Dalai Mama Dishes

Join Catherine as she crams meals into Ben, 8, and Birdy, 5 — and tries to understand why she feels like a better person when they eat.

January 5, 2009
Corn Chowder: As far as children are concerned, corn is less a vegetable than a kind of honorary pasta: its only real flavor is a kind of bland, Frito-y sweetness, and it also benefits from summery associations with picnic tables, long, late twilights, and dripping butter. Which is why, on a winter Sunday evening like this, when it’s cold and dark and Birdy has one of those cases of pink-eye that wakes her with a crusted-over blindness and a dread of the drops, well—it’s time for a little corn.

Okay, I didn’t actually think about it that hard. It was more that I opened the freezer, and there was corn. Despite our moderate commitment to eating seasonally and locally, I make an exception for frozen corn and also frozen peas, both of which are just so reliably good, I find. Plus, I almost never shop for meals: I am the kind of person who can... Read More; 5 Comments

December 29, 2008
Egg Noodles with Ham and Peas: I know that all you really want at this point is a recipe for a nice cold glass of seltzer. Believe me—I hear you. I’m like the Smurf balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, only what came out of the helium tank was actually mashed potatoes and linzer cookies and Prosecco. And yet the children still expect to be fed! It’s baffling. I want to say: My God, kids, haven’t you eaten enough? And yet, strangely, their bodies do not take a storage approach to meals. In fact, Ben just wandered past with 6 inches of ankles dangling bonily from beneath his pajama cuffs. It’s no wonder.

And so, in the likelihood that you are still wrangling a fridge full of leftovers into actual lunches and dinners, I’m giving you this easy, delicious pasta with ham and peas. It’s creamy and comforting, with a tiny bit of zing from lemon, and a tiny... Read More; 10 Comments

December 20, 2008
Maple Snow Taffy: To quote Christina Rossetti via Shawn Colvin: “Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow on snow…” In fact it is snowing still, snowing cats and dogs—very quiet cats and dogs. I look out the window, and snow is dumping torrentially out of the sky, utterly noiselessly. Don’t you love that?

And so the kids have a snow day—on the one single day of the year when they didn’t even want one, this last day before the holidays, with teacher gift bags packed and waiting by the door (Vanilla extract! Shhh. It will keep.), and Ben’s chorus due to perform at a nursing home, and a planned after-school skating party… Ben had even hastened downstairs last night to withdraw his spoon from the freezer, to throw an ice cube into the house, to turn his pajamas right side out—hoping in vain to undo all of his superstitious snow-making rituals, but here we are. And... Read More; 11 Comments

December 8, 2008
Vanilla Extract: What with the flailing economy and all, this just isn’t the year to give everybody ruby-encrusted martini shakers and a nice, tasteful bar of gold, like I’d planned. And yet it is, more than ever, a time for giving, isn’t it? For shoring ourselves up by saying, yes, here, there is abundance even now, if only in our hearts and loving intentions. So I’m offering you this good homemade gift idea, which does not require you to compensate for a lack of coin by devoting the rest of your life to, say, the tatting of a lace bed skirt. In other words, it’s fairly cheap and also really easy, and it’s something the kids can make all on their own for lucky teachers and grandparents. (If you happen to be a teacher or grandparent of anyone in my house, please practice feigning surprise thus: “Ooh, vanilla! How lovely!”) Plus, homemade vanilla extract is significantly more... Read More; 17 Comments

December 1, 2008
Carrot Salad: Hello! How was your Thanksgiving? Excuse me? WHAT? No. I still can’t hear you. Because somehow my cold has transformed itself into a waterbed that’s wedged inside my inner ear, and whatever’s left of my hearing is in there, napping.

But I know you’re not here to hear about the incessant popping or how I keep blowing my nose and clicking my jaw and cursing or how the children seem, for the first time in their lives, to be incapable of speaking loudly. WHAT? I keep saying, but their tiny pink rosebud mouths can produce only the daintiest petals of sound. WHAT?

I also know that you’re busy with your turkey carcass and various odds and ends of yams and cranberries, and this is hardly the time to offer you a fabulous two-day tutorial on puff pastry in 300 easy steps. And so I’m... Read More; 10 Comments