41 Pounds Of Apples, Honey Sticks + A Religious Devotion To Oatmeal
Emily Weinstein's Cub Street Diet
Hi friends,
We’re very excited to present the Cub Street Diet of Emily Weinstein, the Editor in Chief of a small publication you’ve never heard of: New York Times Cooking. In addition to editing the cooking and food sections, she is the author the BRAND NEW cookbook Easy Weeknight Dinners from New York Times Cooking and Ten Speed Press—it comes out today! (You can grab a copy here.)
More crucially, for our purposes, however, Emily is mom to Anya (7 years old) and Greta (4 years old and, ahem, very well-named), the latter of whom eats oatmeal for breakfast every. single. morning.
Read on for a glimpse into her family kitchen!
Greta + Fanny
Saturday
My kids have been up and watching TV for about 45 minutes by the time they decide they’re hungry. Greta, our younger daughter, comes into our bedroom to get us out of bed and ask for food. Greta, who is 4, is so religious in her devotion to oatmeal that we make big batches and keep it in the fridge so that we can microwave a bowl for her every morning. Today she gets the last sludgy, smudgy square of it out of the container. She likes it with a splash of milk, maple syrup and cinnamon. She also has two tiny cups of prune juice and her multivitamin, and it is very important to her that everything happens in this routine exactly the way it is supposed to.
Anya, who is about to turn 7, is way more easy going, and has Cheerios with strawberries because we have run out of her current favorite: Heritage Flakes, which is a fancy whole-grain cereal I used to buy for the adults and should now probably purchase in bulk. I have coffee and Greek yogurt with berries and almonds.
It’s supposed to rain, and things have been so busy lately we didn’t make a lot of plans for the weekend, so I figure it’s a good day for a baking project to help chip away at the 41 pounds of apples we got when we went apple picking earlier in September. (Yes, 41 pounds, what’s wrong with me.) Greta loves to bake and genuinely has the patience to make a recipe from start to finish, which I feel is rare in a little kid. We’re deciding between making apple crisp (simple), fancy apple tart (a little fussier) and French apple cake (chic). Greta picks the cake, though I already know she won’t eat it, or any of these recipes, as she does not want fruit anywhere near her person and definitely not in her desserts.
But first, we have kinder kickers soccer for Greta, and Anya will tag along and hit the playground adjacent to the field. The snacks commence: Stonyfield yogurt pouches for Greta, orange wedges for Anya.
We come home and my kids migrate to one of our wonderful neighbors’ houses, where they have chicken nuggets for lunch with the kids over there. Where are these nuggets from? McDonald’s, which the neighbor kids were promised as a special treat. I can’t believe I’m doing the Cub Street Diet on the one day ever that my children have a meal from McDonald’s that is unrelated to a long car trip and I-95. Is my Green Spoon subscription revoked? But truthfully, I always let my kids have whatever other children are having if they’re all playing together, regardless of what it is. One meal doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, and it stinks and is probably more detrimental over time to watch other kids eat something delicious while your mean mother says no. Also, other people feeding your kids lunch? Bliss! Don’t sweat the details!
Blake is out running errands and so I’m home alone and cobble together my own lunch of runny fried eggs, a big piece of baguette smothered with the last scrags of homemade pesto in the fridge, and leftover scraps of fresh mozzarella. The silence in my home is exquisite.
The kids return, Greta with her chicken nuggets and fries because she is completely indifferent to them. She and I bake the cake, which is a Dorie Greenspan recipe: Marie Hélène’s apple cake, from Dorie’s cookbook “Around My French Table.” Greta legitimately helps make it, which is the best — we got a kitchen tower for her second birthday because even then it was clear she loved to bake. When she’s ready to go, she tears into the kitchen, pushes it over to the counter, climbs up and waits.
While the cake cools, we all go to Anya’s soccer game (go Purple Pythons!). At this point, it’s somehow raining both lightly and aggressively, with drizzle blowing in gusts. It’s bleak, but we are out there screaming our heads off cheering for the kids, which is extremely fun.
We’re all soaked when we get home. Blake lights a fire, and Anya proceeds to gradually have so many snacks that I fail to log them all: more orange wedges, popcorn, a banana, maybe Pirate’s Booty and definitely chunks of baguette with butter.
