Pesto Dimetrodons, "Batatas" + A Chicken Fat Facial
A Cub Street Diet from The New Yorker's Helen Rosner
Hi friends,
Spring has sprung! It’s warming up! And one of our most beloved writers—on the subject of food, or anything, for that matter—is here to share the story of three days in the gustatory life of her 1.5-year-old child. Please welcome The New Yorker staff writer, Helen Rosner, to the Cub Street Diet! Read on and revel in the joyful ride that is experiencing food through her intrepid toddler’s eyes (and mouth).
Though Helen’s daughter Anya is the reason we’re here today, we’d be remiss not to mention that Helen is also an extraordinarily gifted writer with a refreshingly non-discriminatory point of view—her beautiful prose is unpretentious, insightful and utterly delicious.
If you'd like to read more, Helen's essay "On Chicken Tenders," published in Guernica, won the 2016 James Beard Foundation Journalism award; her essay "Christ in the Garden of Endless Breadsticks" was nominated for the James Beard Foundation M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award in 2018—both are a delight. Her piece on Anthony Bourdain is a favorite. More recently, you can find an account of how "Roberto" (a soup) went viral, a tribute to five o’clock being restaurant “Baby Hour”, and a paean to old school diners.
And that’s that. Take it away, Anya! (er, Helen)
Fanny + Greta
Friday, April 5
Most mornings Anya—who is 17 months old—wakes up around 6:30 a.m. and she’s good to hang out in the crib for an hour or so. At 7:30 one of us will get up, pour 4 ounces of milk into a bottle and put the bottle in the warmer, and then go in and liberate the baby from the prison of her crib. We usually bring her into our bed for her morning bottle. She drank three of the four ounces, which is pretty normal for her. She was a formula baby, and when she turned one and we switched to cow’s milk everyone warned us about how nightmarish the transition would be, but Anya was just like, “Okay, whatever!” I assume it’s mostly temperament (I tend to think anything easy about parenting is luck, not choices), but I also give a little bit of credit to the formula we used, Kendamil, which actually tastes like milk, instead of that horrible metallic multivitamin flavor most formulas have. We give her Horizon Organic Growing Years Milk, which is fortified with choline and things like that and I’m pretty sure it’s a scam, and even if it’s not a scam I’m pretty sure heating up the bottle kills all the prebiotics or whatever, but I now think of it as “Anya’s milk” and I’m locked in for life.
One of the unexpected changes that came along with having a kid is that breakfast is now a huge deal in our household. Neither my husband, Jim, nor I tend to have much of an appetite in the morning, but Anya is a breakfast obsessive, so that’s our life now. I made her a rolled-up scrambled egg in a little rectangular tamagoyaki pan that is so perfect and useful for one-egg cooking that I pack it with us when we travel. The one we own is nonstick and bubblegum pink, and came with a silicone spatula the precise width of the pan, which makes the crepe-like egg easy to roll up. Sometimes I’ll mix in chopped herbs, or leftover pasta sauce, or sprinkle on some cheese. Today I made it plain—one egg, a splash of milk, a pinch of salt—and gave it to her along with some strawberries, raspberries, and avocado. She also had two pieces of avocado maki that were leftover from my sushi-delivery dinner the night before; she ate the avocado, peeled the nori off the rice and ate the nori, and left the rice behind.
Some notes on gear: We have a table mat that I am evangelical about, called the Table Tyke. It’s made from silicone and has a thick lip at the edge that both keeps it firmly attached to the table, and mitigates the effects of babies who want to chew on it. Also it rolls up, and has useful loops to secure the roll closed! The XL size is about 18 inches wide and lives on our table permanently, and we have two of the regular size (about twelve inches wide) which we bring with us to restaurants and when we travel. Strangers have literally come up to me in restaurants to ask about it—I think I’ve hand-sold easily two dozen of these things. The other thing I tell every new-parent friend they have to get is the Grosmimi toddler cup—it’s unbreakable, unspillable, and not hideously ugly. The straw is easy for Anya to use, and it’s dishwasher safe and super easy to take apart for cleaning.
