Gingerbread, Flour Tortillas + "Actually, Mom, This Isn’t Very Good Actually"

Jia Tolentino's Cub Street Diet

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Nov 21, 2024

Hi friends,

This month we are truly honored to feature the Cub Street Diet of Jia Tolentino, a New Yorker staff writer1 who likely needs no introduction. Jia’s work is wide-ranging, provocative and utterly engrossing: she’s written about parenthood (hiding pregnancy from the internet, Cocomelon), music (Perfume Genius, Sophie), abortion, what we do to our skin/face/bodies (Tweens at Sephora, Ozempic) and also Britney Spears. (If you’re looking for the full Tolentino Experience™, you should read her fantastic 2020 collection of essays, Trick Mirror.) If ‘listening’ is more your speed at the moment, check out her moving and incisive recent interview with Ezra Klein, “On Children, Meaning, Media and Psychedelics.”

But it’s Jia’s 2020 piece about mutual aid networks that’s been on our minds most over the last couple of weeks, and the mention of her involvement in her local mutual aid group in the below Cub Street Diet serves as a wonderful reminder to address our anxiety about this national moment of flux by getting involved with our hyperlocal communities. (NYC has this great mutual aid finder and LA has this one. If you have intel/insight/advice based on your own mutual aid experience, please comment with information below!)

In addition to possessing a once-in-a-generation mind, Jia has two children—4.5 and 1.5 years—who eat food with great aplomb and a profusion of opinions. Read on for a handful of days in Jia’s family kitchen!

Greta + Fanny

I should say right off the bat that I read the Green Spoon in the spirit of aspirational voyeurism. I love cooking, but I also decided a long time ago that there were certain balls related to parenting I would not pick up if I knew I would just drop them and end up feeling bad about it, and making nutritionally-dense, varied, homemade food for them is one such ball. Also, on principle—shopping for secondhand Boden clothing on Poshmark being the major exception—I don’t take on activities that are a matter of one-parent interest only; my partner Andrew feels no guilt or ambition about child food whatsoever, so I’ve lowered my domestic standards in this department, an approach I think women ought to take more often generally—in the interest of having more time for individual pleasure as well as community, it is never a bad idea, in my opinion, to identify one recurring household obligation about which it would be possible to immediately stop giving a shit!

Anyway, I have a four-and-a-half-year-old named Paloma, and a one-and-a-half-year-old named Marisol, and together they eat a grand total of like fifteen mostly beige things.

November 10th

This was a Sunday, and I’d been out the night before, and I woke up at the genuinely shocking hour of 10 AM. My life changed radically over the summer when Andrew and I rearranged our duties so that he gets up with the kids in the morning and I’m mostly in charge of dinner/cleanup duties every night. (If I were still working as an editor in feminist media, slash if popular feminist discourse still existed in this country at all, I would absolutely run a version of this type of diary feature that is just a domestic division-of-labor log.) Anyway, while I was on my honk shoo shit, Andrew took the kids to the diner, where they ate their usual—pancakes and bacon for Paloma, scrambled eggs for Marisol—and I had enough time before they got home to make coffee and get out all the stuff to make Laurie Colwin’s gingerbread. Laurie is historically one of my most important companions in the kitchen, and her gingerbread recipe is a great way to kill the end of a thing of buttermilk. Kids got home, I made the gingerbread with Paloma while Mari destroyed stuff, and then they laid face-down on the floor for five beautiful minutes, smiling at each other.

Laurie Colwin’s gingerbread. Photo by Erica Maclean via The Paris Review.

The gingerbread comes out of the oven in 30 minutes, which is an important reason I make it so often, and both kids ate a bunch. I normally would have eaten it for a late breakfast, but I—and I am sure I am not alone in this—have been dealing with a very uncharacteristic loss of appetite for the last month, basically since the moment I felt absolutely sure, rather than just pretty sure, that Trump would win the election. This has never happened to me before, losing my appetite, except for my two six-week periods of becoming literally and fully insane while I was weaning each kid. This time I have been relying a lot on my favorite bodega meal: a grilled cheese and a carrot-apple-ginger juice, a pretty great lunch deal at about $12. I went out and got that once Mari went down for her nap, and I spent her nap working while Paloma watched Spidey and His Amazing Friends. I usually try to submit to the fact that children make it very difficult to work on weekends, but this is going to be a busy week, I think.

