Years ago, I was obsessed with this series by Grub Street where chefs, authors, and author celebrities would share everything that they ate over the course of a couple of days. A fascinating voyeurism! I’ve published a few of my own versions over the years and thought I’d reprise the conceit today. A fun twist on a “DITL” post.
Wednesday
7:25 a.m. The usual kale smoothie, taken to-go, for school drop-off. Landon and I alternate between who takes the “first thing” shift (wake, rouse the kids, prepare breakfast and smoothies, unload the dishwasher, oversee everything until the other parent takes over to handle dropoff) every two days. We’ve been making this green smoothie every morning for years now — 20g kale, 1.5c ice, 1/2 avocado, 1 banana, 3/4c orange juice, 1/2c water, placed in the Vitamix in exactly that order. (Otherwise the ice/kale don’t blend up as easily.) I’m never hungry first thing, but a smoothie is the perfect start to the day — icy, fruity, mildly virtuous thanks to its fiber and protein content.
10:30 a.m. Coffee with half and half and sugar. I prefer to drink my coffee earlier but postpone it until after my run on exercise days. I hate the feeling of running with coffee sloshing around in my stomach – ha! I am famished after my workout, so I make a small yogurt bowl — plain, full-fat yogurt from Pequea Farms, raspberries from Landon’s garden (still yielding!), a few slices of banana (I always feed Landon the discarded half — ha — he calls himself “the family trashcan” as he hates to waste food and will finish odds and ends like this), Michele’s Salted Maple Pecan granola, a drizzle of honey, and and a heavy sprinkling of cinnamon. I like to eat this with a very small spoon in tiny bites (the best bites involve banana) out of this exact bowl. It’s the perfect shape and size and depth for breakfast foods like this, and, when emptied, looks like a robin’s egg. Charming reward!
12:30 p.m. Tahini caesar salad from Tatte with my parents! Small but meaningful life pledge: make lunch dates with your parents as often as you can in your adult years. Landon — who was invited, but had other business to attend to — bemoans my absence from our standing lunch date by giving me playful grief when I return home: “I hope you had a great time at your extravagant lunch while I polished off the leftovers…” (His lunch: last night’s Mama Chang’s vegetable fried rice, shrimp with snow peas, and dumplings.)
2 p.m. Desk candy (from BonBon NYC). One of my preferred and private acts of whimsy.
7:30 p.m. Family dinner: halibut with corn, tomatoes, scallions in a deliciously fragrant broth, wrapped in parchment. One of my favorite dishes Landon makes. Today is the first day of fall, but Landon hadn’t made this summertime dish all season, so he claims he’s “slipped it in right at the buzzer.” Side salad of avocado dressed in a garlic-lime vinaigrette, served alongside thin segments of grapefruit, topped with tarragon from Landon’s garden.
9 p.m. An Alec’s ice cream culture cup.
Thursday
7:25 a.m. Smoothie.
8:30 a.m. Pumpkin spice oat latte at a morning meeting with a fellow creative! Hello, world! I will indulge in this seasonal treat maybe 2-3x per autumn, and today — with its crisp, 58 degree weather — felt like the day.
12 p.m. Landon made a big Staub full of escarole, Virginia ham, and bean soup. It’s salty, silky, satisfying. Strange to admit, but I love the mouthfeel and aesthetic of a wilted green in a soup, and the small bites of chewy ham add interesting dimension. I joke that “the Shoops love cruciferous vegetables.” (We started the day with kale; why not middle it out with escarole?). We have some slabs of outrageously delicious sesame sourdough from Manifest Bread, based in Riverdale, MD. They sell it at our favorite grocer/butcher, The Organic Butcher; Landon agonizes over the fact that the loaf cost $16. $16 for bread! However, it is very good bread, a lovely and necessary foil to our soup lunch, made even better by an unimpeded amount of Kerrygold butter, topped with flaky Maldon salt. In my opinion, soup is the most poetic and perfect lunch. I could eat it every day. I love that it’s sustaining, satisfying, and yet doesn’t leave you loaded down. I like to show up hungry for dinner.
