Hannah Selinger’s Grub Street Diet

Illustration: Sarah Kilcoyne

Hannah Selinger has spent the last decade writing about food and restaurant life. But long before that, she was a sommelier, and now that work has become the basis of her first book, Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly, which debuts next week, and which, last week, caused a food-world stir after journalist — and Grub Street contributor — Joshua David Stein deemed it “a mix of Joris-Karl Huysmans, M.F.K. Fisher, and Regina George” (now Selinger’s Instagram bio) in a harsh review for the New York Times. Selinger was quick to respond, attributing the review to a “mediocre white man” on her website. In between leftovers in her Boxford, Massachusetts, home, though, she says she’s already moved on: “I don’t give unethical, misogynist commentary on my work oxygen,” she says. “And I definitely don’t give it rent-free space in my head.”

Sunday, March 2 
I have thought long and hard about how to discuss the problem of coffee with my readership, but, in the interest of true transparency, I’m going to throw caution to the wind. This is, after all, an unveiling of my true preferences, and my true preference when I wake up every morning is a cup of Lavazza Super Crema, ground to order in a DeLonghi Dinamica automatic espresso machine, and then ruined, some might say, with an utterly grotesque amount (let’s say three to four tablespoons) of Coffee-Mate Sugar-Free French Vanilla Creamer.

I make green-olive cream cheese, at the request of my 6-year-old son, and we all eat bagels for Sunday-morning breakfast. I’m embarrassed to admit that I keep Thomas’ bagels in the house. They are bad — like, horribly bad — but I eat mine toasted with thinly sliced red onion on top.

We were supposed to go skiing, but it has been kind of a bummer of a season, between the unpredictable snow and high-wind warnings, so instead we’re staying home. My kids are temporarily occupied with my old Calvin and Hobbes, but they eventually get bored and ask me to cut up an entire cantaloupe. We eat the whole thing. Fruit doesn’t stand a chance in this house. I can’t walk into an H Mart without spending $50 on mangosteen, but that’s another story.

Now, I’m down to only apples and string cheese and stale Twizzlers in the fridge (I like them stale and cold), so I convince everyone to get dressed so that we can go to Trader Joe’s, which I already know is going to be crowded and horrible on a Sunday, but it gives me a chance to think about dinner. My kids pick all of the most expensive, out-of-season fruit they can find, like blueberries and raspberries and a white strawberry that TJ’s markets as a pineberry and another cantaloupe, obviously; I also grab a cold-pressed pineapple juice so that I can chug it in the parking lot.

When we get back home, I make Kraft macaroni and cheese for my kids. I eat several spoonfuls out of the pot and then eat three giant leftover turkey meatballs from a few nights before.

For dinner, I make minestrone soup, a riff on the old Mollie Katzen recipe from the Moosewood Cookbook. This is not a seasonal soup. There is no reason to make it in March. It’s made with eggplant, green pepper, zucchini, and other things that are definitely not grown here. But it’s also a way to get vegetables into my family members, and I’m a fan of anything that can be cooked in one pot (two if you count the pasta, which, fine, I cook separately).

My husband and I turn on the Oscars, and I decide that I haven’t had enough to eat. Thankfully, we have pigs in a blanket in the freezer. I eat them with an enormous side of French’s yellow mustard. I have no idea why I don’t have heartburn.

Monday, March 3
I wake up extremely thirsty, so the first thing I do is pour myself a giant glass of ice water. I follow this up immediately with my good-bad coffee. I’m usually hungry in the morning, but the effect of eating 20 pigs in a blanket at 9 p.m. has curbed my morning appetite. Around 8, I stand outside in the freezing cold with my kids at the bus stop.

Mondays are big admin-task days for me. Eventually, I look up, and it’s suddenly 10:30 and I need to eat. Avocados and eggs are almost always my fallback when this happens. I mash one entire avocado very quickly with the back of a spoon, add salt (kosher, Morton, if you must know), ground pepper, and Frank’s Red Hot, and then top it with an egg that I very briefly fry. I eat all of this standing over the stove, with more Frank’s and, yes, a spoon. And I do not do the dishes.

About an hour later, I’m back in the kitchen, hand in my stash of Trader Joe’s dark-chocolate peanut-butter cups. I’m actually not a huge fan of peanut butter, and I don’t ordinarily like peanut-butter-flavored desserts, but there’s something about the texture of these and the ratio of chocolate to filling. I also eat a chunk of a torn baguette, not yet stale. I try to put butter on it, but realize that the butter that I keep on the counter tastes weird. I spend an inordinate amount of time Googling “can rancid butter give you food poisoning?” before deciding that I’m fine.

