How my Queens Kids Eat
On dividing unpaid work, our family meal schedule, and our neighborhood dining spots
This summer’s eggplant pasta using eggplants grown in my mother’s yard on a vintage tablecloth she found for $3.
The week before school started, I spent three hours on Canva building out a weekly meal plan for our family. Time well spent. You may disagree, but Virgos be virgo-ing.
What Mommy Cooked When She Didn’t Feel Like Cooking
My husband and I both work in the culinary space. He has a side hustle sourcing sponsorships for pop-up dining experiences. I work for a food-justice non-profit that provides produce to under resourced communities in Queens from BIPOC-owned New York farms. Food is our activism, it’s how we show cariño to our loved-ones, and it is work, a lot of work.
Those of us identifying as women in heterosexual partnerships know the stats on domestic labor and bemoan all the headlines that affirm shit is unfair. While some men “weaponize incompetence,” many do actually want to split household tasks. Cooking quick, healthy meals is something I learned from my single, working mom. While she could do it well, cooking laborious dishes like roast pork butt and pea soups were left to weekends or to Vickie, my landlady who doubled as my grandmother. Spaghetti with a defrosted homemade sauce, arroz con defrosted precooked habichuelas, or chicken cutlets, white rice and canned corn, my mother’s running list was predictable but never boring. Meat was for dining out, quick weekday preparations or Sunday cooking, though it was still a maybe three times a week thing. We had salmon or some sort of white fish cooked under the broiler until skins crisped. And lots of salads. Oxtails, pastelones, eggplant parm…those were for Sundays and leftovers on Mondays.
A child of the 80s and 90s, I surprisingly had very little ultra-processed foods. I don’t think this was as much for health as it was for cost. At the time, those branded foods that I begged my mother for or would sneak into the shopping cart at Pathmark, were more expensive than fresh foods. Why would she buy a box of Rice-A-Roni when a huge bag of rice cost the same amount? And also, it was “porquería,” she would say. We did buy a ton of Kraft Mac and Cheese, Jello-O pudding, cold-cuts, Wonder Bread for the cold cuts, and so many Quaker Chocolate Chip Granola Bars. When I asked for Fruit by the Foot she would say, there’s fruit in the house. She wasn’t a crunchy mom, she was feeding two kids, and herself, and our ever-revolving door of rescued pets on $20k a year in our 2-bedroom apartment in Elmhurst. She also watched her mother suffer immensely from diabetes, having a leg amputated months before her death and wanted better for her body and ours.
Today, ours is a dual income household and still we must budget, we must look at prices before placing items in carts, we must find the grocery store that is selling the thing we always buy, for less. My job keeps high-quality, organic produce, eggs, and almond milk in my fridge at much less than what I’d pay at Trade Fair, my local grocery store. My husband’s salary affords us opportunities to dine out as a family once a week, sometimes twice a week. This is not boasting. This is fucking gratitude to the investment my parents and my community made into my education which led to college and higher paying jobs. The socioeconomic upward mobility I’ve experienced came from hard work, luck, and in full candor, who I married and my proximity to whiteness. My last name is the greatest signifier of my Latine heritage whereas my appearance has only ever generated lots of, “where are you from…no but where are you originally from,” questions. I do not enjoy the ability to feed myself and my family well because it’s a mandated universal right (it obviously should be). I enjoy it because I have the means to. The discussion that came before my three hours on Canva on how this school year we’d have a better rhythm on meal prep and cooking didn’t just happen because my husband wanted to do more; it happened because he has the means to do more. So now, because we have the money, and the knowledge and because I think of my maternal grandmother everyday, the one that died a year before I was born, whose tiny ring I wear on my pinky, I use crowd-sourced templates to divide the chopping, the peeling, the oil burns, the shopping, the sears, the sizzles, the love.
Last winter’s carrots from Connected Chef’s lot
An Honest Attempt at Equity in the Home
Okay, so here’s what we do (for dinners mainly). Sunday we alternate cooking something that we’ve been wanting to try or that takes a while to make. We both find Sunday cooking to be therapeutic and love a sauce that takes a while or fresh pasta or something like that. Monday I cook and hopefully it’s as easy as heating whatever we enjoyed on Sunday up, maybe adding a pasta with sauce for the kids. We love us a taco Tuesday but deeply miss Nixtamal, a restaurant in Corona that had an outpost to pick up tortillas. Sometimes I’ll pick up tortillas near my Titi Guicha’s house on the southside of Williamsburg at For All Things Good. Wednesday it’s pizza night for the kids and we scrounge up whatever we can for ourselves. Maybe it’s more leftovers, maybe it’s a yogurt with honey and nuts. Thursday we’ll either cook something easy for the boys (scrambled eggs with defrosted black beans and cucumbers) or dine out in the neighborhood. Friday it’s Shabbat Dinner where for the past twelve years we’ve had an open invitation to our friends and family who may want to drop by. They’ll usually tell me on Wednesday or Thursday if they’re coming by. We alternate this but this is truly a meal I love to make. It could be an eggplant parm or a roast chicken or mushroom tacos or a BBQ, it depends on what produce I’ll have delivered from work and who’s eating. Saturday we’re eating out. That could mean more pizza for the kids or Greek or Nepalese. I’ll list some spots below.
The schedule that we’ll do our best to follow until someone gets the stomach flu or will only eat lollipops and yogurt.
Lunches during the week are covered by the kids schools, except for on Wednesday since my eldest child negotiated one packed lunch. I enjoy making it and if I forget, or my morning got away from me and I didn’t make it, I am comforted by the fact that he’ll eat at school. What he eats there and what is served in public schools in general is a whole other discussion that needs at least another 1,000 words and a gut check because as Stephen Satterfield put it, “because of the demands of capitalism and the ways in which our food system is set up, um, it's not always possible for our ideals to match our meals.” We, the parents of these public school kids, eat while we work from home. There are usually ingredients for a PBJ, salad, grilled cheese, or if I have time on Sunday I’ll make a tomato or lentil soup or vegan sancocho to have during the week.