Anya’s plates are Mushie silicone circle plates in ivory. We’re the opposite of a Sad Beige Family but I don’t like colorful dishes—white plates means that the food gets to be the most interesting thing on the table! I also have a sort of indefensible aversion to segmented plates for little kids (I think it’s useful for them to become comfortable with the idea of foods touching) but somehow we ended up with one of those EZPZ happy-face plates and, to add insult to injury, it’s green. Anya’s flatware is also EZPZ—the big-kid size, we skipped the little-kid size completely—which I like because the tines of the fork and the bowl of the spoon are hard and functional. (For some reason I don’t mind that the flatware is colorful! I can’t explain it.) I should probably get her metal flatware, but we’ve got what we’ve got, and right now it works.
Anya’s been really into drinking out of open cups when she’s at the table. I give her cups we already had pre-baby—I go back and forth between giving her water in a Duralex Picardie espresso glass (they really mean it when they say it’s unbreakable) and a smooth metal espresso cup shaped like a Nespresso pod, which actually is unbreakable and whose shape is surprisingly well-suited to tiny hands.
Anyway, lunch! I was out all day for work, and Anya was with her nanny, Amina. Amina is an unbelievable cook—she’s Algerian, and she makes all sorts of gorgeous Algerian stews and breads and pastries. She often brings leftovers from meals she makes at home to share with Anya for lunch, but this was the last week of Ramadan, and we didn’t want to make Amina uncomfortable during her fast by expecting her to cook. For lunch Anya had some pre-packaged lentil dal from Maya Kaimal, which is one of my favorite supermarket brands, basmati rice, and a Babybel gouda. The packaged lentils are a little high in sodium by baby/toddler standards, but the ingredients are high-quality and the flavor is great. (Maya Kaimal and I both worked at Saveur, albeit at different times, so I feel like we’re friends IRL even though we’ve never met or spoken.) Sometimes I like to mix in an egg and cook the egg-lentil mixture in a pan, just to diffuse the intensity a little, but Anya is a champion water drinker so I generally don’t get bothered about her having something salty here and there. She had some chopped-up cucumbers, too, with a little lemon juice on them.
Various Anya snacks throughout the day: A banana in the morning, and in the afternoon some Wegman’s whole grain animal crackers (they taste like absolutely nothing, an ideal baby snack) and some blueberries. Pretty much every afternoon she has a yogurt pouch, which I once tried to make myself by mixing fruit and yogurt in reusable pouches, which is both more cost-effective and less single-use-plastic-y, but it’s also insane and impossible and I have chosen not to focus my energies on that particular aspect of Perfect Zero-Waste Motherhood. Store-bought, as Ina says, is fine: we get Stonyfield Farms pouches in bulk from Costco. (They’re the only brand I’ve found that does full-fat yogurt pouches, which seems insane to me? Why are we giving reduced-fat dairy to little kids with developing brains? Brains need fat!) Anya calls yogurt pouches “yo-yo’s,” which is very cute.
For dinner, Anya had pasta with tomato sauce and ground turkey, and a few pieces of fresh mozzarella cheese. It was gluten-free penne made out of red lentil flour—no one in our household is gluten-free, but I like the idea of giving Anya a broad sense of “normal” when it comes to textures and flavors. What’s the fun of parenthood without a little benevolent manipulation? She had some blackberries and chopped strawberries as well. Another 4 ounces of milk before bed—we give it to her while she’s lying down in her crib, sing a lullaby or two while she’s drinking, and then once the bottle is done it’s time to say goodnight. Our pediatrician suggested we have her do a sip of water afterwards to wash the residue off her teeth, which is a lovely and practical idea and we don’t do it at all.
Saturday, April 6
6:30 a.m. wakeup, 7:30 a.m. bottle of milk. I felt uncommonly energetic and decided to make a medium-ambitious breakfast while Jim and Anya read books on the sofa. We had some mushrooms that were just on the edge of slimy, so I cut them into thick slices and sautéed them super-slowly in a ridiculous amount of salted French butter. I thought I’d made enough for all of us, but Anya is a mushroom fiend. I was giving her just a few at a time, which was driving her insane—she clearly wanted all of it at once, and kept saying “more mushroom, more mushroom!” until I finally gave in and handed her the entire dish.
