Fast(ing) Food Department: For a while I maintained a separate blog called Fast(ing) Food. As part of my housekeeping in getting this blog active again, I’ve deleted Fast(ing) Food and moved all of its posts over here.
If you browse through older posts here and see one about Lenten cooking, chances are that it’s been imported from the old Fast(ing) Food blog.
Thanks.
Peperonata (Stock photo, not mine)
Fast(ing) Food department: During the Fast, it’s good not only to keep the letter but to simplify and reduce our diet a bit.
A typical meal for the Desert Fathers might be a bowl of lentils, with salt if they had some. I’m not ready for that, but it’s true that a simple bowl of rice and/or legumes makes a fine Lenten meal once we’ve bowed to our carnal nature and added some flavor.
I’ve been making a habit of keeping some of this peperonata around. it’s really tasty and can be used as a topping on rice, beans or pasta.
This is simplified from Martha Rose Shulman’s The Simple Art of Vegetarian Cooking.
The Lenten season includes several “Soul Saturdays,” marked by special services for the departed. It’s customary to bring a platter of Kolyva, made from boiled whole wheat kernels, which the priest blesses and which is then shared out among those present. The grains of wheat bring to mind Christ’s words “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” [Jn 12:24, ESV].
This year I decided to try my hand at Kolyva, and it came out pretty well, so I share the recipe here. There’s a wide range of national and family variants of the basic concept, ranging from stark piles of boiled wheat to elaborate cake-like confections. I hope this is a middle-of-the-road version.
Whole wheat kernels aren’t usually sold in grocery stores. I ordered a five-pound bag of Palouse Brand wheat through Amazon, and was happy with it.
This is smaller than many recipes: it nicely filled a 1 1/2 – quart oval casserole.
Kolyva
Boiling the wheat is the only cooking in the recipe; the rest is just assembly.
Put 2 cups whole wheat kernels in a saucepan with 4–6 cups of water and about 1 tsp salt. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer until some of the kernels begin to split open; then simmer a while longer, until the kernels are soft, not chewy. This will probably take more than an hour. I’m told you can speed up the process by soaking the wheat overnight before cooking it.
Drain the wheat. Put it in a large mixing bowl and stir in:
In other recipes, I’ve seen cocoa powder, star anise, etc. listed as ingredients; suit yourself.
Arrange the mixture in a casserole or cake pan, or mound it neatly on a platter.
Sprinkle the kolyva with enough powdered sugar that it looks white. Decorate with raisins and nuts. It’s customary to include a Cross design in the decoration. Though I’ve seen things like chocolate chips (dairy-free?) and Jordan almonds on Kolyva, I had hoped to avoid using any candy. In one photo of a large, beautiful Greek kolyva I saw a red cross made out of some small red fruit, maybe red currants. I was determined to have a red cross too, but couldn’t find any small red fruits that would work, so I ended up using the bright red cinnamon candies often sold as “Red Hots.” The result looked very nice, but my plan to avoid candy was defeated. Maybe you can do better.
In our church, a lit candle is put in the center of the Kolyva during the memorial service, so you may want to leave a space for a candle in your design.
Serving: Kolyva doesn’t hold together well; it’s usually spooned out into small dishes or cups and eaten with a spoon.
We may liken fasting to a burning coal and prayer to frankincense.
Neither has value without the other,
but together, the sweet savor of their incense fills the air.
— Abba Matta El-Meskeen (Matthew the Poor) in Orthodox Prayer Life
Recently we found ourselves with a lot of potatoes in the house, so let’s enjoy them, shall we?
This is a generalization of an Arthur Schwartz recipe, from his What to Cook: When You Think There’s Nothing in the House to Eat, which I’ve praised before and am happy to praise again.
The general idea is this:
• In a pot, make a spicy tomato sauce;
• Cook some sliced potatoes in the sauce;
• Add some frozen peas at the end, cook them just enough.
Here are the details for this very simple, tasty meal:
In a decent-sized saucepan, heat several tablespoons of oil. Add:
• 1 Tablespoon chopped ginger;
• 1 onion, finely chopped;
• 2 Tablespoons curry powder;
• 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes, or a generous squirt of Sriracha sauce;
• A couple of cloves of garlic, finely chopped.
If you’re in a really big hurry, the onion and garlic could be skipped.
Let this sizzle at medium heat until the onion is transparent. Or, turn the heat down and cook it very gently unti the onion is nice and brown.
Make a tomato sauce, in one of several ways:
• Add a couple of Tablespoons of tomato paste and maybe 1 1/2 cups of water, mix well; OR
• Add a large can of tomatoes and simmer until it’s broken down into a sauce-like consistency; OR
• Add about 1 1/2 cups of bottled spaghetti sauce.
Let the sauce simmer gently.
While it’s simmering, cut up about 4 medium-sized potatoes into sticks, about the shape of fat french fries.
Throw the potatoes into the sauce, put a lid on the pot, and simmer gently for about 15 minutes until the potatoes are tender.
Add about 2 cups of frozen peas, or one whole 10-ounce package. Cover and return to a simmer. Cook just until the peas are tender, no more than a minute.
