Dur­ing the time I was eat­ing dairy free, I found out just how impor­tant meal plan­ning was.  If I planned my meals, most of the time I was sat­is­fied, healthy, and con­tent as far as food was con­cerned.  When I didn’t and tried to wing it, I ended up unhappy, hun­gry, and gen­er­ally miss­ing some sort of hid­den dairy.  That also meant I ended up with an unhappy baby.  It was not worth it.

Since I wrote about eat­ing dairy free, I have been notic­ing that many of the search results that lead to peo­ple find­ing my blogs are those related to dairy free eat­ing while breast­feed­ing.  Because of that, I decided to com­pile some food and meal ideas here in one post.  So, here it is a sam­ple meal plan of what we might have eaten in a week while I was dairy free:

Sun­day:

• Break­fast — Steel cut oats with apple and cin­na­mon and a lit­tle brown sugar (You could use a sprin­kle of brown sugar and some almond milk or rice milk, too, if you want.)
• Lunch — Tor­tilla wrap with peanut but­ter, honey, and banana
• Sup­per — Spaghetti (Every­one else ate cheese, I did not)

Mon­day:

• Break­fast — Smoothie (Rice milk, banana, frozen of fresh fruit, honey if you like it a bit sweeter, and if you are look­ing to add pro­tein; tofu)
• Lunch — Black bean soup
• Sup­per — Stir fry (Before I stopped eat­ing meat, we would throw chicken, broc­coli, beans, peas, car­rots, and cau­li­flower into our wok.  Now, we would skip the chicken and use chick­peas instead.)  Some­times I used this recipe, but some­times I just used Kikko­man Soy Sauce to fla­vor it.

Tues­day:

• Break­fast– Peanut but­ter and jelly toast (Made with home­made bread — If you’re very care­ful you can find bread at the store with no dairy.  Another option would be to look for bread at your local bak­ery or nat­ural food store.)
• Lunch — Taco salad (No cheese or sour cream) — Let­tuce, taco meat (if you eat meat), toma­toes, black beans, salsa
• Sup­per — Beef Stuffed Peppers

Wednes­day:

• Break­fast — Scram­bled eggs with salsa
• Lunch -   Spinach Straw­berry Salad
• Sup­per — Slow Cooker Chicken Taco Soup

Thurs­day:

• Break­fast– Morn­ing Glory Muffins I didn’t have apple but­ter, so I used apple­sauce.  I’m not sure if that’s a great sub­sti­tu­tion or not, but the muffins turned out well.
• Lunch — Lentils and rice with fried onions
• Sup­per — Hum­mus pizza (with no cheese in my part, but chopped toma­toes over the top to keep the other veg­eta­bles moist)

Fri­day:

• Break­fast– Smoothie (Almond or rice milk, banana, honey, and peanut butter)
• Lunch — Span­ish rice
• Sup­per — Corn flake chicken — Chicken dipped in rice milk and cov­ered in crushed corn flakes

Sat­ur­day:

• Bunch — French toast (use almond or rice milk instead of cow’s milk) and eggs, sausage, or bacon
• Sup­per — BBQ Chicken in the crockpot

Snacks:

Fruit Salsa with cin­na­mon chips

Nuts

Dried fruit

Nuts and dried fruit together to make trail mix

Hum­mus (I used chick­peas instead of black beans) for crack­ers or vegetables

Fresh fruit or vegetables

Apples (or apple sauce) with cinnamon

Desserts: (The desserts required some substitutions)

Hershey’s Choco­late Cake — Sub­sti­tute almond or rice milk for the cow’s milk in the cake and frost­ing.  For the frost­ing, you can use a soy mar­garine.  If you pre­fer not to do that, you can melt dairy free choco­late chips in a dou­ble boiler and use that to driz­zle over the cake.

Apple Cake

Triple Berry Sorbet

I hope this helps, and check out my other posts on breast­feed­ing while eat­ing dairy free.  Also, if you have ques­tions, leave me a com­ment.  It’s hard get­ting started, but it’s easy once you get going.  It’s also so worth it.