When I first met Fanny Singer, we were graduate students living in the kind of housing where the batterie de cuisine is usually limited to one giant dented pot, or maybe a frying pan so scratched it resembles a Cy Twombly canvas. And still, Fanny would turn out meals so elaborate and thought-through, it was like you were attending a Michelin-starred restaurant. One Thanksgiving (as Americans living in the UK, we did that time-honored thing of hanging out with lots of other Americans), all the guests got hand-written menus, and we signed a magnum of red wine at the end of the meal. Fanny knew that it was always worth it to make a meal an occasion.
Fast forward a decade, and I found myself—serendipitously—living in the same neighborhood as her best friend, Greta Caruso, who, I found out, also knows how to set a table. “You have to wash them in hot water three times,” she whispered to me once, when I asked her how on earth she was able to maintain such pristine swathes of linen for her mile-long tables. They were humble painters’ drop cloths ordered off Amazon, she informed me, but you had to make them your own. Of course, her skill is not limited to what’s underneath the dishes, but the thought and love that is inside them. After college, she worked at the American Academy in Rome, sourcing local ingredients, and then worked on a farm back in the U.S. before founding the farm-to-consumer service Good Eggs in 2011.
Fanny and Greta know how to make a meal—any meal—something special. And with their new venture, the Green Spoon, they have set out to accomplish something perhaps more impressive than all their prior accolades: to gird the loins of frazzled parents everywhere and convince them that they can bring the wholeheartedness of lovingly crafted homemade cooking to their childrens’ plates. If you’ve been through the wringer of catering to a small person, you might be thinking, “Right… but they don’t know my petite dictator/schedule/allergy issues/choking paranoias.” But this is cooking with grace and flexibility. The desired destination is delicious and nutritious, but there are many “good enough” stops along the way, and no mandates that you stick to anything strict. A small triumph, once a week, is still a triumph. I am a mom of four with a decade of parenting under my belt, and yet I find myself regularly scrolling through the Green Spoon’s emails, thinking “Huh, I never thought of that.” If there is one thing our children teach us, it is that we are all always still learning.
The Green Spoon, Fanny and Greta tell me, was born of one such epiphany. The two were on vacation together in Italy around the time their daughters were starting solids. They visited a favorite local market expecting to encounter something akin to broccoli rabe, and were faced instead with the horrorshow that is most baby food. “It was like, pureed prosciutto, pureed vitello, pureed mortadella,” says Greta. She may be exaggerating a little, but as anyone who has ever faced ground-up, shelf-stable baby food that is somehow also “meat” can attest, her sketch of the supermercato shelves is not that far from the truth.
“That was really one of the underlying premises for Green Spoon,” says Fanny. “It struck us as so strange and bizarre that you would give your kids something that you yourself would not eat. You’d sooner wipe it off your jeans than put it in your own mouth if you got some on your hand. That felt insane.” Fanny, in addition to being the founder of the homeware line Permanent Collection and a cookbook author herself, is Alice Waters’s daughter, and she brings that background to her desire to guide her daughter’s palate. “I mean that not in a lofty way,” she says. “But to share an actual sense of taste at your family dinner table, to form your kid’s palate around the values that you have around food.”
Before they set off on that venture, the pair reached out to their network, asking how other parents had navigated cooking for kids, and the floodgates opened. Women, and some men, who felt many shades of shame related to the topic: shame for not making enough vegetables, shame over cooking the same thing all the time, shame over relying on boxed mac n cheese. One veggie-leaning parent confessed that it freaked her out a little how much her child was into meat. Should you “force” a child to eat? What does that even look like? (Again: kids are always their parents’ teachers.)
That chagrin outlined the underlying project of the Green Spoon: to give parents resources without adding to undue pressure. (One need look no further than “trad wife tutorials” on social media to realize that any domestic instruction can become another way to measure and evaluate parental success.) So Fanny and Greta are conscious of crafting recipes that are realistic, but they are also cultivating an awareness that the full picture of a child’s diet is more varied; there may be a salad with nasturtiums that will seem like something from a fairy tale, and there will be a meal consisting of crackers and hummus. Their Cub Street Diet, a loving riff on New York’s Grub Street Diet, has parents chronicling everything they feed to their kid in a week, is one of the Green Spoon’s most delightful features; a charming acknowledgment, told through handfuls of Cheddar Bunnies tossed willy-nilly into the backseat, that we are all trying our best.
I ask them about one of my parental cooking woes: I make something we’ve all deemed delicious in the past, and when it gets a second showing it’s pushed to the side of the plate. “Kids are mercurial,” says Fanny, “It’s about trying to remember that your kid's reaction to something is not them shutting it down forever. Just because your kid doesn't want to try avocado this week doesn't mean that they won't love avocado next week.”
In honor of Mother’s Day, we asked Fanny and Greta to put together a lunchtime menu of a kale salad with miso dressing, pasta with broccoli pesto, and “perfect chickpeas”—and invited some of their friends for a gathering. “Your daughter is sitting so nicely,” I said with disbelief, watching Greta’s child pluck chickpeas from her plate. “Well, we are on about minute six,” Greta responded.
Read the recipes: Gem salad with miso dressing (used here on kale), pasta with broccoli pesto, and “perfect chickpeas.”
In this story: makeup by Guelfo Altoe.