4 p.m. Made banana muffins out of the sad huddle of browned bananas on our counter. One hazard of our daily smoothie addiction: inventory management for items that go brown or bad quickly. We’ve learned that avocados “cellar” well in the fridge, but need to stay on top of how early and often to remove one or two to the countertop so that they’re soft enough for the smoothie. The bananas are tougher to manage. We try to purchase a small ripe bunch and a small unrripe bunch and parcel out over the course of a few days. Every now and then, we misjudge. Hence the banana bread (I use this recipe — the best for autumn! — and use these bakery-style muffin liners and this cheering tin). I sample half of one when they’re fresh from the oven. Delicious.
9 p.m. Home on the late side after a parent education event for my daughter’s faith formation classes (CCD) at my parish. Landon was out coaching baseball until 7, too, and so he fed the kids separately and ordered us a sausage-and-pepper pizza and caesar salad from Andy’s, which — in my opinion — is the best pizza in Bethesda.
10 p.m. A few spoonfuls of Alec’s brown butter peach cobbler. We are really impressed with this new ice cream brand — the flavor of the dairy they use is amazing. On par with Van Leeuwen!
Friday
7:25 a.m. Smoothie.
10:30 a.m. Another late coffee, but Landon and I had a back to school morning at my daughter’s school and didn’t have time beforehand! We enjoy it at the kitchen counter with banana muffins while debriefing.
12:30 p.m. Soup and Manifest Bread, encore. Blood orange spindrift.
4 p.m. A few spears of melon and a couple handfuls of Kettle Corn (Amish Country brand) while supervising my daughter and three of her soccer teammates before practice. (We set out a spread of blueberries, apple slices, melon, and pumpkin muffins, which the girls devoured before requesting kettle corn and other miscellany from the snack pantry.)
5:30 p.m. A Jovencourt daiquiri. Landon mixed two up for a Friday night round of Wingspan. My daughter is still at soccer (hallelujah for mom friends who offer to take turns handling practice drop offs / pick ups), and my son is playing Pokemon Pokopia in the neighboring room.
7:30 p.m. One of my best friends from college has invited me and two other good friends over to watch “Practical Magic” and enjoy “sninner.” Her husband assembled a projection screen in their living room, and she’s decked out the house with Halloween decorations. We pay attention to approximately three minutes of the movie and spend the rest of the time catching up and enjoying the cheese board, mini chicken tacos, and other snacks and treats. I have some Early Mountain Foothills wine. My friend is a wine club member there and always keeps bottles on hand. I love this blend; Landon and I also often buy it at Organic Butcher. It’s easy-drinking and cab franc forward, which is one of my favorite red wine varietals.
Saturday
8:30 a.m. Because it’s Saturday! A later-start smoothie, followed almost immediately by coffee and one of the muffins, which are now a little long in the tooth, and must be eaten.
9:30 a.m. A few bites of melon while packing the kids lunches. We are taking Emory to her soccer game way out in Maryland and they’ll need to eat in the car, en route. We will only be gone for three hours, but if you were to guess based on the amount of food I pack for the two of them in my LL Bean Tote, you’d assume we were embarking on a 24 hour road trip with no food stops planned. In addition to their lunches of peanut butter and banana, sliced veggies, and melon, there are Kind granola bars (a current hyperfixation among my kids — we’ll see how long this lasts; I’d put it at a 90% likelihood that as soon as I order them in bulk, they’ll lose interest), Chomps, Popcorners, Made Good granola balls, mini peanut butter crackers, apples. Much of this is depleted by the time we return.
12 p.m. LMNT – pink lemonade flavor. I normally drink these on exercise days and am ambitiously hopeful that drinking this will force me to work out later in the day. I have been disciplined about running every other morning for the past few weeks, but this week has been a little out of sorts because of the back to school morning yesterday and my daughter’s game today.
1 p.m. Half of an Italian sub from Gemelli’s Italian Store in the car on the way home. A perk of the trek out to this particular soccer field: there is a wonderful Italian shop nearby.
2 p.m. Cup of English Breakfast tea, one Italian butter cookie, also from Gemelli’s. Exercise does not appear to be in the cards for today.
6 p.m. Cosmopolitan. I am on a huge cosmo kick, out of nowhere. I’m not a vodka girl (prefer gin), but have been finding these extremely appealing this year. Landon is appalled by the way I make mine — I like to overshake to the point that there are ice chips in the cocktail and it’s really frothy. I mentioned this on Instagram recently (along with Landon’s censure of the matter), and someone said “no, this is a thing! It’s called ‘making it skate’ — you can order a martini this way at a bar and it will come really icy.” So, there. I suppose I like to make my cosmos skate.
