Staying healthy and eating nourishing food is extremely important when you are grieving. You may feel like eating is the last thing you want to worry about. I totally get that. I have been there, and it absolutely sucks. You want to be a better person for the baby you didn't get to bring home and raise, but you just can't bring yourself to the fridge. Or the pantry. Or out of bed.
These recipes can be an excellent list of meals that a bereaved parent can get back into the rhythms of cooking. I used a crockpot or InstantPot frequently during this time as well.
Here's the link to the Google Drive Folder - I add recipes all the time once I have tested them out once or twice.
You can also try searching online for recipes that are considered "low spoon".
I remember the first meal that I cooked for my husband and I after Gemma died. It had been about 2 months, maybe 3. I normally cook every meal for the two of us except for 1-2 times a week where we get takeout of some kind. I had been cooking and baking since middle school, so this had been the longest stretch of time I had ever not cooked in a decade. It felt extremely strange to cook, to do the dishes. It was like walking for the first time after being in bed for a week of sickness. Or entering into a foreign country that doesn't speak English. It was unfamiliar and I felt like a complete beginner all over again. I made something like enchilada pasta. I don't know what I was thinking, mixing pasta with enchilada sauce. But it must have been all we had in the pantry and I could dump it into the InstantPot and walk away. Well, it turned out I had forgotten to add water, and it burned. It was salvagable, but tasted absolutely terrible. I lost my entire appetite after one bite. My poor husband, he will eat just about anything, so he ate the rest of it for his lunches the rest of the week. But I felt like a complete failure.
After this first meal, I resorted to not cooking again for about a week. Once I had regained my courage to try again, I kept making mistakes with burning food or undercooking something. I ended up almost burning down the house....twice.....by leaving the oven on. One of those times I had stupidly left the pizza stone and oven racks in and set it to self-clean. There was so much smoke within the next two hours that we couldn't breathe. We almost called the fire department, but I realized they would not have been much help with removing smoke, because there was no fire. The entire house had to be desmoked and I had to buy a new pizza stone. The other time I had left something on the stove in water to boil down, and I left it during a trip to Walmart. I came back and it was not only set to medium high heat, but it had cooked all of the water off so that whatever was in the pot had burned and stuck to the bottom. It never came off the pot even after soaking for 24 hours so I had to throw the entire pot away. My post-partum and grieving brain was unbelievably forgetful. It was one thing after another that kept biting at my heels to keep me out of the kitchen.
Complex meals were not something I attempted to cook until at least seven months into my grieving. And even then, I still used instant mashed potatoes and packets of brown gravy......items I had never in my life cooked with, but oh-so wanted to impress my husband with. I know not everyone has the luxury or the time to cook from home or have homemade meals. But that has been a big priority for me growing up and in my new family. Cooking homemade meals with real food is important to me, and I was having to substitute some items in my kitchen with cheaper, easier alternatives in order to get food on the table. I felt like a failure, and yet I was making progress. I was cooking. I was feeding. I was doing.
It takes a while, but step by step it will get easier.