Close friends are coming over for dinner with their daughter. Instead of cooking, I’ve defrosted a tray of really good eggplant parm that was gifted to me by my mother. My children say they hate eggplant parm and so I also boil a big pot of rigatoni, half of which will be buttered, no sauce, for them. The other half of the pasta is tossed with jarred tomato sauce; our house brand is Rao’s.
I also make a big salad, steam green beans in the microwave (mostly for the kids) and slice up the rest of the baguette.
Before I had kids — oh, that phrase — I cooked elaborately for fun on the weekends and invited friends over to eat. We still have dinner with friends or family most weekends, and while it’s nice if I can cook, I’ve learned that it completely doesn’t matter. If you’ve got a lot of wine and dessert (Haagen-Dazs ice cream bars are perfect, and there are huge packs of them at Costco, if you are a Costco shopper), then you can order pizza and everyone is relaxed and happy.
Actually, wait, one person is currently not relaxed and happy, and that is Greta. Her favorite meal is rice and beans, and she eats it most days, usually with broccoli or avocado. She prefers black beans, but will accept any bean except limas. This should feel like a triumph (even though her babysitter is the one who first gave it to her, so it’s not our amazing parenting), but it doesn’t really because she’s so inflexible about it. At this moment, she’s tired and starts screaming for rice and beans, claiming she hates pasta (not even true). I swear, when she’s not doing this she’s really very charming. Blake brokers a peace by putting a heap of shredded Cheddar on top of the pasta. She eats it all.
The apple cake is nice for dessert, and we have it with vanilla and cinnamon-cardamom ice creams. The kids like the cake (except Greta, who does not try it). Our friends leave, our kids go to sleep, and Blake and I finish the open bottle of red wine.
Sunday
We all wake up earlyish to go to a Rosh Hashana event for kids that promises to have crafts, but first we have the usual for breakfast (oatmeal, cereal, yogurt). At the event, our kids eventually scatter, and I have some coffee. My husband emerges from the parent scrum with half an everything bagel for me, with a cream cheese shmear. This is love.
When we recoup the kids, they’ve been given apples and honey, the traditional foods for the holiday. The honey comes in small clear tubes that are reminiscent of swizzle sticks, and my children have gnawed at those to suck out all the honey. They have taken a few perfunctory bites of the apples, too.
We have lunch at home, leftovers for the kids (pasta for Anya; rice and beans lurking in the fridge for Greta; frozen peas for both). For the adults, I stir-fry tofu with Omsom sauce — I especially like the Korean barbecue sauce — and we eat it with rice. I keep extra-firm Hodo tofu stocked in the fridge at all times.
It rains again for a while, and so we let the kids watch TV because they didn’t get to that morning. There are snacks, so many snacks — yogurt pouches, cheddar cheese, berries, popcorn, whatever. My plan is to roast a chicken for dinner, so I set it up in a yogurt marinade. Greta wants to bake again, and we still have a few dozen pounds of apples in the fridge, so we make apple crisp. She likes the crumble topping and eats it raw out of the bowl.
The weather finally clears, and we go out for a glorious family bike ride. We return and I roast the chicken, along with yukon gold potatoes and carrots, which I let go until they’re pretty limp and caramelized with dark stripes. I make a green salad too, and yogurt sauce. The adults have some wine. Anya loves it all, especially the chicken; she is dark meat only, and she eats both drumsticks. It’s really gratifying to cook for her. Greta eats the breast meat (extra juicy from that marinade), protests that the carrots are too burned, reluctantly eats the potatoes.
The apple crisp bakes while we eat dinner, and then is finally scooped for dessert with vanilla ice cream after the kids are in their pajamas.
Greta doesn’t eat the apple crisp.
This one is wonderful! I have a 4.5 year old who sounds like her and Greta would get along eating habit wise. She also loves beans, especially black beans. I sometimes make homemade beans from dried, but if we're being honest, she prefers canned ones because she likes the "bean juice"...she eats all of it first and then the beans, after salting everything herself of course. Anyone else experience this "bean juice" phenomenon? I assume it's mostly ok...