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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

Best Buttermilk Dressing

Posted June 22, 2009
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
8 people found this post helpful 8 Comments

Donut Cake

Posted June 15, 2009
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
11 people found this post helpful 18 Comments

Finger-licking Ribs

Posted June 08, 2009
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
58 people found this post helpful 10 Comments

Hummus Among Us

Posted June 01, 2009
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
6 people found this post helpful 8 Comments

Banana Muffins

Posted May 26, 2009
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

Rhubarb Crumb Bars

Posted May 18, 2009
We had my favorite kind of weekend--what is known around here as "a real weekendy weekend." Somehow there was time enough for absolute lolling--late breakfasts, pajama-clad board games ( Settlers of Catan is our new favorite), lackadaisical gardening (the kind where I pull weeds one-handed because I don't want to set down my beer), the pleasantly melancholy burying of the two Charlies (goldfish) who'd been in a freezer Ziploc since their respective December and February deaths, and B &… Read More
3 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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