Serve! If you have it, you can top with fresh chopped parsley or mint. If you’ve done this right, it won’t be one big pot of (tasty!) mush, but a pretty bowl of potato sticks and bright green peas in a red tomato sauce. Mmmmmm…
Are potatoes evil? Some “experts” say that potatoes, along with white rice and white flour, are harmful because they have a high glycemic index. (They can’t say that potatoes are highly processed, can they?) I’m not so sure about this glycemic index business. The people of southeast Asia subsist on white rice (bad, supposedly) with various toppings, and you’d have to travel far to find a fat or diabetic person in some Burmese village. So, for now, we follow the age-old advice to eat sparingly or inexpensive, close-to-the-earth foods — such as potatoes.
We tend to think of celery as little more than a source of crunchiness in salads, but it is in fact a vegetable.
Today I was looking through the refrigerator and found that, like many refrigerators, it had a half-used, wilted bunch of celery lurking in the bottom of the crisper.
Since something had to be done with it, I chopped the celery up along with an onion, put the mixture in a skillet along with a few spoonfuls of canned tomato, added some soy sauce and pepper. I kept the skillet hot until the onions were transparent and everything was sizzling nicely, then turned the heat to low, covered the skillet and went away for about 20 minutes. When I came back the mixture was nicely cooked. The vegetables had given off quite a lot of juice, so I turned the heat up again and stirred them, uncovered, until the liquid had mostly cooked away. Then I served the mixture over rice. Very tasty!
And there, in narrative form, is a recipe for Hot Celery Lunch.
I notice that there haven’t been any posts here since near the end of last year’s Great Fast. But here we are again, so it’s time to post again.
During Lent, my family and I aim for meals that are austere without being unappealing, so many of the “recipes” posted here are hardly recipes at all — just thoughts about combining ingredients into simple and (I hope) fairly tasty meals. Simplicity is important not only because it’s an expression of the Lenten spirit, but because the many church services often leave us with less time to cook.
I’ve tried to make this blog look a bit austere too, almost the antithesis of a Food Blog: no statements that recipes are To Die For, and especially none of the food photography that some people call “food porn.” Many modern cookbooks are essentially photo albums with some recipes around the edges, and I try not to follow their example.
May we all have a blessed and fruitful 2013 Lenten Season.
Here is a fine collection of teachings by the Fathers on fasting. Recommended.
A leader of a community asked Abba Poemen: “How can I gain the fear of God?” Abba Poemen replied: “How indeed can we gain the fear of God when we have bellies full of cheese and jars of salted fish?”
On the same site I found this article on the health benefits of fasting, based on a study of the monks of Mt. Athos.
Thanks to St George Greek Orthodox Church, Greenville SC, for posting this collection.
Mother Gavrilia of blessed memory spent much time traveling in the service of Christ to places that separated her from the daily liturgical life of the Church. Especially during these times, the advice of her spiritual father Archimandrite Lazarus Moore stood her in good stead:
‘Fasting is one of our greatest weapons against the Evil One. I will repeat what Father Lazarus told me once. In 1962, I went to the USA. I stayed there a long time and travelled to many states. The letters of Father Lazarus were a great help… He used to say: “Go anywhere you like, do whatever you like, as long as you observe Fasting”… Because not a single arrow of the Evil One can reach you when you fast. Never.’
— Ascetic of Love, the biography of Mother Gavrilia, pub. Series Talanto. pg. 200.
Let each one of us keep in mind the benefit of fasting… For this healer of our souls is effective, in the case of one to quieten the fevers and impulses of the flesh, in another to assuage bad temper, in yet another to drive away sleep, in another to stir up zeal, and in yet another to restore purity of mind and to set him free from evil thoughts. In one it will control his unbridled tongue and, as it were by a bit, restrain it by the fear of God and prevent it from uttering idle and corrupt words. In another it will invisibly guard his eyes and fix them on high instead of allowing them to roam hither and thither, and thus cause him to look on himself and teach him to be mindful of his own faults and shortcomings.
Fasting gradually disperses and drives away spiritual darkness and the veil of sin that lies on the soul, just as the sun dispels the mist. Fasting enables us spiritually to see that spiritual air in which Christ, the Sun who knows no setting, does not rise, but shines without ceasing. Fasting, aided by vigil, penetrates and softens hardness of heart. where once were the vapors of drunkenness it causes fountains of compunction to spring forth.
I beseech you, brethren, let each of us strive that this may happen in us! Once this happens we shall readily, with God’s help, cleave through the whole sea of passions and pass through the waves of the temptations inflicted by the cruel tyrant, and so come to anchor in the port of impassibility.
My brethren, it is not possible for these things to come about in one day or one week! They will take much time, labor, and pain, in accordance with each man’s attitude and willingness, according to the measure of faith and one’s contempt for the objects of sight and thought. In addition, it is also in accordance with the fervor of his ceaseless penitence and its constant working in the secret chamber of his heart that this is accomplished more quickly or more slowly by the gift and grace of God. But without fasting no one was ever able to achieve any of these virtues or any others, for fasting is the beginning and foundation of every spiritual activity.
— Symeon the New Theologian: the Discourses, pub. Paulist Press. pp. 168-169.
That Which is Bread 