Swedish Fish For Breakfast, 'SHAKE' + Grilled Mackerel Sandwiches At The Transit Museum

Megan O'Neill's Cub Street Diet

Hi Friends,

We’re back on schedule with our Cub Street Diets and this week’s contributor is the inimitable Megan O’Neill, one of the health and beauty gurus whose taste and perspective we routinely seek out. Below, the Brooklyn-based mother of two takes us through a handful of days in her family kitchen in the dead of East Coast winter.

Born and raised in Manhattan, Megan has been a beauty editor and writer for well over a decade—after graduating from Amherst College, she had careers at Lucky and ELLE magazines before moving to goop, where she worked as a Beauty Director for seven years. She has been featured as a beauty and wellness expert on Good Morning America, starred in The goop Lab on Netflix, cohosted The goop Beauty podcast, and is currently working on a book based on her essay What’s A White Black Girl. This summer, Megan’s designs for the Miami-based eco-luxury footwear company, Nayla, will debut.

But, back to the boys who brought us here! What are Lagos (3) and Monty (1.5) eating? Read on to hear about life in a house obsessively filled with homemade food and Friday Pizza Night rituals, in which the smallest residents nonetheless largely appear to subsist on little more than air… and A LOT of honey.

Fanny + Greta

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FRIDAY

MORNING: Terrible parent alert!!! My son Lagos wakes up, and we hand him a Swedish fish. Awful, insidious, promoting-heinous-habits move? Or some much needed bribery to make a 3-year-old go the F to sleep by himself? He’s scared to sleep in his bed, an adorable, cozy bed in an adorable, cozy room—the gall. I’m required to lie next to him until he’s fully nodded off. If I attempt to melt off the bed and slink out of the room before he’s out, he shrieks and wakes up his especially shrieky little 1.5-year-old brother, Monty, with whom he shares the room. This bedtime prisoner is at the end of her tether. But last night, for the first time in a year, Lagos let me lie on the floor next to his bed, with him clutching my hand, until he fully drifted off. This was such major progress that he earned a sticker and a Swedish fish for breakfast. I spent something preposterous on the fish because cute branding makes me lose my marbles. It’s almost as if it tricks me into believing these aren’t as perniciously sugary as regular old Swedish fish. Anyway, they are delish, so I pop one into my mouth too at 7:30 in the morning. Bad Monty sees this and shrieks, pawing for a fish. He’s literally the worst baby in the world, and shrieking is his thing. I dash to the fridge and pour some honey-sweetened elderberry-hibiscus tea into his bottle to hush him up. He loudly slurps it down. My mom, who is basically in a thrupple with me and my husband, Jesse, in raising Lagos and Monty, turned the boys onto elderberry-hibiscus tea. She’s obsessed with honey, and when I say she sweetens the tea with it, I mean the woman practically dumps in a whole jar of Roxbury Mountain wildflower honey. Jesse, who doesn’t have my side of the fam’s raging sweet tooth, once sampled the hibiscus tea and claimed to have instantly developed diabetes. My kids aren't impervious to runny noses, but they’re pretty robust little guys, and I like to think that maybe some of that heartiness can be attributed to the immune-boosting elderberry tea.

Cooking and baking are the thing that fills me up—the nourishing of my family and myself, the presentation and aesthetic elements of it all, the fact that hunching over my cutting board mincing garlic puts me into the moment like nothing else. I’m pretty much always plotting what I’ll make next. It’s true what they say about turning into your mom. I used to think mine was such a loser for reading cookbooks in bed, but guess who’s queen of doing that now—currently with Ottolenghi’s new Comfort, Alison Roman’s Sweet Enough, and Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking. So funny because my kids are like those air plants that don’t need food or water to survive and live in a perpetual state of fasting. They eat a bite or two of whatever meal it is and then drift away from the table—toy trains strewn nearby are the ultimate siren call.

