Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Posted September 07, 2007
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The kids are trying to guess what's in mochi. They're addicted to it, what with its texture like a cross between a biscuit and the ball of rubber cement you'd roll between your fingers after a major gluing project. I'm addicted to it too. Michael, on the other hand, always magnanimously offers us his share of little oozing squares -- we get the bake-and-serve kind from Whole Foods -- because he'd sooner tip his head back while you poured the rubber cement directly down his throat than choke down a piece of mochi. And "choke" really may be the operative word here. While I was writing this, I Googled "mochi," as a person might who was a distracted procrastinator, and I learned that during the New Year season in Japan, dozens of people a year choke on mochi. Apparently it's too sticky to be maneuvered Heimlichly, although rescuers have actually had some luck with a plain old vacuum cleaner. Or so I was reading.

Anyways, the two ingredients in mochi are water and rice, and while the evening outside our window is turning the heavy blue-green of early summer, the children guess. "Tell us one at least," Ben begs, so I tell them water. And they're stumped.

"Peanut butter?" Ben guesses, and I laugh. "Right color!" I say. "But no."

"Salt?" he says. This is a terrible guess! I don't say, "Um, duh, if the only two ingredients were salt and water, you'd get seawater." But I say, "Not even close."

"Wheat?"

"Close!"

"Paprika?"

"Less close!" Paprika-water biscuits! Get 'em while they're hot!

"Corn!" he says, and I say, "You're really on the right track!"

Birdy, who has been craned around to watch the sparrows mill around our feeder, turns back and cries, "Dead people!" And then cracks up at her own macabre sense of fun. "I'm on the wrong track, right?"

"Ew," Ben says. "I don't even really want to think about that!" And then, like a comedian, "Ack! I thought about it!" Me too. You can't help it, right? The shuttle running between funeral parlor and mochi factory, the enormous grinders. Or at least you can't help it now. "That was the wrong track, right Mama! Ha ha ha." Birdy is still laughing.

She does not seem to be growing any less peculiar. I love this age, four, where reason and lunacy spool through kids in equal measure. Birdy's mind is like one of those postmodern films where a giant pig makes pea soup with an eggbeater while everyone else does the hokey pokey. And the subtitles are whizzing by too fast. Ben, though -- if life's a movie, seven-year-olds are trying to follow every nuance of plot and soundtrack. And they just want to stay up to watch all the special features.

If Ben falls silent for even a second, you can be sure that a Great Wondering will follow. "If you piled up all the spider webs in the universe..." he is saying now. He has a faraway look, and is pantomiming this piling up with his hands. "Would it make a ball you could still tear apart with your fingers? Or would it be bigger than..." -- he holds his hands apart -- "five light bulbs?" "It would be much bigger," we say, and he says, "Bigger than a great white shark? Bigger than our whole house?" We really have no idea. I picture Yankee Stadium packed to the bleachers with sticky white fluff; I picture our town buried beneath webs. Michael meanwhile is busy explaining how all the insects in the world actually weigh more than every other animal put together. I picture all the mosquitoes crowded together on a gigantic bathroom scale, joking about their back fat. "How many tarantulas in a pound?" Ben asks, like he's buying them and we're shopkeepers: Tarantulas! Ten to a pound, four pounds for a dollar. He's picturing his own bodyweight in spiders: you can see it on his face. When I'm around the kids, that song, "Oh I wonder wonder wonder wonder who..." always loops around in my brain, but I just stop at the wonder part.

Birdy is just catching up. "That," she says -- and she's looking out the window again, watching a chickadee hop around like a wind-up toy -- "That is a lot of bugs. A lot of bugs, right Benny?" And he says simply, "Right."

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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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