I didn’t start batch cooking because I wanted to be organised or productive.
I started because I was pregnant, tired, and trying to prepare for a life I didn’t yet understand.

In 2023, while I was pregnant, I began batch cooking almost casually - just making a few extra portions here and there and putting them in the freezer. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. It felt like one of those “sensible things” people suggest before a baby arrives.

Our daughter was born in October 2023, and everything changed.

I had an emergency C-section, couldn’t drive, and was learning how to care for a newborn on very little sleep. Like many mums, I also carried an unspoken belief that the housework and the meals were my responsibility - even while recovering physically and adjusting emotionally.

Both my partner and I prefer home-cooked food, but with a newborn, cooking from scratch every evening felt almost impossible. Still, when the familiar question “What’s for dinner?” came up, I didn’t hear it as a neutral question.

I heard it as:
Why haven’t you done dinner yet?

That pressure - mostly unspoken, mostly internal - was heavy.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that the small amount of batch cooking I’d done during pregnancy would quietly become a lifeline. On the hardest days, opening the freezer and knowing there was something ready meant one less decision, one less task, one less thing to carry.

It didn’t solve everything.
But it gave us our evenings back.

As time went on and I returned to work, life didn’t slow down - it sped up. I was juggling being a mum, a wife, work, and building this business, all while trying to feed ourselves well in a world full of ultra-processed convenience food.

Batch cooking evolved with us. It stopped being about “preparing ahead” and started being about protecting our time, our energy, and our evenings.

Not cooking all day.
Not filling the freezer every weekend.
Just cooking a little extra when it made sense - and letting that support us later.

That’s where Family Time Matters grew from.

Not from perfection, but from lived experience. From recognising how much pressure mums carry quietly, and how much difference a few simple systems can make when they’re built around real life.

Today, I share batch cooking not as a rule or a routine - but as a tool. One that helps families eat well, slow down, and reclaim small pockets of calm in busy seasons.

Because feeding ourselves shouldn’t cost us our evenings.
And family time shouldn’t always come last.