Lagos goes to this amazing school where they feed the kids like royalty. It’s a bonanza of organic this and that from their upstate farm: cozy curries, fresh fruit. How lucky. But I always pack him a snack box for his morning subway commute with his dad. Right now, in the dead of winter, he gets paper-thin slices of Honeycrisp apple (nothing rivals that crispity crunch), hazelnuts, some blueberries (not their season, but my mom discovered that Eataly has firm juicy ones year-round), and a wedge of an easy cornmeal brown butter snacking cake from Melissa Clark’s Dinner in One.

My pre-breakfast is the same every morning, green juice that I make the night before and bottle in a cute mason jar. It’s a doozy of nourishment; the celery, green apple, parsley, romaine lettuce, kale, spinach, cucumber, and lemon recipe is from The Juice Generation book. I make it in my Nama juicer, the easiest, most powerful, adorable-est one I’ve ever had. I love how the juice wakes me up and fortifies me for the 1.3-mile stroller dash to daycare. My juice, along with the luminizing Mami Wata superserum from Dehiya beauty and the glow-boosting face oil from Klur, are my most powerful skin secrets. My mom recently retired and has made it her full-time job to get to the Union Square farmers’ market to procure all our juicing greens. “You could rhapsodize over how beautiful they are,” she’s been known to say as she plucks a bunch of lacinato kale from the mound. The boys drink the juice, too; Monty takes a bottle of it most mornings to daycare. So cute when he has a green juice mustache and, like, juice breath.

NIGHT: Pizza Friday, rejoice!!! I live for pizza Friday to the extent that a friend will be, like, “OMG, come over for a girls night and we’ll stream Babygirl and get Chinese,” or another might text, “I got a din rez at Eel Bar, let’s go!” and I’m, like, “Naaahhhh.” Pizza Friday feels like the reward at the end of a long week, and I love how cozy it is. When it’s warmer out or we’re especially in the doldrums from a string of underwhelming weeknight dinners and endless bedtime harangues, we venture out. Love a place with a vibe, cocktails, and a great chilled red. Our fave places to go out for pizza are Ace’s in Williamsburg, Saraghina in Bed-Stuy, and Hoek in Red Hook. Fave places to pick it up to eat at home are Fini in Williamsburg, F&F in Cobble Hill, and Paulie Gee’s Slice Shop in Greenpoint. Jesse and I are enormous—I’m 6’1, he’s 6’3—so we order a whole pie of half pepperoni and half cheese plus a few slices. Nothing’s more fun than a plethora of pizza, and it is pure misery to run out of it. So we don’t f*ck around. We have a family drink that we have most nights with dinner called Grape Fizzy, which is seltzer from our soda stream with a dash of Whole Foods’s organic grape juice poured in. I’ve tricked the boys into thinking it’s the wildest indulgence, so that one day their palates will reject soda. Soda will taste like—to borrow Lagos’s most-used word right now— “poopoo.”

Jesse and I love Grape Fizzy, too, but on pizza Friday we might make a mezcal margarita or mezcal negroni or have a glass of wine. We all settle in on the couch, which will soon be smeared with sauce and sprinkled with crumbs, to watch Minions 4 for the 69th time. At endless bedtime that night, as a way to delay falling asleep, Lagos might try to engage me with a question like ”Do Minions have penises?” Honestly, great question.

SATURDAY

MORNING: Love a semi-dramatic Saturday morning breakfast. I aim to use cookbooks as much as possible because all the phone time is really taking the wind out of me lately. But Genevieve Ko’s Lemon Ricotta Pancakes from the New York Times cooking app are insanity. The ricotta (I get it from Bushwick’s Foster Sundry, the freshest) adds richness and a pillowy texture, and the lemon zest is the perfect hit of zing to temper the decadence of the farmers’ market maple ‘sizzurp’ that I drown my whole stack in. Jesse unbecomingly dips each bite in ketchup—freak. I whip those up with cheesy scrambled eggs, heating the pan with a dollop of 4th & Heart ghee and grating in some Gouda or sharp cheddar for the creamiest eggs. (I am sold on ghee; there’s a small study suggesting that people who follow an Ayurvedic lifestyle, including eating ghee and milk and practicing yoga, are less likely to have dark circles.) Jesse will sometimes cook up a few thick slabs of bacon for himself and the boys. I don’t really eat pork—can’t unsee how cute piglets are—but if I did, this bacon from Foster Sundry, which has leather-belt girth and is so beautifully swirled with fat that it looks like art, would more than appeal. The boys are fans of Saturday breakfast and actually devour almost everything on their plates.

