman for The New York Times.
Image from The New York Times.
Wild Rice Cakes with Roasted Turnips and Winter Squash
I found these separate recipes as I was looking for dishes to highlight Indigenous cuisine and I knew I had to make both. After I fried up the wild rice cakes and roasted vegetables, I realized they would pair perfectly together for a heartier meal. Wild rice is a midwestern staple and has an important history for Indigenous Peoples in this region.
Once again, I chose the roasted root vegetables and squash because of how easy they are to digest. Root vegetables, as well as the wild rice cakes, are both filling and offer a lot of fiber to the postpartum diet, needed for the metabolism and cycling of hormones as they balance out in the postpartum time.
I roasted the vegetables while I made the wild rice cake dough and eventually fried them up. After both recipes were complete, I placed the vegetables into an aluminum baking pan and then layered the rice cakes on top. I let the entire dish cool before adding my tin lid, labeling, and placing it in the freezer. I’ll warm this dish on low in the oven when I’m ready to enjoy, maybe even tossing the wild rice cakes in a hot pan to crisp them up a bit.
Wild Rice Cakes are from “The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen” by Sean Sherman, found on HuffPost.
Roasted Turnips and Winter Squash by Sean Sherman for The New York Times.