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Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Asian-style Chicken Salad

Posted 4 days ago
You can hardly even *see* the cabbage under all that yummy fun stuff!
This is the time of year when people who don't do Community Supported Agriculture--aka a "farm share"--are laughing all the way to the Farmer's Market or grocery store. It's late June, you think to yourself. What does our family like to eat? You might choose a lovely quart of strawberries, a dinner's worth of sugar snap peas, and a sweet little head of butter lettuce, and tote it all happily back to your dinner table, confident in the meal you are about to set out for your family. Meanwhile, we of the CSA farm share are lugging home sacks of turnips ( The summer's first! Phew, because we are practically running out of our winter-share turnips.) and radishes and patty-pan squash and--the reason for this column--a head of napa cabbage that would make too much coleslaw for a family reunion of giants.

Now, don't get me wrong--our CSA, where we go weekly all summer to pick and pick up… Read More
5 people found this post helpful 5 Comments

Best Buttermilk Dressing

Posted 1 week ago
Ben, snipping chives with scissors, after we recovered from seeing a SNAKE! A SNAKEI SNAKE! in the herb garden. It was about four inches long, and we screamed our heads off for ten minutes.
When it comes to salad dressing, the world really splits into people who have worked food service jobs and people who haven't. So, for example, if you have ever scrubbed dishes in a restaurant kitchen or prepped for the dinner rush work or balanced a dozen salads on a tray in a crowded café, then a whiff of ranch dressing is like Proust's madeleines: it will instantly catapult you into that time in your life when salad dressing left greasy… Read More
6 people found this post helpful 6 Comments

Donut Cake

Posted 2 weeks ago
Grating whole nutmeg on a little grater is a fragrant and lovely job for a child.
Maybe it's really just frosting I don't like, which is nuts. Even a frosting-shunner like me can see how crazy that is. Frosting! Who doesn't like frosting but a grayly parched crone in a gloomy, turreted house, the one who gives neighbor kids the evil eye while she's outside calling to her dozens of many-toed cats? I know. Believe me. But I tend to think it's desserts altogether I don't like, but then I go completely wild for plain cake.… Read More
9 people found this post helpful 17 Comments

Finger-licking Ribs

Posted 3 weeks ago
. . . and after.
Yes, I am the kind of person who plies you with eggs and hummus for weeks on end in my cheap, de-facto vegetarian way, and then throws you this pricey, carnivorous curve ball. That's how it is for me in the duck-duck-goose of dinner preparations. Sometimes the fact of an early June Friday evening with friends just feels like cause for celebration.

Plus, well, ribs. Ribs were for Michael what bacon was for me: the gateway meat as… Read More
17 people found this post helpful 10 Comments

Hummus Among Us

Posted June 01, 2009
I wish I could take credit for that gorgeous vibrantly-hued pepper dip, but it actually came out of this jar. Michael and I loved it. The children scooped some up and touched their tentative tongues to it. Each claimed to be "not a big fan."
It all started with a pita the size of a car tire. No. It started before that, in Target, where I'd taken the kids on an errand, even though it was such a beautiful Sunday morning, and driving to the mall was a strange and guilty pleasure. But a "quick" trip to Target is about as likely a "quick" trip to Kathmandu. Finding what we were looking for was easy--though I have to be cagey about it, since it's for… Read More
5 people found this post helpful 8 Comments

Banana Muffins

Posted May 26, 2009
Birdy learning the patented "scoop and bloop" method.
When I taught creative writing at UC Santa Cruz, I used to start the semester with a free-write on oatmeal: 15 minutes of pen-to-paper disgorging about comfort and obligation, about the scrubbing of burnt pot bottoms and the brown-sugar smell of home. And I'm thinking that when I teach again, I'm going to do the same exercise, but with bananas.

Find me someone who doesn't have an opinion about them. Really. Birdy bites into a banana with the kind… Read More
4 people found this post helpful 10 Comments
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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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