The Absolute Best Late-Night Breastfeeding Fuel Is Noodle Kugel

updated Feb 24, 2021

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A slice of noodle kugel — Credit: Brian Yarvin | Getty Images

Well-meaning parents pepper pregnant people with a deluge of advice, stories, and worst-cast scenarios to prepare for. But no matter how much you’ve been told about what the experience of taking home your newborn is like, everyone’s experience is different. Some challenges you encounter inevitably diverge from those your friends or family told you about, but others just seem to have been ignored. Like, the writer Anne Thériault on Twitter pointed out the other day, just how many calories producing milk for breastfeeding burns. “You need to eat constantly,” she marveled. “Like, “Wake up at 2 am and eat a full meal, even though you were snacking at 11 pm,’ level hunger.”

I laughed out loud, remembering my mid-night pose a few days in with my oldest: in one hand, I cradled her head gently in one hand, grimacing through the pain of a new baby’s latch, in the other, an iPhone-sized slice of kugel. Cold from the fridge, the congealed cheese held it together so I could tear into it ravenously, like a frat boy attacking a sandwich with a single hand so he didn’t have to pause his beer pong game. When we sat down to figure out what needed to happen before my second child was born, my list held only one to-do: make sure my friend Julie was ready to make that kugel again.

Try a recipe: My Family’s Noodle Kugel from Smitten Kitchen

But even as I giggled at my own previous absurdities, I wondered aloud to Twitter what other ridiculous foods people ate to satisfy the bottomless pit of breastfeeding hunger.

People responded to my question with stories of cold empanadas, a triple-decker PB&J with Nutella, and middle-of-the-night Cheerios. On Anne’s original thread, someone described converting an entire nightstand drawer to food storage, while others recalled 20-packs of TimBits, triple chocolate chip cookies, and very expensive Clif Bar habits. It also turned out my wee hour kugelating wasn’t an anomaly: Anne Thériault, who started the original thread shared her own kugel experience. “My friend brought me the biggest, roundest, noodliest kugel after my kid was born,” she said. “And I have been chasing that high ever since.”

What’s your 2 a.m. breastfeeding fuel? Let us know in the comments.