Meet our other lunch mothers
Clara's recipe
(Left to right) Erica
Marianelli, Lesia Crognale, and Clara Dunlap.
Long before the school buses full of children arrive at St. Patrick
School, Clara Dunlap and some of her lunch crew are busy with the
earliest preparations for cooking baked ziti — the scheduled hot lunch
for the day. Clara and her team — Lesia Crognale, Erica Marianelli, Anne
Marie McCarthy, and Lou Ann Toto — are a handful of hundreds of moms,
grandmoms, and others who have worked as hot lunch volunteers at St.
Pat’s over the years. While the faces in the kitchen change as children
and grandchildren come and go through the school, a steady stream of new
volunteers is always at hand to fill the shoes of those who have gone
before.
This year, more than three dozen women, divided into 12 teams, provide a
hot meal for the children every Monday, Wednesday and Friday throughout
the school year. Meals vary from pasta dishes, to chicken pot pies, to
pizza — all favorite foods for the young people at St. Pat’s.
The school sends a list of scheduled meals home for families to review
every other month. The children and their parents select what they want,
then return the list to school so the lunch moms have an idea how many
children they will be serving on any given day.
Clara first volunteered to help with hot lunches when her granddaughter,
Alyson Marianelli, started kindergarten in 1991. Another granddaughter,
Sarah, arrived a few years later and is now in seventh grade. The school
children all have grown close to Clara.
“They are all my grandchildren,” she says, adding, “They call me Mom Mom
and they wave to me when they see me at Mass.”
Clara’s specialties are baked ziti, and spaghetti and meatballs, both of
which she prepares regularly.
Without prior experience cooking for a crowd, Clara’s earliest days in
St. Pat’s kitchen were a bit daunting, she remembers. Consider that it
takes more than 20 pounds of pasta to feed 160 or more children. “When I
started cooking here, the biggest pot we had could hold only two pounds
of spaghetti,” she says, “so we cooked, and cooked, and cooked, and
cooked.” Eventually the school purchased a huge pot that can cook five
pounds of spaghetti at once. The pot is designed especially for pasta
and comes with a strainer. Lifting the hot, heavy, dripping wet
spaghetti out of the huge pot to drain presents more challenges, she
says, but otherwise the big pot has been great.
When Clara first started in 1991, the school was serving the children
canned spaghetti sauce, she says. Accustomed to cooking sauce from
scratch in her own kitchen, she wanted to do the same for the
schoolchildren.
After speaking with the head food mom at that time, she received her
blessing and soon got to work making her own sauce. Clara’s homemade
sauce includes fresh chopped garlic, onions, basil, virgin olive oil,
and lots of locatelli cheese added to 40 to 50 pounds of tomato sauce
and puree!
Clara bought two big 20-quart-capacity saucepans and soon had started a
tradition that has continued all these years. For Clara and all the
other moms who work at St. Pat’s, preparing a hot lunch for the children
is a labor of love.
“The kids are asking me already — Mom Mom — when Sarah leaves St. Pat’s,
will you stay and cook for us?”
“Yes,” she answers. “If you pray to God and ask Him to give me good
health — I’ll be here.”