At some point in the afternoon, I made Paloma a plain quesadilla—I keep Vista Hermosa flour tortillas in my freezer, they’re very important to me—and made Marisol some tofu, which I always brush with miso, soy, and honey and bake in the oven. We live with friends in a very important mini-commune arrangement, and we sent Paloma upstairs to play with her best friend/neighbling Gus. While she was gone I made Clare de Boer’s turkey-milk-lemon-sage ragù over mezzi rigatoni, a household staple. It’s amazingly easy, and our kids love it, and we add fresh arugula and black pepper and olive oil and parmesan and love it too. Marisol refused her carceral high chair when it was dinner time, though, and she also refused the two broccoli florets I last-ditch boiled for her in the tiny pot I use for soft-boiled eggs. Later on she demanded a banana and ate half. Both kids watched a lot more TV. The two of them have been decisive and strong-willed from babyhood, the way Andrew and I both are, and we probably say “me sowing/me reaping” to each other every day.

Clare deBoer’s turkey-lemon ragù. (Photo + lap via Clare herself!)

November 11th

Marisol’s Daylight Savings Time early wakeups are finally beginning to dissipate. Andrew got up with her at 7 and gave her milk in a bottle. Paloma got up a little later and had Cheerios and milk. I got up and immediately began writing about the new “meme” of “your body, my choice," which unhappily and immediately curbed my appetite.

In the late morning I took a break to go pick up groceries to make a dinner, tonight, that I can bring over tomorrow to David Haglund, my absolutely beloved New Yorker editor, father of two beautiful young children, who lost his wife very suddenly and tragically at the end of the summer. I have a bottle of red wine in the fridge that I opened on election night but will not finish because it’s a too-sweet Malbec (plus I'm sort of trying to do more drugs but max out at five drinks per week total) so I thought I would make some braised short ribs for David. Alongside the stuff for that I got some smoked salmon for me, and made a piece of toast with Hawthorne Valley fresh cheese, smoked salmon, a lemon squeeze, and black pepper.

Paloma was at a camp since there was no school for Veteran’s Day; Andrew was with Marisol in the absence of daycare, which was the state of things for the first year of her life—he dropped to 10-hour weeks at the union where he works as an organizer and became her full-time caregiver. He took her to the Met today, and fed her, he reported, Goldfish and fruit snacks and some old butter-and-cheese pasta and banana bread. When he brought them both home, I stopped working, warmed up tofu and made some white rice in my cheap Target rice cooker, and the kids had dinner. He gave them baths while I started the short ribs, using a recipe from Bon Appétit and two containers of pre-chopped mirepoix from the store. After that, he went out for the night, and the kids watched Moana while I ate ragù leftovers, again with arugula. At one point Marisol opened the snack drawer and held me at the gunpoint of her screaming to get a mango-flavored fruit leather. At another point Paloma, sniffing the air, asked me if I could give her some beef. I cut her three small bites of the gorgeous simmering short ribs, knowing what she was likely to say to me, and did: “Actually, Mom, this isn’t very good actually.” It’s fine, because a week ago she told me, “Mom, you don’t have to be so perfect all the time,” and that really meant a lot.

Wine braised short ribs, via Bon Appetit.

Max, my upstairs co-parent (who also has a terrific Substack!), brought down the baby monitor so that I could babysit Gus remotely, another enormous perk of commune life. Paloma, insisting on watching the credits of Moana to prolong her awake time—she goes to bed close to 9 most nights, which is why she watches an entire 90-minute movie most nights too—told me that, at camp, she ate pasta and chicken nuggets and carrots and cheese.

November 12th

I came downstairs to Marisol eating her egg, which is always made in a nonstick GreenPan—my first Green Spoon-inspired purchase, actually. Paloma had Cheerios and milk. As I was helping to get Paloma’s shoes on, she asked me, with hopeful anime crescent eyes, if I had packed her a lunchbox. The kids in her Pre-K class have been mounting a collective pressure campaign on their parents to pack them lunches, but unfortunately for Paloma we are monitoring the situation closely on a group chat of parent friends and engaging in top-down anti-organizing behavior. She goes to the amazing public school on the corner, which is rapidly gentrifying but has a student population that’s still overwhelmingly drawn from public housing, and though we have heard from her lovely teacher that the school lunch is legitimately unappealing I think she can have what everyone else is having for as long as we can possibly make it that way. Also, what, cold quesadilla or pesto pasta every day? I told Paloma that it was too late to pack her a lunch—she was heading right out the door, silly!