LUNCH: Lagos has a friend coming over for a playdate at noon. I say this all casual, but it is the biggest f*cking deal—the first playdate we’ve ever hosted! His little friend, the little friend’s cool/nice dad, and the 7-month-old little sister come over for lunch, and bring us a gorgeous, perfectly burnished Alison Roman banana bread. It’s the same one I make probably once every two weeks because we perpetually live in a state of overripe-banana pileup. I’m secretly vexed, though, because I see Jesse licking his chops and going back for his third wedge; he never salivates over my banana bread like this. I’ve thought about what to serve for pretty much the whole week and land on Alison Roman’s baked chicken tenders (I use bread crumbs I’ve made from past-its-prime She Wolf bread), as well as her riff on mac ’n cheese, Tiny Creamy Pasta with Black Pepper and Pecorino from Nothing Fancy (I use couscous instead of pasta), and a pile of steamed broccolini doused in olive oil and heartily sprinkled with Himalayan pink sea salt. The meal is a hit with everyone but my children, who do their signature thing of being interested for a few bites before drifting. When the playdate is over, the living room is in shambles with errant broccolini stems in every corner.

SNACK: These children of mine don’t eat meals, but God do they love to pick. Current go-to’s: a spoonful of honey, then going back for three more spoonfuls until things ladder up to just eating honey from a jar. A spoonful of an-impossible-to-find-in-the-States balsamic vinegar that Jesse and I brought back from our babymoon on the Amalfi Coast last year. And…cod liver oil? My mom somehow got both boys into it. We like the one from Rosita because it seems pure and responsibly sourced. The major downside is that the person who administers the cod liver oil can’t help but smell like rank fish herself after spooning it into little mouths.

DINNER: I want to be a take-out person, but the plastic clamshells, packets of sauce, and bible-thick stack of napkins make me feel save-the-planet dread. Plus, cooking is just what I must do, even when I’m bone tired. Sometimes Jesse and I go out for date night—dinner at Thai Diner for some saucy noodles and then walking a few blocks to Regal Essex, with the reclining seats, to see The Brutalist was a pretty good time recently—and I’ll leave something like the Italian ‘Pane Vecchio’ soup from The Green Spoon that’s as profoundly slurpable as it is salubrious (most ingenious way to use up stale bread). If we’re staying in, I do a lot of cheesy, sauteéd kale omelettes with good bakery toast. While on maternity leave, I furiously sussed out every cool bakery in Brooklyn. The winners for bread and more: Radio bakery and its perfectly iced cinnamon bun and lemony turkey-kale sandwich on hot-from-the-oven focaccia; A & C Super for its luscious brioche doughnut; and Winner for its malted chocolate chip cookie and proximity to Prospect Park.

SUNDAY

MORNING: There’s this genius half-pudding, half-smoothie thing we call ‘Shake’ that the boys eat without fail. I made it up in a fugue state in the early days of Lagos. Throw all this into a blender and purée until smooth: one avocado, one banana, peanut butter to taste (we do a small heap because yum; could do any other nut butter too), and ¼ to ½ cup of coconut water (Harmless Harvest for that gorgeous natural pink tint and distinctly not-from-concentrate flavor). The boys happily dig in with their spoons, and I’m at ease because they’re getting some real nourishment even if the rest of the day might be full of string cheese, crackers, and Swedish fish.

LUNCH: We thought we were chill and cool because we’re not psychotic about naps, but we probably should be slightly psychotic because the boys turn into banshees by 3 pm and everything sucks. They won’t go down at home but nod off in four seconds in the car. So we drive to the Transit Museum in downtown Brooklyn. All we do is drive to the freakin’ Transit Museum. Lagos and Monty are ragingly obsessed with trains. It’s an awesome place to learn about the New York City subway and the backbreaking work that went into building it, and there are also real subway cars from every era that you can actually walk around in. I wish I could report that we go and sit in the car from the 1930s with gorgeous raffia seats and brassy fixtures that I want for our house in Brooklyn, but no, Lagos makes us sit in the modern-day, not-gorgeous subway car that, you know, one rides a million times a week.

