Breakfast Popsicles, Salami Fear Mongering + A Grilled Cheese Sandwich That's "Not Grilled"
Sophie Brickman's Cub Street Diet
Hi friends,
Today, we are thrilled to give you the Cub Street Diet of our old friend, the smart and hilarious Sophie Brickman.
After graduating from culinary school and working the line at Gramercy Tavern, Sophie turned to journalism. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Saveur, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and a few other minor rags. Her first book, Baby, Unplugged—about the intersection of parenting and technology—came out in 2021, and her debut novel, Plays Well With Others, comes out literally today! It’s a sharp and funny send-up of parenting and education in New York. You can read Sophie’s work here, buy her book (immediately) here and follow her on Instagram here.
For our purposes, however, Sophie is a mom to three, all of whom need to eat three meals a day—even when she has a book coming out. Read on to see how she tackles the demands of her family kitchen, and wrestles with the compartment of her kids’ lunch box that doesn’t fit a damn thing. (Or does it?)
Greta + Fanny
“This installment of the Cub Street Diet is both entirely unrepresentative of our normal life—you’re catching me on a week when we’re renting a house outside of the city, so the children are mostly unclad and covered in sunscreen and ice pop juice—and entirely representative of our normal life, in that, despite the vast amounts of farm fresh produce within walking distance, the three of them still mostly survive on Boar’s Head salami and cucumber slices. (Do they flatly reject the cucumbers from the local farm, deeming them “too tough,” and insist only upon the mini cucumbers from the grocery store, direct from the Dominican Republic? They do.) And so, join me as we hurtle into a summer Monday.
Monday
By the time we stagger to the kitchen table for breakfast, my husband and I have been awake, in various shifts, for 2.5 hours, since my middle daughter, age 5, woke up with a nightmare and our eldest, age, 8, marched into the room but 14 minutes after the middle one was back asleep, holding a blaring alarm clock and claiming she had no idea why it went off, randomly, at 5:23 in the morning. (I know why. It’s because it’s the cheapest version I could find online that wasn’t digital, which I bought her when she was learning to tell time. The thing goes off every four months because the on-off alarm switch is extremely faulty, a risk I idiotically have decided to continue taking. But I pretend to sleep through it and my husband, a saint/perhaps petrified of the anxiety radiating off of his wife, pre-book launch, handles it.) By the time the baby—no longer a baby, he turned three two weeks ago, but still—commands through the monitor that “someone wake me up, please,” the sun has thankfully started to peep over the horizon, and we all congregate in this rental kitchen, which is full of tools I do not know how to use but desperately want to. See: a little metal stick with a whisk-like attachment on the end, which whizzes around in circles as you press down on it. Or: An extremely flat frying pan (for making a single crepe?).
My eldest commandeers the mystery tool to whip some cream, because for some reason we have an unopened carton of heavy cream in the fridge and she, like her mother, is a food show enthusiast, so spends most of her allotted screentime watching baking videos and then sighing indignantly when I tell her that no, we do not have fondant in the cupboard. This whizzing up of the whipped cream, which will accompany lord know’s what, takes a good ten minutes, during which time I slice the littlest one strawberries, toast him a frozen waffle, explain why we don’t have ice pops for breakfast, and start making the middle a “toad in the hole,” which in our household is simply a slice of bread with a circle cut out and an egg fried inside, and which doesn’t resemble an actual toad in the hole at all (something I learned just now, by googling it, but whatever, that’s what I thought it was). I decide to use the extremely flat pan for this, and am pleased with myself. The eldest, still whisking away, asks for a smoothie, so I rummage around and find a NutriBullet, and immediately become its biggest fan. The thing is SO POWERFUL and look how beautiful this strawberry-frozen mango concoction is! I vow to use it for as many meals in this house as possible.
