Fill Marnie Ellwood Fill the Freezer Before the Baby Comes

The freezer is the only thing you can do for the first six weeks before they happen.Nobody starves after a baby arrives. What happens is smaller and more grinding than that: you eat standing up at half past four, you eat toast for the fourth night running, and one evening you realise you have not had a hot meal with a vegetable in it since the hospital bag was packed.This book is written to be read early and used late. Sixty recipes, three cooking days, and a plan for packing a normal freezer drawer - not a chest freezer in a garage - so that a stranger could open it, read a label, and put dinner in your hand.WHAT IS INSIDE- Sixty recipes, sorted by how you actually eat them: bowls you can hold with one hand, raw bags that cook themselves in a slow cooker, foil trays that go into the oven still frozen, soups in single ladles, breakfasts, and small sweet things.- Three cooking days with three complete shopping lists, written so you can hand one to somebody who asked what they could do.- The exact four-line label to write on every bag, copied out with each recipe: what it is, cooked or raw, the date, and how to reheat it.- An A to Z of what freezes well and what does not - the potato that goes grainy, the cream that splits, the pasta that dissolves - so one wrong ingredient never ruins a whole container again.- A plain chapter on food safety: 0 F / -18 C, the three ways to thaw and the one that is not on the list, and the two temperatures that mean "cooked".- Twelve things that go wrong and what to do about each one, from freezer burn to a power cut.- A chapter for the people who are not having the baby, on what to bring, in what container, and when to leave.- Every recipe has a variation, so sixty becomes a hundred and twenty.WHAT IS NOT INSIDENo photographs, no calorie counts, no nutrition tables, no claims about your body, and no promises about health. This is a book about having something hot in the house. Nothing more, and nothing less.Written by a home cook with no professional culinary, nutritional or medical training, and the book says so on the page where it matters.Print it, tape the shopping list inside a cupboard door, and cook one afternoon. In six weeks you will be glad of yourself.