At the end of a midday Mass at St. Catherine-by-the-Sea in Ventura, a line of hungry nuns — some in veils, a few in festive holiday sweaters and at least one wearing a Notre Dame hoodie sweatshirt — heads down the hall and into the convent’s dining room.

There, packed on ice, a tub of red, sugar-free Jell-O awaits them, a lunchtime nod to the fact that several of the sisters have dietary concerns as they enter their 80s and 90s.

But retired nuns do not live by flavored gelatin alone. So it is that, thanks to a trio of convent-staff chefs — two of whom last worked at well-known restaurants — the sisters’ daily meals now resemble those of a gourmet restaurant, right down to the preference for fresh, local ingredients over commercially canned or frozen ones.

That the featured dishes must also be relatively healthy and, frankly, cheap, almost goes without saying. Except that Kevin Ryan, a veteran of the kitchens at Jonathan’s at Peirano’s and Nona’s Courtyard Cafe in Ventura, says it anyway.

“With food prices going up, fresh and local is less expensive than processed stuff, and you know exactly what’s in it in terms of how much sugar, how much salt,” he says.

In addition to bringing in ingredients from purveyors such as Challenge Dairy in Ventura and Produce Available of Oxnard, the convent — a retirement residence for Sisters of the Holy Cross, which has its home base in South Bend, Ind., near Notre Dame — also grows some of its own food.

Outlined by Poli and Catalina streets and Foster Avenue, the grounds include a garden planted with fig, apricot, avocado, persimmon and citrus trees. There is at least one vegetable bed, with room for more.

One of the sisters is a newly minted master gardener who raises worms for composting; she feeds them vegetable trimmings that Ryan grinds up and saves for her in a container labeled “gourmet worm food.”

‘The health benefits of tiramisu’

Back in the kitchen, Ryan and his fellow chefs have taken to ordering large cuts of beef and whole chickens that can be “broken down” on the premises, saving money over the pre-packaged, individually frozen alternatives, he says. The switch also has helped usher in a new era of homemade soup stock. Set at a near-permanent simmer on the stove is a pot of water into which Ryan tosses bones and meat trimmings along with vegetable peelings; several hours later, the concoction is strained for stock that then goes into soups like ginger-carrot, a hit recipe from his days at Jonathan’s.

“Some of the nuns are retired from missions spent almost entirely in Bangladesh or Africa, and it’s fun for them to be able to have foods they might not have had there,” says Sister Linda Bellemore, coordinator of St. Catherine-by-the-Sea. “Others are well-versed in different foods. All enjoy the socialization that comes with sitting around the table together. And with the quality of chefs we have, we certainly don’t have to go out to eat.”

On this day, for example, the lunch menu includes chicken breasts that have been butterflied, breaded with a mixture of toasted almonds, trans fat-free panko bread crumbs and a few pinches of ginger and garlic, then pan fried in a blend of olive and canola oils. Side dishes range from a Mediterranean salad topped with crumbled feta cheese to a colorful blend of sauteed peppers, squash and carrots.

And for dessert? Served just a couple of times a week, the sweet final course is diners’ choice of an orange from the orchard or an oatmeal-topped square of berry crisp made using fruit picked and frozen on the premises last summer. A third option, baked in honor of visitors, is a slice of chocolate Bundt cake drizzled with ganache, an icing of cream and melted chocolate.

Seated at a table in the dining room furnished with a piano and a Christmas tree covered in angels, Sister Bellemore considers her slice of Bundt cake. “What are the health benefits of tiramisu?” she asks with a laugh. “Because we like that, too.”

Someone’s in the kitchen

After earning his culinary chops during the 22 years he spent in the military, lead chef Harold Sanders approaches the task of making sure the 28 sisters living at St. Catherine-by-the-Sea have something to eat three times a day with, well, military precision.

Menus for the coming month are detailed on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet; a peek reveals that, on Christmas Day, the nuns will be dining on New York strip loin and a gratin of Yukon Gold potatoes, Gruyère cheese and caramelized onions.

Sanders wears a Bluetooth hooked over his left ear at all times, the better to be in constant contact with food suppliers calling about price fluctuations. The device glints in the light as he helps a sister who uses a walker carry her lunch plate from the self-service buffet to a dining room table.

“We always try to put out a meal that is cost-effective and delicious for the sisters,” he says.

Sanders and Ryan are joined on a part-time basis by Tom Davis, whose culinary résumé includes a stint at Westside Cellar in Ventura and introducing sushi night at the Mupu Grill in Santa Paula. Ryan credits Davis with bringing “Asian flair” to the hors d’oeuvres served instead of the evening meal during once-monthly celebrations marking the feast days of the saints for whom the sisters are named.

Menus for special occasions and everyday meals alike are set with guidance by the food committee, which consists of Sanders, St. Catherine-by-the-Sea administrator Dave Singer and a group of sisters interested in the caloric and/or culinary outcome.

“It’s easier than having all of us tell the cooks how to cook,” Sister Bellemore says of the group, which discusses everything from new recipes to maintaining the long-standing Friday tradition that is soup-and-salad night. On that evening, the sisters enjoy a meatless meal and donate the difference in cost to local charities who help the poor, she adds.

Baked Alaska requested for birthday

“I was like a kid in a candy store when I first got here,” admits Ryan, who delights in offering tours of the two walk-in refrigerators in the convent kitchen. (During one such tour, he stops to point out the wheel of aged cheese made in Kentucky by Trappist monks and mailed to the convent in time for the sisters’ Christmas party.)

Ryan has since reined in such chef-y creations as pears poached in port and crème de cassis (“One of the sisters said, ‘That was an interesting dessert,’ which was a nice way of saying ‘I don’t really like that,’ ” he notes with a laugh).

And he has cut to one the number of times per week that he makes buttery breakfast pastries like almond-cranberry-white chocolate scones, the same scones he served during the Ventura Music Festival’s Tea & Trumpet concerts at Nona’s.

But there are times when having a restaurant chef with a flair for the theatrical comes in handy, like when Sister Beatrice Marie requested baked Alaska for her birthday. Ryan was happy to oblige, crafting the show-off dessert from cake and ice cream, covering it with peaks of Italian meringue and then toasting it at her table with the aid of a kitchen blow torch.

And the sharing of culinary experience goes both ways. After noting that some of the sisters like to eat their homegrown persimmons by using a spoon to scoop the flesh right out of the skin, “I found out from one of them that if you put a persimmon in the freezer, it will be fully ripe when it thaws,” Ryan says. “That was a new one on me.”