Preparing for Radiation: Meal Prepping

 Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing regular posts about how I'm preparing for radiation. I'm hoping these can help someone else, as I struggled to find a conversational source like this that dealt with the subject. For more information on my brain tumor, check out these posts.

 

 When I learned that I had about four and a half months before I started radiation therapy, I wanted to take advantage of every opportunity to both do the things that were important to me, like my trip with my son, and prepare for the road ahead. They tell you a little about what to expect, but treatment hits every person a little differently so they can't say much for sure. My primary symptoms associated with my tumor (I have lots associated with other illnesses but we're hoping they won't be affected) are nausea and vertigo. My doctor has warned me that these will likely increase as treatment progresses because radiation causes inflammation to the area of the tumor, effectively temporarily (I hope) increasing its size, and thus its pressure on surrounding brain tissue. Scar tissue can also be built up and in a worst-case scenario, radiation necrosis where the inflammation from the radiation kills healthy cells. Not good. But that's an outlying concern for another day. In the near term, I'm looking at increased nausea and vertigo (my husband has been shopping extensively for "fun" emesis bags - did you know that was even a thing?), and of course the classic radiation symptom, fatigue. Now this is not, "Gee, I think I need a nap" fatigue. This stuff is next level. When I was recovering from my brain surgeries, I went through a period of time where I literally couldn't stay awake for more than 20 minutes. And this from a person that formerly couldn't sleep at all in an upright (seated) position! My understanding is that this fatigue will be similar if not more intense. So how do you prepare for fatigue? Well, my husband bought me my first recliner, which I'll discuss in a future post about setting up my lounge, but really you can't prepare for the fatigue itself. It's not like taking extra naps beforehand will make a difference. What I can do is recognize that I won't be able to do most of the things that I usually am responsible for around our house. So, in looking at what I can do ahead of time in preparation, I decided to make ahead and freeze as many meals as I reasonably could. I'm not physically capable of the massive freezer meal prep sessions I've undertaken in the past, but I can certainly double a recipe a few times a week. My hope was that by doing this I could put up about 50 meals before I ran out of energy. Then the other shoe dropped and I learned that instead of four and a half months, I had six weeks, much of which would be taken up in travel. Time was limited and I made the call to double EVERY meal I made in that time, if at all possible. By my count I had about 25 dinners left, but I did find a way to add in a few doubled lunches besides. We had to eat part of what I made, of course, so I couldn't freeze it all, but now that its typically just my husband and I at home for dinner, we don't eat a full recipe's worth anyways. With most doubled meals we could eat one dinner and freeze two more, occasionally I can eek out a third freezer portion. At that rate, we should more than meet my 50-meal goal!

 So how am I going to store all these meals? Well, one of the smartest purchases we made as a young married couple was an upright freezer. I'm not sure why I thought I needed one of those when it was just my husband, myself and a breast-fed baby, but I did. That thing has outlasted every other appliance we've owned! It's a beast! In God's perfect way, He's been having me fill it up over the last 6 months with every great meat sale I've come across, not sure quite what I would do with it all, but I couldn't pass them up. Now I know what it all was for. I did a thorough inventory and then set about finding ways to use up as much of it as I could - I really hate to waste good food!

