Just Keep Feeding Them
The Green Spoon's 'Cub Street Diet'
Here is a little-known fact about myself and Fanny Singer, author, cook, designer, lifestyle arbiter.
My mother, an excellent home cook who trained at Le Cordon Bleu, was obsessed with Alice Waters, Fanny’s mother. Alice named her daughter Fanny (after a Marcel Pagnol film), and somehow my mother got wind of this. After accepting my given name as Stephanie (not her choice, but that’s a story for another day), she became determined to call me “Fanny.” A true Francophile, she found a 19th-century signet seal at a flea market, with the name "Fanny” carved into the agate in reverse, and bought it for me. I’m sorry to say though I still have the signet, the nickname never stuck.
If my mother could see me now.
Fanny and I have been orbiting each other for years - fans of each other’s work, sharing an editor at Knopf, with half a dozen friends in common. Her first book, Always Home, is a treasure; it sits on my shelf alongside Laurie Colwin, Elizabeth David, Patience Gray, and Richard Olney (a deep cut, but iykyk). I’m also a devoted reader of her Substack, The Green Spoon, which chronicles the trials and small triumphs of feeding children. I’m especially fond of their banana bread recipe, and their column, “The Cub Street Diet,” where once a month a writer details a week in the life of their home kitchen.
I love these voyeuristic peeks into other people’s pantries and parenting - it’s lifestyle, aspiration, inspiration. But I’ve often been in awe of how chic, how unbearably elevated other people’s lives look: children happily eating anchovies and fancy “tuna” salad made with kippers and extravagant hot breakfasts. My life looks more like what Gabrielle Hamilton describes in her memoir: the demoralizing reality of birthing two humans who will eat nothing but the plainest food. It wasn’t until after my divorce, when I was thinking more than ever about cooking and logistics - about what a home even is - that I began to feel I might have something to contribute about feeding children. I realized I’d never seen a Cub Street from a single parent, or a split-custody household.
Then, out of the blue, Fanny texted me.
Below is the introduction to my “Cub Street Diet” for Fanny and Greta’s The Green Spoon. You can read the rest at their beautiful newsletter.
This is my tiptoe back into publishing here, finding my footing, writing about life as it is now. I told myself I had no business writing essays or newsletters with deadlines outstanding, a novel to finish, and my life in disarray. The novel is in. And my life is still in disarray, but for the first time in a while, it’s not total.
More soon.
2-2-5. That’s a custody schedule. I hope whoever reads this never has to consider one, but if you end up on that side of the marriage line, I’m happy to dive into the lifestyle minutiae. In short, it means I have my two wildebeest children, Julian and Paloma, every Monday and Tuesday, and every other weekend. My weekends with them are Friday through Tuesday, and I measure that time in meals.
Divorce is an ongoing negotiation with heartbreak, but lately it feels like we’ve reached a gentler side of it. Matt and I are psycho in love with our kids and that undergirds everything. I’m hesitant to give advice or romanticize the process. My first caveat is that our schedule—our choice to live one block away from each other and still spend a lot of time together—is not prescriptive. Co-parenting is as private and temperamental as a marriage.
And while the pros of splitting up my life have presented themselves (Travel! Writing! Sleep! Exercise!), my children’s absence has not gotten easier to bear. But you know what has gotten easier? Cooking. Knowing that it’s all on me - every grocery run, every dirty dish, every meal and snack, no one coming to lend a hand - has made organizing my life easier.
Second caveat: my kids eat nothing and not the same kinds of nothing. J doesn’t eat any vegetables, hamburgers, bagels, or chicken nuggets outside the home. P doesn’t eat quesadillas, hot dogs, hamburgers, SANDWICHES, and says the smell of Annie’s Mac and Cheese makes her sick.
Which is a bummer because Annie’s Mac and Cheese is my favorite food.
Friday March 6th begins our weekend. This week it’s not just a five day stretch because Matt is going to Japan for nine days (when he returns, I’ll go to Italy to teach at a writing retreat. I know, I’m sorry!) Matt and I keep things extremely flexible. We trade nights, “babysit” for each other, split the kids up for one-on-one time. They are in and out of both houses. But I just had two days to myself, so the fridge and pantry are stocked, prepped for this ten-day span of servitude where I present them with food from dawn to dusk.
Usually Friday is pizza and movie night, but tonight we’re having a little dinner to send their dad off on his trip. I saw a recipe for Japanese curry in the NYT and I had almost everything on hand. Except for the curry bricks, for which I ran to the Galleria Market in a mall in Koreatown. I shop here at least once a month and it’s a delight (fwiw, parking is free/easy). I can’t catalogue all the treats I’ve gotten in the past (cuttlefish, barley tea, their ready-made bibimbap is excellent) but today I grab the curry bricks, two kinds of furikake, rice vinegar, soy sauce, Kewpie (which makes up a large part of my son’s diet), rice crackers with seaweed, two bags of Japanese gummy candy, and kimchi. And a huge box of mandarins.
Our most consumed dinner is “rice.” I ride hard for my cheap and cheerful Aroma rice cooker, we use it multiple times a week. Julian, seven, the extremely picky one, won’t eat vegetables. But he will eat seaweed. And he will put sushi rice inside seaweed with a whopping amount of Kewpie and make a roll. Sometimes he will put cucumbers in there too! But the key is the rice base we can adjust for ourselves. Paloma, five (and a half, she insists), is less picky, and likes her “special rice,” with soy sauce, Kewpie, and furikake. She and I usually have roasted miso salmon and cucumbers soaked in a little rice vinegar/sugar/salt, and steamed broccolini or roasted cabbage.
But this is Japanese curry & rice night. The recipe comes out looking like slop, tastes delicious. Paloma eats a bowl right up. A pleasant surprise…
The rest is at The Green Spoon. Happy eating.
fwiw, Julian did inspire me to always have my own kitchen stocked with seaweed and kewpie mayo for easy dinners, but i do it Paloma style with salmon and furikake
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