A List of Meals My Kids Eat in a Day
It's more than just breakfast, lunch and dinner.
I write about food a lot here, and that frequently includes sharing meals that I have made. It’s a tentpole of the newsletter, but those showoff meals—those elaborate Sunday dinners or quick-but-delicious weeknight workhorses—those are just the tip of the iceberg (food pyramid?) here at Action Cookbook Estates. You see, I have two grade-school-aged children. They are lovely people, but they are also rapidly-growing people, and they require far more than three meals to sustain said growth.
Occasionally, a magazine will have a celebrity or food personality write a food diary, a chronicle of all the things they ate within a given day. My kids aren’t celebrities, but I thought I’d take a similar approach here today—breaking down their gustatory schedule for any given weekday.
Let’s review.
Breakfast
It’s the most important meal of the day, they say. Who? I don’t know. They. The people who say things.
The thing is, they’re right. How would I be able to start my workday without first getting frothed up into a righteous rage? Coffee just isn’t enough for me anymore. I need to get my heart rate into the 200s like I’m Jason Statham in Crank before I can properly do my job (sending emails).
Each morning, I will wake the children up and ask what they want for breakfast. I already know what they want for breakfast, but if I do not ask them, it will change, and with dire consequences for all. (But mostly me.)
Having taken their order, I will toast two frozen waffles to absolute perfection, apply the requested toppings, and place them in front of my now-dressed children. I will pivot to a few other necessary morning tasks—packing my lunch, making coffee, feeding the dog, making final edits on my newsletter. Then, I will look up twenty-five minutes later and realize that the kids (still sitting in front of their waffles) have not taken a single bite. It is a feeling much like realizing you loaded the dishwasher and put the detergent pod in last night, but never hit the start button.
I will then calmly and politely inform them that if they do not eat their waffles in the next four minutes, their father might die.
Second Breakfast
The kids attend a before-school program, and it provides free breakfast to all kids. I suspect this is where they are actually eating breakfast, but that is none of my business.
Morning Snack
My world revolves around snacks. It is the actual currency of my household; much in the way that some video games require you to stock up on gold or rocks or fruit or whatever, I must make sure that I have a full stock of Cheez-Its, overpriced granola bars and applesauce pouches, lest I be killed by orcs.
We keep these snacks in bins in our laundry room, and the kids know to collect their daily snacks themselves. I am merely incidental to this process, a distant benefactor like whatever rich weirdo is funding your favorite college’s athletics program. I am only noticed when I don’t deliver the goods, or get some wacky ideas about dried fruit.
School Lunch
Since COVID, our school district has provided free school lunch to all kids. I think that that’s wonderful; it’s an invaluable resource to many families, it (hopefully) ensures that no child is going through their school day hungry, and it removes the ugly financial stigmas associated with ‘free lunch’ and 'lunch account deficits’.
It should be the norm everywhere, because the absolute least we can do as a society is feed schoolchildren.
[steps off soapbox]
I also like it because it means I do not have to pack lunches for my kids.
Do I know if they are eating any of the lunches provided? No. Again: not my business.
The only times that I get actual confirmation that they have eaten lunch at school is when they inform me that it was pizza day, something they will tell me immediately after we have had pizza for dinner.
Class Birthday Party
Each of my kids has around two dozen kids in their class. There are roughly 180 days in a school calendar, and so this means that it will be someone’s birthday every day.
That math does not make sense, but lots of math does not make sense to me.
Math is also not my business.1
Second Snack
You know how in Back To The Future II, Doc Brown shows up wearing cool sunglasses in the newly-modified-with-futuristic-technology-from-the-year-2015 DeLorean, and instead of needing to scam terrorists out of plutonium to fuel it, he just throws some banana peels and beer cans into the Mr. Fusion and now the car can fly?
That is an elementary school-aged child’s metabolism. They eat nothing but Goldfish crackers, fruit leather and Pirate’s Booty and yet they grow stronger every day.
Meanwhile, I eat salads for lunch and I am aging like an American highway bridge. (My structural faults are visible to all, but it doesn’t seem like anything’s going to be done about it.)
I Am Hungry (Drive Home From School)
“What did you have for lunch today?”
“I don’t remember. Can we have a snack when we get home?”
I Am Hungry (Five Minutes Before Dinner Is Ready)
“I’m still hungry.”
“I’m making dinner right now.”
“But I’m hungry.”
[Don Draper voice] “THAT’S WHAT THE DINNER IS FOR.”
“What are we having?”
“We’re having [meal that should be perfectly acceptable to children]”
“Oh.” [brief pause] “What are the kids having?”
“Please leave now.”
Dinner
Dinner should, of course, be the actual most important meal of the day.
For me, it’s the largest—the one where I undo the minimal good achieved by my sensible breakfast and lunch by eating more than half of my day’s calories in the hopes it will cure the stress of the workday that has just ended. (It does not.)
For the kids, the experience of dinner is a bit like visiting a sample table at Costco, albeit one worked by a surprisingly-pushy employee. They will cautiously inspect what is being offered, take two bites, and then inform me that they are not hungry.
Dessert
“What’s for dessert?”
“You said you weren’t hungry.”
“That’s a different thing. I have room in my stomach for dessert.”
“You didn’t invent that, you know. I know you think you did, but I need you to understand that countless generations of children have tried that very same line of reasoning on their parents before you. I know this, because I tried it on my parents.”
“So can we have dessert?”
“… yes.”
I Am Hungry (Ten Minutes After Dinner)
You might think that dessert is the finale, but is actually the aperitif. It has stimulated their appetite, and now they are ready to eat dinner after sundown like some kind of European. At this point I will direct them to the well-stocked rack of fruit on our kitchen counter, which they will act like they have never seen before prior to grudgingly accepting a banana.
I Am Hungry (Ten Minutes Before Bed)
This is where the magic truly happens; they know that I will not allow them to retrieve an Actual Snack from the laundry room, nor will I authorize the concept of Second Dessert. (That is a privilege reserved only for the highest-ranking members of the family, and it can only be instituted after the children have gone to bed.)
They also know that I cannot suggest fruit, as they already had fruit in their eleventh meal of the day, roughly thirty minutes prior, and what kind of monster suggests eating two pieces of fruit in a day? Not me, if I know where my bread is buttered.
I will be forced to concede something here, mostly because I cannot send them to bed hungry for fear that they will get back out of bed after I have mentally clocked out from being a parent.
This moment is The Charcuterie Hour: short of all other options, I will offer them a slice of cheese or salami from the fridge.
They will eat it, and tomorrow they will be two inches taller.
—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)
As you may know, I am an architect. Often, upon being told that I am an architect, someone will remark “oh, you must’ve taken a lot of math in school!” I do not know where this misconception comes from but no, I do not have to deal with much math. That’s for the structural engineers to figure out, and I’m pretty sure they just use computers too.
I want to be clear about the genesis and veracity of this post: I wasn't sure what I was going to write about by dinnertime last night, but after Dessert, I'm Hungry (Fruit) and I'm Hungry (Salami), I was 100% sure by kid-bedtime.
Also, I did my final edits over breakfast this morning while periodically looking across the kitchen and yelling "EAT!"
Once when I was back from college I was standing in front of the cabinet just sort of idly staring at the food and I heard my mom sort of crying behind me. It took her back to me being much younger and doing _the exact same thing_ constantly, just staring at various foods waiting for the more lizardlike parts of my brain to decide what I'd be eating that moment. She also stopped cooking green beans for dinner for several years because they were my favorite vegetable.
Yes, I am the oldest child why do you ask.