Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Headlong into Spring (i.e. Asparagus with Brown Butter Sauce)

Posted March 08, 2010
The kids are thawing out outside in the thaw, riding their bikes around and around the dirt-breaded mounds of snow like they've emerged from hibernation with a craving for nothing but air. There are many things I miss during the long winter months--the dear sight of their arms and legs, for instance, or the way anybody's nose looks when it's not crusted with snot--but watching them now, out the window, I realize that I've been missing exactly this: the pleasure… Read More
17 people found this post helpful 12 Comments

Corn, Bean, and Barley Soup

Posted March 01, 2010
"You sound like an ad for a pressure cooker." This is Ben at the dinner table, and he's right. I do. I cannot stop talking about it. "I know," I say. "But seriously? Those beans were never going to soften without it. I mean, I cooked them for, like, a hundred hours in a regular pot and they were still tough as fingernails! They were like bean fossils from the Pleistocene era! They were like meteoric detritus from some other… Read More
11 people found this post helpful 20 Comments

Soft Pretzels

Posted February 21, 2010
For me, a soft pretzel is one of those Proust's-Madeleine type of foods that evokes a host of fragrant, salted, mustardy memories. Childhood, for one. In New York City, where I grew up, there were pretzel vendors every half dozen blocks or so, the air around them thick and smoky with the charring of something--either the pretzels themselves, or maybe the chestnuts that were sometimes roasting burntly nearby on a foil-lined grill. Summertime at the vending carts meant Italian ice:… Read More
15 people found this post helpful 57 Comments

Winter Blues

Posted February 15, 2010
Around the world, children are bursting with inspiration: their blood is aboil, they are pawing the ground, they are imagining their own bad selves in 4 years, 8 years, 12 years. They are going to shred the slopes! They are going to race like the wind! They are going to whiz past us in a latex blur, into their futures of speed and success! Not my children, of course. We bought one month of cable TV to watch the winter… Read More
5 people found this post helpful 18 Comments

Empanadas

Posted February 08, 2010
You know the kind of day where you're on the toilet, and you hear a splashy little plonk behind you, and for just a second you're afraid that the glasses that you pushed up onto your head so that you could rub cream into your face because you don't have time to be on the toilet doing nothing else--you're afraid for just a second that your glasses have slipped through your hair and fallen behind you into the actual contents… Read More
18 people found this post helpful 16 Comments

Walnut-Orange Cake

Posted February 01, 2010
It can be hard for families to let their members change. Have you noticed that? You will get an aquarium-themed calendar every year for the rest of your life because you had a neon tetra when you were ten. You will never be served orange juice again because you once threw it up in the car into a beach towel. In my family, I am still the person with a terrible sense of direction because I read a map wrong… Read More
10 people found this post helpful 6 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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