Then comes the moment I’ve been facing every day this summer: the sight of two unpacked bento box-style lunchboxes, waiting to be filled for the girls’ camp lunch (the baby comes home for lunch and a nap). I strive to be the kind of person who has five distinct ideas of what to pack in a lunch, but I barely have one. What goes in that tiny center compartment? Three raisins? One grape? While I panic about the center compartment, we do the dance we do, daily, wherein I offer them all sorts of lunch meats and they always end up picking salami. I tell myself that the risk of their high sodium diet pales in comparison with being raised by a mother who is constantly stressing out about lunch. The lunch meat goes into a sandwich for my middle daughter + a cheese stick + some cucumbers which she will not eat but I put in there anyway, and which my eldest asks for unadorned (I gave up years ago, she just eats what’s inside the bread, and yes this means one day my husband sent her to school with a Ziploc bag of salami slices and an apple which, if anything is a symbol of just-barely-keeping-it-together parent-wise, is a pretty good one—all you readers are correct to feel smug that at least you’re not there (yet!)), with some pita chips on the side, cucumber slices which also won’t be eaten, and some grapes. For the middle compartment? A single marshmallow for both. It fits perfectly.
After everyone has been pinned down and slathered in sun screen, which the baby brilliantly calls “sun scream” for obvious reasons, I use the second NutriBullet attachment (genius!) to make Melissa Clark’s Green Goddess marinade for chicken thighs (using my absolutely favorite lemon juice, Santa Cruz, which tastes exactly like lemon juice and not even slightly artificial—I always have a bottle of their lime and their lemon juice on hand, which is perfect for splashes in vinaigrettes or marinades or to go into a flavored sparkly water alongside maybe some gin? Maybe, sometimes.). The green goddess is so beautiful and vibrant! I’m moved to do this because we have a wilting bunch of basil on the counter, courtesy of the CSA box that the house’s owners have for the season, and graciously are giving us for our time here. The only other time I was part of a CSA, I was living in San Francisco after college. I remember months of radishes. Months and months and months. But, three kids and one rental NutriBullet later, and we’re in a whole new world. I put everything in a large mixing bowl to marinate, then spy a plastic top next to the bowl that fits perfectly over it. ANOTHER BRILLIANT KITCHEN AMENITY. Make a mental note to get a set for our apartment.
After camp and the baby’s nap, everyone gets an ice pop, and for dinner, instead of grilling up the chicken outside, it’s pouring rain so I stick it in the oven. I have a lone zucchini, and have found that coating anything in parmesan-panko crust makes it appealing to tiny people, so my middle daughter helps me bread some rounds to pan-fry. She insists on using the magic whisker to beat the eggs, and it works perfectly. One to three zucchini rounds per kid, one chicken thigh each, fruit for dessert, milk for the baby, everyone catatonic before the sun goes down, Little Women and some yogurt for the eldest once the littles are asleep, and scene. Whipped cream sad and alone in the fridge.
Tuesday
We have a breakfast appetizer of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Puffins on the porch, then head to the kitchen, where the baby pulls open the freezer and asks, again, why he can’t have an ice pop for breakfast. Is an ice pop actually that different from the smoothie I’m about to make his sister, sugar content-wise or other? Doubtful. But I feel the need to impose some limits—children need limits!—and so I say, firmly, NO and as he walks away I think, smugly, about that chapter in Bringing up Bébé, in which ex-pat Pamela Druckerman writes about Parisian mothers being able to give “the look” to their children and impose discipline. Moments later, as I’m canoodling with my NutriBullet, I look up to find him wandering around the kitchen with a strawberry ice pop he’s stolen from the freezer. I give up and tell him to eat it out of sight of the girls. Smoothie for one kid, eggs for both girls, fruit and an ice pop for a third. Whatever.
Lunchtime wrinkle: the middle daughter has left her Bento at camp! But, miraculously, there’s another lunchbox-esque Tupperware in some drawer, and it only has two sections! I feel like I’m starting the marathon on mile 20. Basically the same exact lunch for child #1, a ham and cheese for #2, plus some apple sauce (I remember the spoon!), and because I’m energized by my marathon placement, I flex and throw in just as many components as I would have had to fill had she not left her Bento at camp. Psychology is weird. Anyway, off they go. I peer into the fridge and realize that, at day two of the week, we’ve already eaten our way through just about the entire fridge, but I find some steak way in the back, which I throw in one of those handy covered mixing bowls with Soy Vay Veri Veri Teriyaki (a beloved marinade from my childhood, my own personal madeleine) and eagerly await the CSA pickup this afternoon.