When my kids come home from school at 3, they are ravenous. One of them wants plain Cheerios with milk (hard pass), and the other wants grapefruit. I cut myself a giant pink grapefruit, too, and add a diabetes-inducing amount of sugar to it.

For dinner, it’s seared chicken thighs cooked over rice with a really lemony, mustardy, shallot-y salad on the side, inspired by a dinner I recently ate at Bernadette in Salem. (I add some thinly sliced cucumbers, rainbow carrots, and halved grape tomatoes for contrast, but it’s mostly just a red-leaf-lettuce mix with a whole bunch of dressing.)

I’m out of parsley, so I also make a gremolata with lemon zest, garlic, and coarsely chopped grilled green olives that I got as a holiday gift, and it’s a really nice, bright contrast with the salty, fatty chicken. The olives have these tiny little grill marks on them, like the kind you find at the bazaars in Turkey, but I’m pretty sure these are from HomeGoods. Bonus points, because my kids eat most of the food groups here (olives, rice, chicken, cucumbers, tomatoes), although they will not touch lettuce, unlike my Russian tortoise, Gromit, who dines on it exclusively. I eat this all with a very cold and crispy Diet Coke in a double-walled Tervis tumbler that says Kiawah Island on it, which is super-ugly but also the only vessel in my house that reliably keeps my drinks cold.

I have to catch up on The White Lotus and Saturday Night Live, and I do both, predictably from my couch, surrounded by three different flavors of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams because I can’t make a decision: Coffee With Cream and Sugar, Brambleberry Crisp, and Wildberry Lavender.

Tuesday, March 4
My mother, who has been a practicing trial lawyer for 45 years, is arguing her final case today, and she has invited me to come watch. I have to get to Salem, where the Essex County Probate and Family Court is, by 10, so I’m front-loading my morning. My mother has sent me a warning over email about court, telling me that I must wear “appropriate” dress, must silence my cell phone, and can only use my computer if I am “not typing,” which seems kind of pointless, but who am I to argue with the finely honed American judicial system.

Anyway, I slam back my terrible and delicious coffee, take the kids down to the bus stop, and then spend about ten minutes worrying about how hungry I will be for the rest of the day before eating last night’s wilted leftover salad out of Tupperware while standing in front of the refrigerator. I chase it with a small glass of tart cherry juice, which I am not drinking for my health.

It should be said that I am allergic to food waste. First of all, I love eating leftovers, and second of all, I really try my best to turn myself into a rodent and eat whatever has not yet turned totally foul in my house. So I feel pretty good about eating that wilted salad, until, like, two hours later, when I discover that, no, salad is not a great breakfast choice when you’re going to be sitting in a courtroom for the entire day. But I digress.

I get to Salem on time, but, as it turns out, the other attorney has called an extra witness, so my mom gets her argument pushed back until after the lunch break. You can’t bring food into the courthouse, but she’s smuggled a bunch of snacks into her trial bag, which turn into lunch for both of us: three tiny bags of Snyder’s pretzels and one of Famous Amos cookies. Plus a bottle of water.

The testimonies take until the end of the court day, at 4:30, at which point I feel like I’m going to faint from hunger. I’m also suffering from the first whiff of a migraine. Luckily, I’m meeting my best friend, Jessika, to cover a restaurant for a magazine. It’s Sarma, in Somerville, and after traffic, I arrive just in time for our reservation.

At the restaurant, since not having eaten for much of the day has messed with my brain, I order enough for five people: pork ribs al pastor with an avocado crema and salad of tomatoes and peppers; a French onion tzatziki dotted with plump mushrooms; savory-sweet Black Sea cornbread, which is cooked to the texture of pudding and served inverted on the plate, like a little dome; mushroom manti in a porcini-yogurt sauce beneath a poached egg that drools yolk when you cut it; and dukkah-spiced shrimp satay, cloaked by chopped peanuts, kumquats, and chopped cucumbers. A server comes around with a tray of the night’s special: crispy pucks of fried chicken over a tahini remoulade made with yogurt and pickles and a bunch of herbs. I say “yes” to that, too.