After two looooooong hours we leave and go back to the car for a bite to eat and to get out of the cold. I’ve packed us mackerel salad sandwiches. I watched a documentary on the fishing industry and learned that eating tuna is not the move if you care about not consuming something into extinction and preserving ocean life. Mackerel seems to be a more sustainable option. For the salad: Combine canned grilled mackerel with Primal Kitchen avocado mayo, chopped cornichon pickles, a few grinds of black pepper, and lots of tangy red wine vinegar. Spread it on a slice of sourdough from Radio bakery for the perfect car lunch.

Also—wrap your sandwich (or sliced apple, Green Spoon granola, brown butter corn cake, or whatever kid snack you please) in this brilliant reusable “foil” from Bee’s Wrap made from beeswax and tree resin. It comes in the cutest patterns, too. I could not feel more like an aspirational Brooklyn mom when I use it.

Lagos wants dessert, so I whip out some dried mango. I get all our dried fruit, and honestly many of our pantry staples like flour, sugar, nuts, coffee, and safflower oil from the refillable store Maison Jar in Greenpoint. All I want to talk about and tell people about is this place. My mom’s obsessed, too. Everything is so fresh and beautifully presented, and the people who work there are a dream. Maybe you hear “refillable” and it seems like something that involves a lot of work. But they make refilling anything from olive oil to dish soap so easy, and honestly kinda fun. Yes, it absolutely takes a minute more to get things, but that’s part of the appeal, not racing and rushing myself to death but enjoying the process.

DINNER: Even on a lazy Sunday we can never get dinner on the table before 7:30. I grew up in Manhattan with a single mom who worked full time and yet insisted on making us involved homemade meals, which meant dinner was often at 9 or 10 at night. So that’s the context determining why I was destined to be a late-night-dinner parent. Love the idea of making an elaborate dish for Sunday dinner, but time is eternally running out.

If I’m on it, I’ll have marinated a whole chicken the night before in the delectable fish-sauce-coconut-milk marinade from Ottolenghi’s Auntie Pauline’s roast chicken from the Comfort book. This with brown rice drizzled with olive oil, and some broccolini, is heaven. Or when I don’t have it together I make something easy and nourishing like his Gingery Fish and Rice. I like it with flounder. Plus more broccolini. Jesse is not psyched to see broccolini on the table every night, but it’s winter and there’s not a lot out there, and I’m passionate about having a green with each meal. The boys loooove broccolini and always eat the Ottolenghi chicken and fish!!!! Ha! I wish!… They’ll predictably have a few bites and drift away.

For dessert, there might be a strawberry galette from Claire Ptak’s The Violet Bakery Cookbook—the bakery itself is in Hackney, London. It’s a chic little place, and the quiche is to die for. If I haven’t baked, we have Malai’s Masala Chai ice cream—holy sh*t, Founder Pooja Bavishi with her South Asian flavors is killing it—or we’ll let the boys dig into a bag of Quadratini cookies. Those things are crack. The vanilla flavor for the win (though peanut butter occasionally).

BEDTIME: I’m a lizard person who’s always cold and down to be sipping a warm cup of something. My acupuncturist—Adele Reising—is a master of the female body; she studied gynecological acupuncture in China before opening her NYC practice. She has me drinking black sesame and goji berry tea. I get the sesame and berries from Maison Jar, naturally, and steep them in boiling water to make the elixir. It’s for supporting vitality and energy, and I love the earthy taste. It’s the perfect wind-down ritual. Monty must investigate everything anyone is doing always, so he tries to grab the cup from me. Now Lagos is curious, too. So we all have some black sesame goji tea, and all seems right for a few precious moments before the endless bedtime spiral of madness begins again.