While the mushrooms were cooking I supremed a Sumo citrus, for no reason other than I wanted to be able to say I’d done that while writing this food diary. When she was littler, we used to peel the membrane off of each bite for her, but we don’t need to do that anymore. Anya eats a lot of citrus—we sometimes have to hide the fruit bowl under a dishtowel, because if she sees an orange, she wants to eat that orange.
I soft-scrambled an egg in the mushroom skillet, and folded in a bit of shredded cheddar cheese (Kraft, baby!) just before the curds set. All of my favorite Anya plates were in the dishwasher, which we’d forgotten to run overnight, so she got to eat breakfast off the green plate. I’m pretty sure she makes absolutely no distinction between them.
We went to the park and Anya replenished with two Wegman’s whole grain animal crackers and half a banana. (The guys at the bodega give her a banana every time she comes in. She calls bananas by their Arabic name, moz — my husband is Palestinian-Egyptian and we’re trying hard to give Anya as much Arabic as possible — and the bodega crew are just delighted by it.) At home she had a medjool date (tamar in Arabic) and then another 4 ounces of milk just before falling asleep for her nap.
Anya usually wakes up ravenous for lunch. Instead of feeding her immediately, we packed her into the stroller and walked three blocks to the home of our friends Tommy and Katie, where they were having an open-house style birthday party. We all ate bowls of an unbelievably delicious vegan chili Katie had made, with butternut squash, quinoa, and kidney beans—I picked the poblano chiles out of Anya’s portion but honestly I could probably have left them in. (Katie showed me the homemade veggie stock she used in the chili and it was thrillingly neon pink from beet scraps!)
At one point, I had Anya on my lap, and realized I was sitting within toddler-arm distance of a bowl of tortilla chips—an unforced error on my part. So, Anya had some chips. In her seventeen months of life she had never once shown any interest in dipping, as a concept, but at this party she saw someone (me) dipping a chip in a bowl of chunky salsa and it was like everything suddenly dropped into slow-motion and you could basically hear her neurons firing in real-time: you can put the chip into this substance and then you can eat it??? So I spent the next ten minutes scooping salsa onto chips for her while she slurped it off, and then I ate the slightly softened, sucked-on chips, which I guess now that I’m a parent I do not consider gross.
The party also featured several cakes from a terrific Italian bakery, one of which had big beautiful strawberries decorating the top. Anya ate three of the berries (with permission!) plus whatever whipped cream was still clinging to them. She drank a lot of water and I also let her have a few sips of my seltzer, straight from the can, sorry. When we got home she ate about half a pint of blueberries and a few frozen peas out of a bowl while sitting on the sofa, which is a new fun thing for her that she gets very excited about.
That night for dinner I made a pot of pasta (full of gluten) stirred with several enormous dollops of Gotham Greens pesto, which is an incredible product that I don’t think I could survive without. I started buying it after Hannah Goldfield talked about it in her Cub Street Diet, will the circle be unbroken, forever and ever, amen. On the side we had some roasted asparagus, more green peas, and a little bit of reheated spinach. A very green dinner! I believe in trying to eat the same thing as your kid, within reason, and sometimes that means she eats grown-up food, and sometimes that means we eat kid food. Though honestly the only thing kid-ish about the meal was that the pasta was shaped like dinosaurs. I was impressed by the variety of shapes — there was T. Rex and Stegosaurus, obviously, but also Diplodocus and Dimetrodon! Some real deep cuts.
4 ounces of milk at bedtime. We had an accidentally meatless day!
Sunday, April 7
Morning milk bottle. I started making Anya a rolled egg in the tamagoyaki pan, but unthinkingly stirred it before it set, so it was just a nice scrambled egg. I cooked some Beyond Meat breakfast patties in the egg pan—we eat meat, but I like to give her veggie burgers and alt-meats for the same normativity-expansion reasons I like her to have non-wheat pasta. I’ve been trying out different brands of veggie breakfast sausage, and was surprised by how much I liked this one—a lot of them go so overboard with sage and faux-maple that they end up having kind of a potpourri vibe, and this was actually sort of savory and sharp. Anya had one patty, which I sliced into matchsticks, and a few raspberries.
