Cucumber Circles, Omelet “Sammiches” And Single-Serve Twizzlers: Three Days in Hannah Goldfield’s Family Kitchen
Introducing the Cub Street Diet!
Hi friends,
When we were developing the idea for the Green Spoon and gathering feedback from fellow parents about feeding their kids, one of the things we heard the most was “How the fuck are other people doing this?”
This week’s email is our attempt at answering that question. Welcome to our new monthly “column” wherein a generous and willing parent chronicles a few consecutive days of feeding their kid (or kids): all of the triumphs and despair and everything in between. And for no reason whatsoever, with a name that’s utterly devoid of puns or cultural references, we’re calling it the “Cub Street Diet.”
To kick us off, we have the inimitable Hannah Goldfield: dear friend, national treasure, New Yorker staff writer and food critic, and mom to a four-year-old son and two-year-old daughter (who are also food critics). She has graciously given us a glimpse into a few days of her family kitchen, and it is an utter joy to read.
And since just one piece of Hannah’s writing will surely not sate your appetite, you should also read her recent treatise on The Lasting Pleasures of New Haven Pizza, a fantastic profile of Tatiana’s chef Kwame Onwuachi and a round up of her twenty favorite New York restaurants. (And you can follow her here.)
Without further ado, we give you Hannah Goldfield’s Cub Street Diet!
Fanny + Greta
Wednesday, November 15
“Immediately after our kids, Otto (4.5) and Matilda (2.25), get up, a little after 7 AM, we start to hound them about what they want for breakfast. It takes five to seven rounds of begging “WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR BREAKFAST?!” at an increasing volume before they deign to give us a reply.
Otto has usually already eaten something. He is an early riser (anywhere between 5 and 6:30 AM) and his preference is to barge into our room and demand that someone “keep him company.” This is very sweet but to get a little extra sleep we’ve gone to great lengths to keep him out. We have the Hatch Rest, which worked for a while as a “permission to wake” clock—he’s not supposed to leave his room before the “birds chirp” at 7 AM—but then he started to complain that he was getting too hungry. To solve this we tried leaving a snack in his room when we put him to bed, but soon discovered that he was eating the snack immediately after we left his room, in the dark.
Now we sneak in a few hours after he’s fallen asleep and leave a snack. We used to give him a smorgasbord but after the crumbs attracted ants (!) we simplified to a single Bear brand fruit roll. I don’t love to give him dried fruit because of the dental implications but he loves these, they have no added sugar, they’re not messy, and each comes with a collectible card that has an animal on one side and a little game on the other. This, plus his Yoto audiobook player, has successfully been keeping him entertained of late.
Matilda, meanwhile, usually sleeps til 7 AM without any bribing, though when she rises she is often hangry. The eventual answer to what they want for breakfast is almost always an omelet, and sometimes Cheerios or oatmeal instead, or a bagel if we have them. I feel such a sense of relief when my kids eat eggs, which strike me as the most complete, wholesome food, and a great protein supplement to their otherwise primarily-pasta diet. We buy about two dozen eggs and two gallons of Battenkill whole milk a week from our beloved neighborhood coffee shop, which carries great local stuff at wholesale-ish prices.
Most mornings, each kid has one to three single egg omelets. This morning they each had three. Crack the egg in a bowl, beat it with a little kosher salt, pour into a generously buttered (and induction-friendly) Greenpan and fold it in half after it sets. Then onto a bamboo-melamine plate (we have iterations of this one, which is the perfect size) and sliced into strips (Otto) or squares (Matilda). To drink, whole milk and water. They also each got a gummy vitamin with iron, which I think taste absolutely disgusting, like blood, but they love.
While they ate, I made Otto’s lunch for preschool. He asked for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich but we were out of the English muffins I usually keep in the freezer and the loaf of bread in the bread box turned out to be wildly moldy. He assented, instead, to a sliver of 4 day old pizza I found in the fridge, wrapped in tinfoil. I cut it up into even smaller pieces so that it would fit in the biggest compartment of his lunchbox, and filled the other compartments with: a peeled mandarin; a few slices of a Winesap apple from the Greenmarket; a few batons of organic Persian cucumber (my general policy is to buy organic produce only when it seems to be higher quality and therefore worth the elevated price, because I don’t trust the system and I suspect that much of what is labeled as such is sadly not); a whole peeled (small) carrot; and three lightly salted roasted cashews from Nuts.com.
Then I packed him two snacks: a few pieces of dried mango (Nuts.com) and a mini Nature Valley Sweet & Salty Nut bar, “Peanut” flavor. In the chaos of getting him out of the house, I consumed nothing but coffee with milk and my own (non-gummy) post-natal vitamins, which I’m still taking because I’m still occasionally nursing Matilda. I felt slightly embarrassed about including this but then I realized if I gave into that, I’d be part of the problem. Women are shamed for not breastfeeding at all, for not breastfeeding enough, for breastfeeding too much. She is mostly weaned but still sometimes requests to be nursed at bedtime; I don’t offer but I don’t refuse. I’m in no rush for her to grow up.