Today Andrew’s dad came in from Long Island to babysit Marisol. He’s been retired for a decade, but spends two days a week volunteering in the NICU and usually two days a week taking care of his two sets of grandkids. It is an unbelievable, overwhelming blessing, and the example he set for his two sons was crucial for them (and for their very lucky female partners—though of course, we’re just getting what most straight men get by default). According to his report, Marisol ate gingerbread, a Dunkin Donuts cruller, and tofu. My own breakfast was a soft-boiled egg, avocado toast (important recent upgrade to this toast: Burlap and Barrel Kashmiri Chili), and smoked salmon; for lunch I had some ragù leftovers.

In the late afternoon, after work, I made egg noodles and brought them to my editor's place with the braised short ribs (and three books—Rejection and Loved & Missed, probably my two favorite reads of the year, and Liars, a book I quite disliked but read in one sitting and have perhaps talked about with friends more than any other 2024 release). Back at home, I made Paloma a plain quesadilla and cut her some strawberries. Marisol boycotted food until she saw us all eating the short ribs and egg noodles, and then she demanded egg noodles, and so did Paloma, and then she ate some short ribs and said they were good!

Later on we watched Mary Poppins together. Paloma ate a banana, and Marisol yelled “nana” until I brought her one, which she didn't eat. Before bed I had some white cheddar and green grapes, and then a little bowl of rigatoni again at 11. I used to not be able to fall asleep unless I had a really full stomach, which I don’t think is a great habit, but I was glad to feel my normal appetite back.

November 13th

I woke up to devastating news about a family member of someone I really love. I gave Paloma Rice Krispies and milk, and made Marisol a one-egg omelet a few minutes before she had to be out the door. I forced myself to choke down my prototypical breakfast—two eggs and spinach and cheese scrambled in bacon fat, which I keep in a thing in my fridge, on a 20-seconds-microwaved tortilla with Cholula on top. I went to the New Yorker office to film a video about my favorite books of the year—I chose Rejection; Limitarianism, by Ingrid Robeyns, which makes the very common-sense argument that extreme wealth is a social ill as bad as if not worse than extreme poverty, and that its eradication is a necessary moral good; and An Honest Woman, by Charlotte Shane. On the way back, depressed, I got a thing of salmon nigiri from the Wasabi to-go counter and ate it in the fucking Fulton Street subway station next to a couple of fucking cops.

I have never before checked what Marisol or Paloma is eating when they’re out of the house, in school and daycare, but it appears the information has been available to me this whole time. Marisol today, apparently, had an English muffin for breakfast, ground beef with pasta and vegetables for lunch, yogurt and strawberries for PM snack, and hot dogs plus broccoli plus bagel for dinner (which it took Andrew and I two months to realize they were providing at 5 PM every day). Paloma today appears to have gotten grilled chicken, green beans, and brown rice. I made the decision not to follow up with her about that at all in order to not enter another discussion about me packing lunch.

I stopped working in time to make pesto pasta—I am another Gotham Greens pesto adherent, though they don’t have it at my grocery store, and I used to get it at Mekelburg’s but Mekelburg’s was tragically replaced by an exorbitantly priced “private art studio” for children. Luckily, Andrew or I still go regularly to the small Whole Foods in Fort Greene to shop for our now-family-friend Ms. Nancy, who we were connected to through the Clinton Hill/Fort Greene Mutual Aid group in 2021, and who we’ve been buying groceries for ever since. (Everyone already knows this, and obviously everyone reading this has a lot going on, but post-election it feels worth saying: particularly if you are depressed and feeling powerless, volunteer, take your kids.) Andrew went there this afternoon to shop for her and catch up on gossip, and he picked up another thing our kids love but that we can only find there—two packs of those very expensive cinnamon-raisin English muffins from Stone & Skillet.

The kids came home—Paloma brought back from after school by our upstairs neighbors, Marisol by Andrew. They ate pesto pasta and we ate short ribs and egg noodles. Before bed, they each ate a cinnamon-raisin English muffin straight out of the bag. I went out, got home late, woke Andrew up completely by making a huge amount of noise heating up more rigatoni and ragù (that recipe makes a TON of sauce), and then tried to make up for it by saying I would wake up with the kids the next morning, which I did.