We had a pound of red mini-potatoes that were starting to slightly shrivel, so I chopped them up and roasted them with olive oil and salt. A few months ago we bought a Breville Smart Oven, which is a giant countertop beast that’s like eleven appliances at once, including a toaster and an air fryer, and it has completely and totally replaced my regular oven. It heats up so quickly, and unlike my horrible gas oven it doesn’t run seventy-five degrees off temperature. I love it so much. Anya is obsessed with potatoes—she calls them “batatas,” their Arabic name—and ate so, so, so many. She kept very sweetly asking me to “open” them, which in toddler-language means to cut them in half.
Anya had some peanut butter puffs at the park—we get Earth’s Best brand, which I think are better than Bamba, they’re lighter and taste a little fresher—and some slices of apple. She drank 3 ounces of milk before her nap.
We had some friends coming by later that afternoon, so I did a big grocery shop at Eataly—we were going to all be going out for dinner, but I figured maybe they’d be hungry, and I always love an excuse to shop at Eataly, which to me is very much a special-occasion grocery store. When Anya woke up from her nap, I gave her a piece of fancy Eataly bread spread with cream cheese and a little bit of green-olive tapenade (she licked off the spreads and did not eat the bread) and a few shreds of mortadella. She had some leftover pesto dinosaurs from dinner the night before, and some leftover asparagus and spinach. I sliced a tomato for her and she sucked out all the seeds and tomato goo, and left the solid parts.
Our friends arrived and we all left for dinner, which turned out to be minorly dramatic: I’d thought I’d made a reservation at Hart’s, which is basically my favorite restaurant in all of New York, and which despite its extreme chicness is shockingly kid-friendly, especially for the earlier seatings. We’ve taken Anya there a few times—it was the first real restaurant we brought her to as a baby!—and the staff are so lovely to her, and bring her martini olives for her to wear on her fingers. But when we rolled in for our 5:30 reservation it turned out that I, an idiot, had actually booked it for two weeks in the future. Hart’s is teeny-tiny, and we were six people, so they very politely suggested that we go instead to The Fly, which is a few blocks away and run by the same folks, and is also wonderful.
The deal with The Fly is that the menu is very tight. They have rotisserie chicken, a bunch of sides, and that’s pretty much it. We ordered literally everything—including a really gorgeous special of Persian cucumbers and thick slices of sweet onion tossed in a tahini vinaigrette with tons of fresh cilantro—and Anya was a beast. Almost immediately she wanted to be taken out of her high chair, so she sat on my lap for what I think may have genuinely been the best meal of her life. She picked up a drumstick off my plate and ate absolutely the entire thing—like, fully stripped it to the bone—and then finished a half-eaten drumstick from Jim’s plate. She ate roasted potatoes, and French fries, which she dipped into ketchup. (The evolution of yesterday’s salsa skills! Also possibly her first time eating ketchup?) The Fly’s caesar salad is absolutely drowning in fluffy microplaned Parmigiano, which she loved, and then she licked all the dressing off the long ribs of romaine, and then crunched down the denuded lettuce. She dipped pieces of bread into the lemony yogurt dip they serve along with the chicken, and at a certain point I noticed she had stopped using the bread and was just shoving her hands directly into the dip, so to try to salvage some dignity I handed her a spoon.
By the end, her face was glossy with chicken fat and her arms were bloody with ketchup and her hair was wild and all the rest of us at the table were just watching in awe. We figured she’d pass out in her stroller on the half-mile walk home, but she was just waving at strangers and chattering about how ducks say “quack quack” and kicking her feet up and down and laughing at her own socks. We’re a morning-bath family usually, but we threw her in the tub when we got home—both to wash off the schmaltz, and to (hopefully!) calm her down for bedtime. (The “calming” scent bubble bath from California Baby really works, I swear.) Four ounces of milk during lullabies in the crib, and then sleep.
Omg Cub Street diet. I love
delightful, as helen rosner always is.