After I put on clothes and got Matilda partially dressed, I ran to the fridge and basically swallowed without chewing three cold miniature potato knishes leftover from the birthday party we threw for my husband, Josh, at a Jewish lunch counter last weekend. They were honestly great. By the time the lunch hour rolled around, I wasn’t hungry, and yet I heated up a large bowl of the chicken and orzo dish that I made, from this truly incredible Nigella Lawson recipe, for Josh’s actual birthday the night before. It’s his favorite, but the kids don’t much care for it, even though technically they like all the components. They did eat some of it, while playing a game where they run around the table like lunatics and stop for bites—I know this is not good, thank you—but there was a huge amount leftover and I couldn’t stand to see it go to waste and the freezer is already quite full.1
For Matilda’s lunch, our nanny made her bowtie pasta in Carbone’s (very good) jarred marinara sauce and also offered her steamed broccoli, cucumber slices, and steamed frozen peas, the green vegetables my kids most reliably enjoy, all of which she rejected. While passing through the kitchen, I ate several bites of her pasta. my new favorite dried brand, which I discovered in Canada last summer: La Molisana. Their bowties are ridged, which gives them the most satisfying texture and encourages sauce to cling so beautifully. Later, I picked Otto up from school and the second he got in the house he asked for a packet of what are known in our house as “LEGO gummies” and are technically Annie’s Building Block fruit snacks, which I buy in bulk. Matilda had already consumed her daily allotment of LEGO gummies, when she woke up from her nap.
For dinner, I pulled some big pieces of chicken breast out of the dinner leftovers, and heated them up after scraping off all evidence of orzo, chili, leek, and carrot. Then I cut it into chunks and served it to the kids with leftover bowties in marinara sauce, some leftover peas (to which I had added a knob of salted Ronnybrook butter), cucumber slices, and milk. They both sort of ate, but mostly jumped up and down and screamed and turned the lights on and off. Matilda was pretending she was Baby Margaret, Daniel Tiger’s sister, and got legitimately angry when one of us forgot. Josh and I, meanwhile, ate most of the rest of the orzo, and all of the peas, and drank a glass of sparkling wine each.
The kids have each been allowed one post-dinner piece of Halloween candy every night since they went trick or treating but tonight they seemed way too focussed on it and were being so chaotic that I called an audible and declared a no-candy night. As you can imagine, this didn’t go over well—Otto sobbed and told me he didn’t want any “disgusting fruits that he doesn’t even like” (he loves fruit) for dessert— but they seemed to have recovered by bedtime. Later, I unpacked Otto’s lunchbox. He somehow managed to eat less than half of the pizza scraps. He ate one piece of cucumber, ignored the carrot, and finished the apple slices and the cashews.
Thursday November 16
Last night as I read the chapter about breakfast in “The Upstairs Delicatessen,” Dwight Garner’s wonderful new meditation on reading and eating, I thought about how I’ve had a really hard time getting it up for traditional breakfast foods lately. This morning, while drinking my coffee alone at 6:40, I realized that it’s because even though my internal alarm clock now wakes me up before 7 AM, my body is really uninterested in eating that early, always has been. By the time I’m hungry, it feels like breakfast is over since I’ve already fed the kids, and I feel permission to move onto foods most people would think were only appropriate for lunch (cold potato knishes).
In his book, Garner mentions the large volume of eggs he eats and how he’s been warned about something called myocardial infarction. I made a mental note to look up what that is and I’m too lazy to do it this morning [Update: Turns out it’s medical terminology for a heart attack] but now feeling slightly uneasy about the quantity of eggs I felt so great about yesterday. When the kids get up I plant the idea of oatmeal instead and Matilda says yes but then as I’m pulling out the oats (Bob’s Red Mill, of course) she says, “no oatmeal, omelet!” They each have two single egg omelets while I prepare and pack their lunches; Matilda goes to school on Thursdays and Fridays and while she only stays til noon, they do lunch, for reasons mostly of socialization I think. Today, like most other school days, she asked for pesto pasta. I boiled a handful of bowties.
When the pasta was done, I stirred in a big spoonful of Gotham Greens pesto, which is a supermarket product (fresh and refrigerated, not shelf stable) I rely on heavily. I keep a couple of containers in the freezer. They also make a great vegan version, which I lived on when each of my kids had a milk-protein intolerance in infancy and I went off dairy. I packed the pasta with some Persian cucumber sticks and a few slices of Winesap apple.2
Otto wanted peanut butter and jelly and this time I was able to comply: I reupped on English muffins yesterday. He rarely eats an entire English muffin sandwich if I pack one, so I defrosted the muffin, sliced it in half, made him a half sandwich with peanut butter and raspberry jam. I toasted the other half for myself and I smeared it with Ronnybrook salted butter and some Tiptree orange marmalade which I don’t even like that much but I sort of need to cosplay as the Queen of England if I’m going to make breakfast exciting.
