Easy Recipes to Make When You Want to Get Pregnant
What should you eat when you want to get pregnant? When you’ve got baby-making on the brain, you’ll want to make sure you’re cutting out a few specific foods while incorporating nourishing ingredients that support ovulation, improve the quality of your eggs, and build your blood.
Including more high protein, iron-rich, and warm temperature options like teas and soups into your daily routine is a great place to start when you want to improve your diet. There are a lot of fertility foods we recommend, but they don’t do you any good if you don’t actually eat them.
Like anything else in life, it’s better to take small consistent action instead of trying to overhaul a million things at once. The recipes below offer a simple and easy way to do just that.
Our Top 3 Fertility Friendly Recipes
According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, some cases of infertility can be from having a ‘cold uterus’ or kidney yang deficiency, which is why it’s incredibly important to keep your belly warm when you’re trying to conceive.
One of our favorite ways to incorporate more warmth in your meals is by batch cooking a series of meals at once. It’s no fun to spend hours shopping, cooking, and doing all of those dishes just for one meal. Make things easier for yourself by cooking these three fertility-friendly options at the same time, and you’ll have healthy food at your fingertips all week long.
MY FAVORITE FIVE-INGREDIENT ROASTED CHICKEN
This recipe serves 2-4 and takes less than two hours from start to finish.
Ingredients:
A 2-3 pound pasture raised chicken
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 teaspoons minced thyme (optional)
1 cup room temperature unsalted butter (grass-fed if available)
2 tablespoons dijon mustard
Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 450°F. Rinse the chicken, then dry it very well with paper towels, inside and out to get a crispy skin. Cooking a room temperature chicken will give you the tastiest results.
Salt and pepper the cavity, then salt and pepper the outside of the chicken to taste.
Combine the butter and mustard in a bowl.
Gently lift the skin of the chicken and use a spoon to cover the meat with your butter mixture.
Place the chicken in a saute pan or roasting pan and place into the oven when it’s reached 450°F.
Roast the chicken for 50-60 minutes until the juices run clear.
Baste the chicken with its juices and add the thyme, letting it rest for 15 minutes on a cutting board.
Remove the twine and enjoy a delicious meal, but don’t throw away any of the bones.
After you’ve enjoyed your meal, put the rest of the meat aside in a glass storage container for another lunch or dinner. Now you’ve got the ingredients ready to make a nourishing bone broth that is so healing for your gut and wonderful for your fertility.
EASY PEASY BABY MAKING BONE BROTH
This recipe makes approximately 4 quarts of bone broth cooked in a slow cooker for at least 8 hours.
The recipe for bone broth is hardly a recipe at all. It’s more like having a personal chef come to make you the most nutrient-dense, immunity-boosting, ultra-healing soup without having to lift a finger. You’re really just putting your leftover chicken bones and pan drippings into a slow cooker and walking away. We’re not kidding! The bone broth you see for sale at $20 a quart costs practically nothing to make at home. All it takes is a little time.
Ingredients:
Leftover chicken bones
Filtered water
Optional ingredients: 1 tablespoon pink Himalayan sea salt, 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar, or 3 pieces of dried seaweed like Kombu (each piece roughly 5 inches long). If you add seaweed, skip the salt. Then add salt to taste when serving if needed.
If you can find seaweed where you live, we highly recommend adding it to your bone broth. Seaweed is incredibly rich in easily absorbable iron and is a powerhouse food for fertility.
Instructions:
Place your chicken carcass, bones with some meat attached, and pan drippings in your slow cooker.
Cover the chicken bones with filtered water, making sure there’s about 2-3 inches of water above the chicken.
Set your slow cooker to low and let it cook for at least 8 hours.
Enjoy your homemade bone broth. It’s great to sip from a mug plain and can be added to any savory recipe where you’d ordinarily use water.
Be sure to let your bone broth fully cool off and then portion any leftover liquid into glass jars (only filling the jar about 80% full) to place in the freezer for later. Be careful not to fill your jars all the way or the glass will crack as your liquid freezes and expands. Then when you want to have homemade bone broth, just let the jar thaw in your fridge overnight and it will be ready and waiting for you.
FUTURE MAMA-TO-BE JUJUBE TEA
This recipe makes 4 cups of tea concentrate and will simmer for 4 hours. Jujube tea can be kept in the fridge for about a week.
Having a delicious tea on hand is a great way to add a little stress busting self care into your everyday life. And Jujube dates are the absolute tastiest little fertility fruits! This Jujube Tea recipe not only combines one of our favorite fertility superfoods with the Traditional Chinese Medicine recommendation of drinking warm liquids. We’re taking it one step further by mixing this yummy tea with bone broth.
When it comes to recipes for fertility, there’s nobody better to create dishes that support women through every stage of the childbearing journey than Heng Ou. When we found this recipe for Jujube tea on her website www.motherbees.com, we knew we had to share it.
Ingredients:
One pound of jujube fruit
A gallon of filtered water
Instructions:
Fill a large pot with 1 gallon of water.
Add a 1 pound pouch of jujube fruit.
Cook for 1 hour on medium heat, then simmer on low heat for 2 hours. Mash the jujubes and simmer for 1 more hour. Turn off the heat.
Strain the tea and store the liquid in an airtight jar in the refrigerator. Before drinking add a splash of water (room temperature or hot) or a few ice cubes.
This tea is delicious alone, but even better combined with bone broth. For an uplifting quick soup, add 1/2 cup jujube tea to 2 cups of bone broth. Add leafy greens, an egg, a splash of lemon juice, stir and enjoy.
Your Ideal Fertility Diet isn’t One Size Fits All
We know how overwhelming it can be to figure out why it’s taking so long to get pregnant. There could be lots of reasons things aren’t happening as quickly as you’d like, but no matter how long you’ve been trying to conceive, there’s hope for you.
Join us for our next Overcoming Infertility workshop to learn how to turn your body into a welcoming, healthy home for a baby. It’s free! You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.