And when I arrive to pick her up, hours later, oh is she a beaut, the stuff that Ina Garten’s dreams are made of. Basil is spilling out of the top. An eggplant is nestled in one side. Peaches! Sungold tomatoes! A melon with dirt still on it! Given this bounty, if I can’t make a vegetable dish for my kids that they eat with the gusto they do a D.R. cuke, I will have failed. Though we did zucchini last night, I roll the dice and double down, and sautée a yellow one in a pan with some leftover wilting leeks, some garlic, and lots of butter. Nothing is chopped particularly uniformly but not to worry because I have a plan! And it involves… my new best friend. Into the NutriBullet the yellow mush goes (didn’t see that coming!) with a huge handful of basil. Just as I’m about to turn it on, my eight year old looks up from her book and says, skeptically, “Don’t green and yellow make blue?” and I vaguely entertain the possibility that I will make them a blue pasta sauce. It turns out to be slightly brownish-green but oh. My. Good. Lord. Is it good. Bonus: They won’t be able to pick out the zucchini! It’s a huge success, 2/3 ask for seconds, and I have two bowls while cleaning up, standing over the sink, because #glamour. Melon for the baby, yogurt and granola for the biggest, dump the whipped cream down the garbage disposal, everyone asleep before the sun has fully set, yours truly included. Dream of garbage disposals.
Wednesday
Morning breaks. They have to eat, again? Sadly, yes. In the kitchen, the baby demands to start the day off with fistful of basil, tells me, while chewing, that it is “so good,” then spits everything out on the floor and runs off to play with a bunch of plastic pretend food. He offers me coffee with a carrot, peas, and steak steeping in it, which I take while on my knees, cleaning up chewed up basil bits.
My husband likes nothing more than a deal, which is why, months ago, 12 containers of the same pancake mix arrived at our apartment from some wholesale grocery company, enough to feed the isle of Manhattan. Did I remember to pack two for our vacation, while forgetting toothbrushes? I did. Blueberry pancakes for the baby and the oldest, “plain with a spritz of lemon” for the middle. (Mental note: too many cooking shows?) For lunch, you won’t believe it, but the middle has forgotten her Bento again. I have a brilliant idea, and offer to pack her some leftover zucchini pesto pasta in a microwave safe container. She emits a sound like a dying moose, then pouts, “I hated that pasta, and only ate it last night so that you wouldn’t feel bad, but I was lying.” Cool. Demands a grilled cheese sandwich “but not grilled,” so she gets a cheese sandwich, a cheese stick for good measure, some apple sauce, and then when she sees her older sister’s standard charcuterie board, asks for rolled salami on the side. All three ask for a “snack” before getting in the car for camp, and while I’m sure there is some more preferable interval between “meal” and “snack” than four minutes, my defenses are low, and so everyone gets a pack of freeze-dried apple slices which, to my palate, taste similar to Styrofoam.
My plan for leftovers tonight was scuttled because everyone liked the steak so much. We have some boneless, skinless chicken thighs, and while my go-to is usually Sam Sifton’s oven-roasted chicken shawarma, we don’t have all the necessary spices, plus I am struck by the realization that we have all the ingredients for an Ali Slagle recipe I’ve had my eye on: Grilled chicken with tomatoes and corn. Hours later, I riff on the recipe a bit, sauteeing shallot in butter then adding corn and sungolds (what could be better???) and grill the chicken on a grill pan because, again, rain. At the dinner table, one screams that they hate corn, the other that they hate tomatoes, the third that they’ll only eat the corn. It’s hands down the most delicious thing I’ve ever made. Bribe and threaten 2/3 to eat most of their plate. The third eats microwaved steak from last night. Feel bad about myself. Add lots of bottled lime juice to my Spindrift. Add some gin. Drift off, thinking about Bento boxes.
Wake up at 2 a.m., inexplicably, brain churning. Try not to pick up phone. Pick up phone. Click on an article about how eating processed foods is linked to dementia. One food they mention in the lead: salami. Do not fall back to sleep.”
This post made me hungry! Love the breakfast popsicle idea.
My packed lunch in elementary school for like two straight years was salami on a potato roll, no additions or condiments. Going to be so mad at my 9-year-old self if I get dementia from this lol