Chickpea Flour Waffles, Rebranded "Bonbons" and Light Sprinkles of Pecorino
Nana Mensah's Cub Street Diet
Hi friends,
We hope you’re all enjoying the holiday season and managing to sneak in one to two moments of rest.
In an attempt to help answer the evergreen question “How the F are other people feeding their kids?” we give you the second installment of the Cub Street Diet. Today, we are honored to feature Nana Mensah, a great friend, exceptional human, and triple threat filmmaker-writer-actor who recently wrapped up a run in her Broadway acting debut in Jocelyn Bioh’s Jaja’s African Hair Braiding. When Nana is not on the Broadway boards, starring in Netflix’s The Diplomat, or screening her award-winning film Queen of Glory (stream it here immediately), she’s navigating the waters of feeding her two-and-a-half year old son. Triple threats: they’re just like us.
Trigger warning: Nana’s kid is a joyful and ravenous eater who could *not* be described as picky. Let the inspiration wash over you in a glow of hope for the new year!
Speaking of which, if there’s anything you’re especially wanting (or needing) to see from us in the coming months, please let us know! We’re in the throes of planning and want to make sure the Green Spoon serves you well. Just reply to this email or shoot us a message at thegreenspoon@yahoo.com.
See you in 2024,
Fanny + Greta
This, I fear, is going to be a very boring installment. Our two-and-a-half year old son will eat… anything. Dutifully at worst. Actually, rapaciously at worst. A friend of mine spotted him on the train, and she reported that what first drew her attention to him in the busy, rush hour train car was the sound: his lips smacking delightedly as he tucked into an uncut Gala apple, the amuse-bouche of his three course post-nursery snack (courses two and three consisting of a packet of dried seaweed and a few unsalted almonds aka “NUT-TH!”). He would eat his own highchair if his teeth were sharp enough. He screams enthusiastically “Ma look!” and holds up his plate—which looks like it’s been through at least a rinse cycle—to show me how thoroughly he’s finished a meal. I know. I learned early on that it’s the type of thing I can’t talk about at parties because other parents of toddlers simply walk away.
Another adult friend recently asked him “What’s your favorite food?” and without missing a beat he responded “Bread.” Not pizza. Not sandwiches. Just bread. And as someone firmly committed to Cacio e Pepe, I understand the grip that a simple carbohydrate has on my bloodline. Which, of course, is greatly complicated by the fact that our son has eczema and we were told explicitly by a holistic practitioner in Los Angeles (shoutout to Dr. Kang!) to avoid feeding him dairy and gluten, and to give him digestive enzymes with every meal. Give him what? I definitely faltered. But the blessing of a toddler is that even the most observant of them really and truly knows practically nothing. So in our house, the digestive enzymes were retitled “bonbons” and my son now demands them at every meal.
Aside from chalky health tablets, what else do we feed this mac truck? In short: everything. We traveled a lot from the first months of our son’s life, both for work but also familial obligation as I am Ghanaian and my husband is French and Lebanese and we have family in all those places. In typical first-time-parent fashion we were nervous about a lot of things, and even allowed a little bit of Eurocentric Afrophobia to creep in when we were preparing to head to Ghana. I called my cousin in Accra to ask about water for babies, diapers for babies, food for babies. My cousin, a parent of two, gently replied “We have babies here, too, love. All the time.” Right. Duh. My face grew hot. And something about that reminder blew the lid off, gave me permission to stop worrying. People have been having healthy babies and rearing them into capable, dynamic adults in the Middle East and West Africa for millennia. So our son traveled to Accra and we let him try everything my cousin’s kids ate: roasted plantains, kontomire, boiled yam, banku, stewed fish. The spiciness took our son by surprise at first, but he soon took to it (“Is spicy? I like it.”). In New York, we moved uptown and he fell in love with Senegalese food: attiéké, a staple, the peanutty vegan international maffé, crispy on the outside, gooey on the inside aloko. (I should note under threat of divorce that he also took to Lebanese food: his first solid was hummus and he never looked back. Olives. Labneh. Manousheh. Fattoush. Olives. Tabbouleh. Olives, and olives.) But alas, that is not every day.
My husband took a trip for a few days and I decided to simplify my life (solo parenting can do that sometimes). Karim usually does breakfast and I learned that his preferred routine of waking up first, getting dressed, starting our son’s oatmeal before our son has risen was simply not going to work for me. The thought of getting up earlier than the blaring-though-loveable alarm clock that is our child makes me shudder, and I didn’t manage to do it once successfully while Karim was away. So we had to improvise. The first morning I got away with rice cake topped with peanut butter and banana. But I spent the rest of the day agonizing about him accidentally sending another kid at the nursery into anaphylaxis. Enter Banza. Known primarily for their delicious chickpea pasta, a staple in our family, I was ecstatic to find myself (or lose myself?) in the frozen foods section at Whole Foods and stumble upon a line of gluten-free Homestyle Protein Waffles. So I served them to the kid with a dollop of yogurt (I know, I know dairy, but he loves the stuff so I will fight that battle another day), half of a banana (he usually asks for the second half later), the teeniest skosh of agave syrup and a dusting of cheese. Cheese? No, not cheese. Organic flaxseed meal, which I tell him is cheese (see dairy inconsistencies/am I going to hell?). And he gobbles it up. And it’s ready in under five minutes and I can breathe. With oxygen now flowing to my brain I feel triumphant. Superior, even. It is now I realize why no parents want to talk to me at parties.