 This was my second major endeavor with CoPilot. On a whim, I asked it for freezer meal ideas and was quickly sucked into a vortex of food safety recommendations and recipes. Better than a standard search, I was able to tell it what I couldn't eat (gluten, brassicas, and ginger primarily) as well as requirements I had like needing to pre-soak dry beans rather than using canned ones, and it tailored its recommendations. When we hit recipes that included ginger, it was able to offer advice on what substitutes would work best for that situation. I wanted to simplify and cut down my time in the kitchen as much as possible, so I asked CoPilot to focus on doing recipes in the Instant Pot. It confidently spit them all out that way, turns out you can't take EVERYTHING AI says at face value. The first four recipes I tried didn't come to pressure because they scorched on the bottom. That's a particular quirk of Instant Pots which is overcome by making sure that the liquid you use is very thin (i.e. water or broth). CoPilot had me using crushed tomatoes and thickening sauces before pressurizing. Now, I know better. I can't blame CoPilot for everything. And I'm a little embarrassed to admit how long it took me before I realized what was going on. With the fourth meal I got into an argument with CoPilot about how there wasn't enough liquid and I was going to have an issue. It insisted over and over and over again that there was enough and it would be fine, so I went ahead and did it, and it was a DISASTER! It ended up being transferred to a pot on the stove where my chicken fried rice became more of a congee. Not my favorite. It was at that point that I realized I needed to use the brain God gave me instead of buying in 100% to what the AI said. I started reworking the recipes and remembered that my mother had given me an Instant Pot Dutch Oven for my birthday last year which I had hardly used since. Let's just say, that situation has changed and it is now one of my favorite appliances! I'm even taking it down to the beach house with me today because I don't want to go a week without it 😂. So, some recipes are great in the instant pot, and some just need a little tweaking, like thickening after pressure, and some are better done in a Dutch oven, like meatballs in marinara. 

 When packaging these meals for the freezer, I wanted to make sure to think ahead to how I would reheat them later. Yeah, technically I could think a day or two ahead and put things in the fridge to thaw, but I know myself and I don't do well at that when I'm at my best, let alone when I'm barely putting one foot in front of the other. So, I wanted to consider ways we could reheat meals from frozen safely. Some casseroles and things can simply bake longer. I often freeze soup in individual portions and reheat that from frozen, but that still left a lot of other meal types. Years back I had taken a class on the Instant Pot through Traditional Cooking School (formerly GNOWFGLINS) and learned that you can reheat leftovers in it using the Pot in a Pot (PIP) method. When going through the class I had purchased a Pyrex dish that fit perfectly in the Instant Pot, but I was always nervous to use it. I've had too many glass-shattering events in my life to be completely at peace with that, especially if the food I was putting in it was frozen. So, I made a major purchase:

 Ok, they were less than $20, but more than I would typically spend on such an item. These are stainless steel 8-inch round pans that fit great in the instant pot and hold enough food for my husband and I and either a guest or a lunch for him the next day. I was only going to buy the one set of two pans, so I'd have to figure out a way to freeze the food in them, to set the shape, and then remove it to be able to use them again. I started out greasing the pan, lining it with Saran wrap, then greasing it again so the food would release from the wrap. When I did my test run, reheating one of my precious stored meals to make sure this wasn't all in vain, I found that while the Saran wrap released pretty well from the frozen food block, it would get stuck in the cracks and crevices and was kind of a pain to remove. So, I got to thinking, maybe the food would slide out without the Saran wrap? I tried it out and, sure enough, with a good enough coating of avocado oil cooking spray and a little warm water run over the bottom of the pan, they slid right out! Later I added in a parchment disk to the bottom, which really seems to be the sweet spot (oiling and parchment). Wrapping them in Saran Wrap after freezing avoided the "stuck in a crack" issue, but as I got to thinking about it, I started to worry about having 50 freezer-burned, inedible bricks in cold storage. I ran it through CoPilot, and it agreed, Saran Wrap alone was not enough! Out my little food disks came to be additionally wrapped in heavy-duty foil, labeled on the top AND the side (so you could see what things were when they were stacked up) and then wrapped once more in Saran wrap, which might help with freezer burn but would definitely help keep the labels readable. So now, every day, I am adding a few more disks for the future!

 In order to reheat my meals, I just unwrap them, and unwrap them, and unwrap them, then slide them back into the pan they were frozen in, cover it in parchment paper and then foil (to keep the moisture from the pressure cooker out of the food) and lower it into the Instant Pot with 1 cup of water in it using my new silicon sling. Everything told me that they should be done in 15 minutes under pressure, but mine were still frozen solid at that point. 40 minutes did the trick though! If you're interested in learning more about Instant Pot cooking (or reheating), check out Wardee's article here, and I highly recommend her classes!

Here's the Thing: I don't know how long I'll be out of commission in the cooking department, and odds are I won't be able to store up enough to cover it, but I can do what I can do. Saving some meals for hard days also gives me something to do instead of sitting around stressing about potential symptoms!