I have to drive home, so I order a nonalcoholic cocktail — date syrup, Baharat spice mix, lemon and grapefruit juices — and Jessika gets a glass of Txakolina. She’s vegetarian, so she adds to my already questionable order of a bunch of vegetable dishes that I can’t eat because they have tree nuts in them. Obviously, I cannot skip dessert, so I get the ricotta loukoumades with halva caramel and the pavlova. The latter comes deconstructed in a tiny mason jar: meringue, blood-orange custard, and chewy cubes of Turkish delight. The restaurant basically has to roll us out.

Wednesday, March 5
Bad coffee. Bus stop. Something about that huge meal the night before has had the reverse effect, making me ravenous, so I take out the leftover shrimp I brought home, toast two pieces of baguette, and pour the saucy shrimp over it, and honestly, it is one of the most delicious things I’ve eaten this week.

I’m instantly parched from doing this, though, so I grab one of those Tervis tumblers, extra ice, and a full glass of tart cherry juice. For what it’s worth, apparently this whole thing is entirely predictable behavior for me. Later in the afternoon, I get a message from Jessika: “I was going to text you on my way to work and ask if you were already eating out of a brown cardboard box.” (I ate off a plate, but whatever.)

Late in the morning, I have to go over to the Apollo Sunrise Center in Merrimac to discuss a writing program it is launching that it wants help with. It’s a gray, wet day, and I drink a cup of English breakfast tea (no sugar) during my meeting. Then it’s back to my desk for a writerly meal of stale Twizzlers from my refrigerator and original nacho-cheese-flavored Doritos, which I procured from CVS on the way home, and which RFK Jr. can pry from my cold, dead hands.

I’ve invited my mother over for dinner, because she’s headed out of town for a few weeks. I find a vacuum-sealed pork loin in our pandemic-purchase chest freezer that I know won’t take much effort to get on the table later in the evening. (My husband defrosts it using the Anova sous vide thingy that we pretty much exclusively use as a defroster at this point.)

I don’t have time to do another round of grocery shopping, so it’s one of those shop your own cupboards situations. Here’s what I find: yellow onions, shallots, rainbow carrots, four Yukon Gold potatoes, a red-leaf-lettuce mix, about a cup of grape tomatoes, and a few errant cucumbers. Here’s what I make: roasted potatoes, carrots, and onions with olive oil and lemon zest; a salad with another round of lemon-mustard-shallot vinaigrette; and a pork loin slathered in Dijon mustard and one of those tiny Bonne Maman jars of blueberry jam that I must have taken with me from a hotel stay. The mustard-jam mix caramelizes on the fat cap and gives it this sweet, crackling quality. I’m into it.

My husband opens a bottle of Amarone with dinner. I drink very little these days, owing to migraines, but I do have a small glass. More important, for dessert, I heat up four little apple-caramel tartlets that were sent to us as part of my husband’s Omaha Steaks holiday package from work. These are incredibly delicious, with really flaky crusts, and I’m not even an apple dessert person. I add a scoop of Jeni’s Coffee With Cream. I eat two because no one else seems to be interested.

Thursday, March 6
Yes, I do repeat the routine of coffee and bus stop, but instead of putting it off, I make breakfast right away: two long pieces of that increasingly stale baguette (still kicking!) with a lot of salted butter (this time from the refrigerator, because I have learned my lesson) beneath a fried egg. Eat ’em if you got ’em.

I have interviews for much of the morning, so I have a lot of prep to do in my office, and that takes me right through to the middle of the day. Thankfully, I don’t have to think much about lunch, because there is still minestrone soup left in the fridge, so I heat some of that up and eat it with two peanut-butter cups. Oh, and a Country Raspberry Clearly Canadian, which I don’t actually finish, because I’m not that into it.

Last year, Nowhere, Massachusetts, got our own New Haven–style pizzeria: Sally’s Apizza. It’s about a half-hour drive from my house, but my family has gotten used to me schlepping them all over creation for meals.

We order two pies, both large, cheese for the kids and black olive and fresh basil for my husband and me (I want mushroom; he says it’s too watery; he is wrong). He also gets pepperoni on one half. When you walk in, you can watch the pizzaiolos sliding the pizzas into the coal oven, but, weirdly, my kids’ favorite part is the storage section where they just stack up bags of coal, like Christmas in reverse.

I also order a birch beer (fountain), an appetizer order of meatballs, and another appetizer of Calabrian-spiced shrimp that is topped with lemon and bread crumbs. My kids eat their entire large pizza, and my husband and I eat most of ours. There are three slices left at the end, all without pepperoni. I think they’ll make an excellent breakfast.