I love the community that’s created when a baby is born. People typically are excited to help a neighbor, a friend, or family member as they make the transition to new parenthood. As a mom who just gave birth, this transition can feel really overwhelming, right? What time did my baby last eat? How long did he sleep? Do I put him in his crib awake and let him fall asleep? Before you know it, it’s the end of the day and here comes the most popular question asked 97 times in our house. Every.Single.Day. “What’s for dinner?” Nails on a chalkboard.
Bringing a family a meal when they’ve just had a baby, whether it’s the first baby or number five, is one of the things I was most thankful for after having my kids. It was always so nice to have some new recipes to add to our rotation, too.
5 Easy Meals to Bring to a New Mom
Beef and Broccoli 
This is on an every-other-week rotation in our home. It’s a recipe I can start in the morning, letting the meat marinate all day, and quickly adding it to the pan in the evening. We don’t ever have cooking sherry on hand, so I just omit that. When I bring it to a new family, I make cilantro lime rice to pair with it. I’m not sure they go together, but I find it a little better than offering plain rice. I just add lime zest, the juice of the lime, cilantro, salt, and pepper. *Be sure to ask if the new parents like cilantro; it’s one of those love-it-or-hate-it foods.
Pork Carnitas
Go out and buy a pork butt now. This recipe is so good and so easy—a crockpot recipe; need I say more?! This recipe is nice because most of the time, this one recipe will feed your family and the new family. I like to bring this over in a bigger foil pan and provide tortillas, cheese, sour cream, and salsa. You could also pair this with the cilantro lime rice mentioned above.
Greek Chicken (With Greek Salad)
My kids love this! I think I have finally mastered how to cut the chicken into thin strips. Game changer! We add and take away from this one each time, but this is a fun little dinner to bring to a friend. I bring the Greek Chicken in a foil pan (easier to heat up this way) and bring containers of hummus, Feta cheese, pitas, diced tomatoes and cucumbers, and a salad.
Breakfast Casserole
You know when someone makes you food and it’s so good and you try your hardest to make it taste the same as they did? This is that recipe for me. As silly as that sounds because this is such an easy recipe, we had a family bring this to us and I still can’t get mine to taste the same. So, who doesn’t love breakfast for dinner? If it’s for a larger family, you may want to take more than one casserole. We drop it off uncooked so the family can pop it in the oven when they are ready to eat it.
Chinese Chicken with Black Pepper Sauce
Ok. So I improvise on this recipe because I always forget oyster sauce. While this isn’t really considered “comfort food”, this is my comfort food. I could live off sauteed peppers and onions. This is a great dish on its own or you can make some rice as a side. This one is great to have the next day…if your family leaves any!
I never really understood the saying “Make sure you sleep when your baby sleeps.” Newborns sleep the majority of the day and I would literally get nothing done if I slept when my son slept. And maybe I spent most of my day watching him sleep. So having friends drop off dinner was something about which I could never say thank you enough!
What are some of your tried-and-true recipes for a new mom?
