Tag Archives: fasting

Got butter and eggs?

food and cooking, Lent, , ,
Custard

In the Orthodox Church we start fasting from meat a week before full-on Lent. And this week we don’t restrict ourselves otherwise, even on Wednesday and Friday. I thought I might post an appropriate recipe … but I’ve run out of time, so instead I’m just going to put up a few pictures of such foods as I have cooked, and might cook again, during these seven days.

Butter Week Quiche
Salty Honey Pie

As I eat more butter than cheese always, I prefer to call it Butter Week,
but Cheesefare Week is also a good name.

Egg Lemon Soup

I can make Egg Lemon Soup with vegetable broth instead of the traditional chicken broth, but I can’t see making it without eggs, though I’ve seen recipes for such a thing. But please, give it a new name if you are going to do that!

Tea Eggs

You know I’ve never even flirted with the idea of being vegan.

Lemon Sour Cream Cake

You can find some of these recipes on my Recipes page tabbed above.
Happy Butter Week!

It was legislated in Paradise.

Lent, quotes, ,

“Do you think that I posit the antiquity of fasting on the basis of the law? Indeed, fasting is older than the law. …Fasting is as old as humanity: it was legislated in paradise. It was the first command that Adam received: You shall not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You shall not eat legislates fasting and self-control. …It is because we did not fast that we were banished from paradise. So let us fast that we may return to it.”

-St. Basil the Great, “First Homily on Fasting,” On Feasting and Fasting.

Man recovers his true nature.

humanity, Lent, quotes,

“Fasting is the only means by which man recovers his true spiritual nature. It is not a theoretical but truly a practical challenge to the great Liar who managed to convince us that we depend on bread alone and built all human knowledge, science, and existence on that lie. Fasting is a denunciation of that lie and also proof that it is a lie.”
….
“Let us understand …that what the Church wants us to do during Lent is to seek the enrichment of our spiritual and intellectual inner world, to read and to meditate upon those things which are most likely to help us recover that inner world and its joy. Of that joy, of the true vocation of man, the one that is fulfilled inside and not outside, the ‘modern world’ gives us no taste today; yet without it, without the understanding of Lent as a journey into the depth of our humanity, Lent loses its meaning.”

-Father Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent

If you labor a little…

Lent, quotes, , ,

gl-john-climacus-websizeToday we commemorate St. John Climacus, also known as St. John of the Ladder, because of his famous book, The Ladder. 

 

“Stint your stomach and you will certainly lock your mouth, because the tongue is strengthened by an abundance of food. Struggle with all your might against the stomach and restrain it with all sobriety. If you labor a little, the Lord will also soon work with you.”

-St. John Climacus