8 p.m. Landon has made Missy Robbin’s ricotta ravioli in red sauce from scratch. He hesitated in this plan earlier today because we’ve enjoyed pizza, Italian soup, and Italian subs this week, and he likes to vary the cuisine, but I disabused him of his apprehensions. (I could eat Italian every day of the week!). My kids gobbled it up, along with peas and fruit (we always offer both a veg and fruit at dinner) and a small serving of the most outrageously delicious caraflex cabbage dish Landon makes. First of all, do you know about Caraflex Cabbage? It’s like the cabbage of our youth had a glow up. It is sweet, tender, more mild in flavor. Landon steams the cabbage whole and then quarters it and crisps up the cut sides to the point of charred in a cast-iron skillet. Then he drizzles with an achovy-garlic butter. Holy cow. It is lights out delicious. We polished off an entire half of the head of cabbage between the two of us. The kids choked down a few bites — I get it, cabbage is an advanced flavor — but it meant more for us. We enjoyed the dinner alongside a glass of red wine.
I’ll pause there. What have you been enjoying on your menu lately?
Post-Scripts.
+The stove works for you, and other lessons from the kitchen.
+Landon’s buttermilk biscuit recipe.
+Some of the Magpie community’s favorite cookbooks.
+Six nights in London with kids (where we stayed, what we ate, etc).
Shopping Break.
+Thanks to the Magpie who let me know these perfect brown utility pants I’ve been wearing all the time are restocked in petite as well as regular inseam lengths! Use code JS15. Run TTS.
+I ordered myself these shearling-lined boat shoe mules and…I’m obsessed. They look SO good with a pair of ankle-length jeans and a cozy sweater (<<the exact outfit I wore to my friend’s house to watch “Practical Magic,” along with this scarf, this bag, and this jacket.)
+On the subject of the bag. I’m literally in love with this bag. She’s petite but full of personality, deeply on-trend, and such a cool and unexpected shape. Can fit (barely) over the shoulder, but looks coolest in the crook of the arm. Holds the perfect amount of things. I love this brand. I also own one of their Charlie bags in brown suede (so, so chic and different), and their $118 Tokyo shoppers sold out earlier this season but were recently brought back. I’ve also seen this nylon sling bag styled to perfection.
+People have been raving about these Citizens’ Winslow jeans, and they just came out in a fabulous brown wash on the Citizens site…! I also discovered these jeans come in a petite inseam…!
+Speaking of Citizens, these sweats have the coolest shape. I saw a mom wearing them on the sidelines this weekend! I own in brown. Run a bit big. Quince has a compelling look for less.
+My other favorite sweats (different silhouettes for different needs/moods): these slim fit ones (the material is 10/10) and these cropped ones. (BTW, has anyone tried their new “trouser sweatpant”? Use code CHEERS).
+Treated my “writing garret” to these nesting trays. The pattern and colors reminded me of the cover of Small Wonders!
+Corduroy shirts are having a moment. I see them everywhere. I like them either tucked into jeans with a 90s style belt OR worn open with a pointelle tank.
+Um, this mosaic comforter looks divine…! I want to curl up in bed beneath it right now. (It’s rainy and perfectly fall.). I also randomly came across a code for B&B this weekend — try FALL20. I think there might be a min spend of $250 or something. A great opportunity to treat your fall bed to the ultimate upgrade (I’m sorry, can’t stop raving about this! Truly one of my favorite things!)
+New Varley I’m obsessed with!
+Treated myself to a new Julia Amory toiletry set for my fall travel. These are PERFECT. Roomy sizes, lined, have pockets in the interior, can be tossed into laundry when dirty (dry inside out), and have luxe finishes (like a glossy gold zipper). I’d been waiting for a good pattern! Love this one. Use code JEN-15.
+25% off this perfect denim barn jacket.
+Two Anthro finds Magpies have been loving: this look-for-less for a The Great cardigan and this $58 bandana scarf.
+Just got Landon a new half-zip and pair of joggers from Rhone. These are THE best looking loungewear pieces for men. Run TTS. Use code SHOOP20.
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