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.

November 17, 2008
Crudités: This is my gift to you this Thanksgiving—the gift of your not cramming your pie hole with baked brie and grape-jelly meatballs right before you sit down eat the biggest meal of the year complete with a bucket of gravy, a basket of Aunt Willetta’s dinner rolls, and so many variations on the theme of glucose-in-a-crust that you have a sudden epiphany about pi, and how it goes on and on, forever and ever, or at least until you fall asleep on the couch with a small, pumkin-smeared plate still balanced on your knees. As our friend Megan used to say after the turkey and stuffing every year, “I’m doing a juice fast until the pies come out.”

So, here’s this: a way to start the meal on a lovely, light note; a way to be sure that you won’t be stuffed before you even begin; a way to give your kids lots of pleasant little jobs while they’re milling around; a way... Read More; 17 Comments

November 10, 2008
Gingerbread: This is just the kind of gingerbread you crave when dinnertime has suddenly become pitch-black and cold, as it now has, and you feel like it’s midnight all the time and like you’re up in Scotland drinking whiskey from the bottle and waiting for spring. It’s big, soft, and comforting, like the down comforter of the cake world, and it fills your house with the spicy, delicious smell of holiday baking, even on a regular old school night. Plus, it will take you no more than 10 minutes to get it into the oven, I promise. Or, as we say to the kids when we are quite sure about something but don’t want to get into it later, if there is, say, a surprise hurricane or earthquake, I almost promise.

The recipe is hand-written in my recipe binder, and when I was trying to figure out how properly to credit it, I naturally consulted my mother. “Is this your gingerbread?” I asked, and she said... Read More; 24 Comments

November 3, 2008
Tofu P.S.: For some reason, this photo didn't post with the others. Perhaps because I had suggested, for the caption, "I can bring home the tofu. Fry it up in a pan. And never never never let you forget you're a man." Maybe there's some kind of seventies-Enjolie-perfume-commerical screening function?
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November 3, 2008
Soy-Glazed Tofu: Doesn’t “soy-glazed” sound so lovely? It was either that or “pan-roasted tofu” or “butter-browned tofu”—the idea being, of course, to make it sound like it’s halibut at a fancy restaurant, not like it’s a one-pound block of quivering beany blandness. Ah, tofu. We eat a lot of it. It’s inexpensive, it’s incredibly good for you, our kids love it, and you can treat it like a blank canvas. Plus, it fills us with nostalgia for the early days of our great romance. Yes, welcome to another episode of Dalai Mama Dishes up memories of falling in love with her husband in a vegetarian co-op...

Speaking of which, if you’ve ever lived in a vegetarian co-op, then you know how easy it is to make tofu taste exactly like, er, tofu. Michael and I have eaten great panfuls of tofu parmesan, for example, that tasted like sauce and cheese that had... Read More; 40 Comments

October 27, 2008
Granola: I seriously considered adjusting the last photo here—and by “adjusting,” I mean, of course, blurring out the box of Corn Chex in the background. Because it’s a bit tricky to make the case for whole grains and whole foods, for investing in your family’s health in every possible way—time, money, the womanly art of persuasion—when the love of my life eats a bowl of Corn Chex every single morning. And by “every single morning,” what I mean is every single morning. Except weekends when we make pancakes or waffles—and then he eats Corn Chex for lunch.

Be that as it may, the rest of us like to start our school mornings with whole, unprocessed foods: oatmeal, eggs, or leftover soup sometimes, but mostly this granola. Yes, granola is a hippy cliché. Yes, when Michael and I lived in our vegetarian co-op, they delivered it to us in 1-ton... Read More; 35 Comments

October 20, 2008
Pot Roast: I understand that the words “pot roast” may inspire about as much excitement for you as the words “stool softener.” I get it, I do. Believe me. I was a vegetarian for sixteen years—in fact, Michael and I met when we were both living in the kind of hardcore vegetarian co-op where you had to have a house meeting every night about rennetless cheese. I get it. But then something happened to me, and no—it wasn’t bacon, although yes, bacon also happened to me. But what happened was that I got pregnant with Ben, at which point I leaned out my car window and bit into a passing cow. After sixteen years, the first meat I ate was no microscopic bit of lard in a can of pork and beans—it was a roast beef sandwich, at Berkeley’s Café Intermezzo, which may be, ironically, the most famous salad restaurant in the world. Sure I immediately regurgitated it onto the sidewalk of Telegraph Avenue—but that would have happened with the...
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