Otto’s lunch also included a string cheese, sliced cucumber and apple, a carrot, and cashews. Matilda got cucumber and apple, too. For snack, Matilda got a clementine and Otto got a clementine and a mini Nature Valley bar (his school day is much longer). At the last minute, I remembered that Otto told me I “forgot” to pack him a napkin yesterday (we have literally never discussed this before) so I folded up a paper towel and shoved it in his bag.
When we got home from school, he beelined once more for LEGO gummies. On the walk home, I had asked him what he wanted for dinner and he’d said pizza. We’ve been eating an enormous quantity of pizza lately, so I vetoed that and took a risk instead. I had a brick of tofu in the fridge as well as a few heads of broccoli, and I flipped through some cookbooks for inspiration. I landed on Heidi Swanson’s “Fiesty Tofu with Broccoli, Chili, and Nuts” from her book Super Natural Simple, left out the chili (Josh and I put tons of Lao Gan Ma chili crisp on ours), and served it with pumpkin-ginger soba noodles tossed in the leftover tofu marinade. I also sliced up some Persian cucumbers. It went over surprisingly well! Otto at first declared that the noodles had no flavor, but he came around to them, and said he also liked both the tofu and the broccoli. Matilda went wild for the nuts (cashews) and ignored everything else until I explained that she wasn’t going to get Halloween candy if she didn’t eat her dinner. She begrudgingly ate some broccoli. Both kids drank milk, and Josh and I split a beer. Later the kids each had a single Starburst, followed by some apple slices.
I unpacked the lunchboxes and found mixed results. Otto finished his sandwich and the apple and took a few bites of the carrot but skipped the cucumbers altogether. Matilda ate most of her pasta, half of her apples, and one piece of cucumber.
Friday, November 16
This morning the kids both had omelet “sammiches” (same omelets on a English muffin that they split, with Kewpie mayo, just to even further up the fat content) AND bowls of Gorilla Munch, Nature’s Path “EnviroKidz” version of Kix (definitely not more natural), with whole milk. Plus gummy vitamins. Otto wanted PB&J again for lunch and once again I made it on one half of an English muffin and ate the other half. Since he kept ignoring his lunch cucumbers, I asked him if wanted something else and he explained that he just wanted me to cut them in CIRCLES rather than sticks. But, of course! I complied, and also skipped the carrot at his request. I tried to add steamed broccoli into the mix and sneak some grapes in with the apple slices but he protested loudly about both of those. Assented to cashews and string cheese, and then requested that I doctor up the apples into “apple sammiches,” which means gluing pairs together with peanut butter. My pleasure, my prince.
To Matilda’s pesto pasta, I added some of the broccoli plus some pitted Castelvetrano olives, in hopes that she wouldn’t notice and consume some extra green stuff. (Are olives healthy? I honestly have no idea.) She also got apple slices, some ROUND cucumbers, and two grapes. They give them challah on Fridays to celebrate Shabbat so she never eats her snack, but I packed a mango fruit roll just in case.
When 4 PM rolled around, I felt grateful to yesterday me, who had thought to marinate a whole chicken in buttermilk and salt, aka the best recipe ever, by Samin Nosrat. (Two whole chickens in a week, who am I, the Pioneer Woman?!) So all I had to do was roast that. The kids rejected my offer to also roast some broccoli. They also said no to delicata squash, but that’s what I wanted, so I roasted slices of that instead, with olive oil and salt.
Just when I had given up on getting the kids to eat vegetables for the evening, they saw me slicing raw fennel to put in a salad for me and Josh and asked to try it. I was shocked when they both declared that they LOVED it. It was really good fennel, ordered via Farm to People. (Ask me for my referral code ;)) “More fennel, more fennel,” they both exclaimed. “I like it so much,” Matilda said, which genuinely brought a tear to my eye. We have an unofficial rule in our house that you have to try something before you say you don’t like it (even the meat of a human head), but they usually don’t like it after they try it, so this felt like a huge win. The chicken came out beautifully, and the squash, consumed exclusively by the adults, was also excellent.3
The kids were again allowed each to choose a piece of candy: single-serve Twizzler for Otto, fun size M & Ms for Matilda. I really wish I had thrown away half of the candy immediately after they’d gone to bed the night of Halloween; they’re young enough that they never would have noticed. Long after they’d gone to bed tonight, Josh and I each had a bowl of mint chip Haagen Daz.”
Egg photo courtesy of Good Eggs, chicken from Nigella Lawson and sauce from Heritage Foods.
New Haven pizza photo from The New Yorker, Twizzlers from Walmart and Persian cucumbers from the Zestful Kitchen.
Fennel from Love and Lemons, Envirokidz cereal from Good Eggs and Heidi Swanson’s tofu recipe from Viet World Kitchen.
Always love the feedback! And a TJ’s rec!
I love this series so much! Also wanted to comment that a few days ago while getting some staples from TJ’s I discovered that they have a new ridged bowtie pasta! It’s so yum and easy for those of us who don’t want to special order. Thanks for all the tips ladies! Xoxo from a very picky toddler mama 💗