Lunch differs slightly weekdays versus weekends because on weekdays we have to pack his lunch for nursery. I am particularly sore about this because we had the good fortune of beginning his nursery school education in London, where meals are provided. But we’re not in London. I usually remember that fact at about 8:00 am the morning of, when begins a panicked free association. The night before, my cousin Miesha came over and brought a bottle of champagne and Oishii Omakase strawberries to christen our new apartment (I know what you’re thinking and I didn’t). But the strawberries. My god. I had never had these before—is it natural? What is in them? How do they do that? Well, I avoided looking up how much they cost, so our son got one in his lunch box. Two actually. Looking at them nestled in his little lunch box I really didn’t want to add anything else. They looked so beautiful. And I wasn’t there when he ate them, but it was all he could talk about that afternoon when he got home. Other than gluten-free fish sticks and the occasional $50 strawberry (ok I did look it up), the go-to is baby carrots with some hummus and then Banza pasta with tomato sauce and chicken sausage with a light sprinkle of pecorino romano, so he does not end up in therapy 15 years from now with no concept of cheese (the therapy is inevitable, but the cheese? Not on my watch). And always a couple slices of some fruit: pear, apple. A favorite hack is buying a bag of tangerines and throwing them in his lunch box indiscriminately. The kid loves a salad (I know) and during intense work periods I do a vegan/gluten free meal subscription service called Sakara. It’s less expensive only to having a private chef in your house or to being Oprah. It’s insanely convenient and nutrient dense. Perhaps too nutrient dense, if there is such a thing? I have yet to be able to finish one of their lunch salads so in this week of solo parenting—you guessed it—the kid gets a side of Sakara worth the GDP of Tuvalu with his lunch.
And now I have to talk about lunch at the London nursery for a second. Maybe I sound negligent when packing his New York lunch but it’s only because it feels like some cruel joke. The London nursery forbids us from sending him to school with any food. Not a snack, not a drink, not a nothing. It could be seen as paternalistic, that the institution doesn’t trust us to feed our child but based on what I’ve told you thus far they probably shouldn’t, should they. Ripped from their brochure:
We home-cook all our food from scratch at the nursery and use organic ingredients wherever we can.
For the children and our staff, we prepare 4-course meals with:
a starter (often soup in winter, often a salad in the summer)
a main course (with an alternative if required)
a cheese of the day (sometimes plain yogurt)
and fruit (occasionally cooked fruit, with no added sugar)
Upon reflection this explains a lot. They go on to add:
We aim not to repeat a main course during a two-month period, to set the expectation of food constantly being different – this helps avoid children having “favourite” foods which they will only eat, as they come to expect that food is going to be varied. This variation does not mean we will not repeat an ingredient. Chicken can be roasted, or have a cream sauce, or be served in a Spanish style sauce with tomatoes – this is the variation we are aiming for.
Cream sauce?! Spanish style sauce with tomatoes?! They cater to dietary restrictions. Vegetarian? No problem! Halal? Kosher? No problem! Gluten intolerant? No problem.
So what is the point in sharing this? Honestly, I don’t know. Move to London. I guess it’s a limp attempt at self-defense. Or maybe it’s a testimony to how hard it is to feed a kid properly when you’re doing it right, and that in some other countries that is worthy of dedicated infrastructure, and at least one person’s full time salary, and so to have that responsibility returned to me—did I forget to mention that the London nursery also serves a morning snack and afternoon tea, oh and is cheaper—just… irks me. The reason I have a kid who eats everything or at least tries everything is maybe genetics, but also because he started at a nursery that was committed to a variety of flavors and diversity of herbs and local and organic ingredients, so it was normalized for him to look at a plate of something unfamiliar and wonder what it tastes like as opposed to a knee-jerk ‘no.’ And now I—alone in this week of solo parenting—have to gin up the same level of thoughtfulness and care in orchestrating a lunch box meal that may or may not even get reheated because of the US’s over reliance on tort law. Ok, I’m ranting.
So. Dinner. Dinner is whatever I’m eating. Which has actually made me a more healthful person because you can’t feed a toddler half a pint of Americone Dream as a meal. So it’s gluten-free veggie dumplings (bought frozen) and a quick veggie stir-fry medley and brown rice or a piece of gluten free toast. Or a vegan, gluten free frozen pizza we share with a mixed green salad and I put a slice or two away for the lunchbox in the morning. If I really didn’t get it together in time, I order Indian food which is way too salty but he loves saag paneer. So in other words: here too, I wing it. I suppose that's all we can do.
See you next week!