Ep 60 – All About Fasting
This is a chatty episode all about fasting with the family. It’s long and so is the transcript! Just a fair warning! 🙂
Hello, dear mamas. You’re listening to All These Things, episode 60. In today’s episode, we’re going to talk all about fasting. Listen in.
Intro: “I understand how the everyday lives of mamas are filled with many different things. I believe that all these things of motherhood can be lived intentionally, and through that intention, beauty can be found. I believe that as intention and beauty are laced in all these things, seeking the kingdom of God becomes experience of our lives. And I believe this is a lifelong pursuit and process. I’m Hannah Vazquez and this is All These Themes. My desire is for each episode to nourish, inspire, and encourage you. And for you to know that you are not alone.”
Hello. Before we get into fasting, I just wanted to let you know about a free series. I am doing this Lent through my email list. You can find it on my Substack, which is hannahevazquez.substack.com. And to sign up for it, you go to my Substack. And you sign up for my emails and every Friday, I will send out an email with 7 tips or links for Lent. It will include things like a recipe, a homemaking task, a writing prompt, an analog activity, different things to help you slow down, help you unplug a little.
Also, it will include a couple of reflections of my own regarding Lent. And every Friday, I will send out this email, and you can work through the different things all at once, or throughout the coming week,. And throughout the, series, I will occasionally be attaching some free printables and one printable in particular I will be talking about in this podcast episode, which is a meal matrix worksheet and a meal planning sheet.
So I will refer to those later in the episode and you can get those by signing up for my email list to get this free Lenten series. So you can go to hannahevazquez. substack. com to sign up for that. Alright, let’s get into the fasting.
During Lent, the Church prescribes fasting from all animal products, wine, and in some circles, even oil. Now, when you’re preparing three meals, and who knows how many snacks, every day, for a family, switching things up like this is challenging. So today I want to go over a bit of the mindset behind fasting, modifications for different stages of life, as well as meal planning tips and suggestions.
This episode is heavy on the practical, so I hope you find it helpful.
To start things off, I want to read from my favorite Lenten book, The Lenten Spring, by Fr. Thomas Hopko. In this chapter titled, By Prayer and Fasting, he says, “Fasting is part of the spiritual life without which the soul perishes, suffocated by the flesh and choked by carnal pleasures. A human being must fast. The effort, enlightens the mind, strengthens the spirit, controls the emotions, and tames the passions.”
He goes on later to talk about how fasting is one of the tools to help us gain our salvation he says, “Fasting is necessary but not as an end in itself. It is necessary like prayer as a means and a tool. The service of God is the goal. The acquisition of the Holy Spirit and the attainment of his fruits. St. Seraphim of Sarov summed it up in this way. ‘Prayer, fasting, watching, and all other Christian acts, however good they may be, do not alone constitute the aim of our Christian life, although they serve as the indispensable means of reaching this aim. The true aim of our Christian life is to acquire the Holy Spirit of God.'”
So to reflect on that a little bit and preface everything I’m going to talk about with fasting, we have to remember why we’re fasting and not let The details of fasting take over our spirit. The goal of fasting is to relieve us from thinking about food so much to lighten us so that we’re not weighed down and so satiated and just, you know, everything’s hunky dory because we’ve got our nice, filling rich foods in us.
It’s really a tool to help us focus on Christ more. And if you let the details and the distraction of fasting take your gaze away from Christ, then it defeats the purpose. So we have to try to remember, especially as mothers who have to prepare the food, we have to try to remember to keep things simple, to have a plan so that we can just follow the plan and not have to think about it again and again and again, every day, every week.
What are we going to make? What do I need to get from the store? There are really so many reasons to be prepared in this aspect so that then once we start fasting, we can simply run on autopilot and focus on Christ, which is the whole point of Lent is to redirect us, guide us back to focusing on Christ and doing the things that help us do that, like prayer fasting.
Okay, so with that in mind, let’s get into the nitty gritty of fasting with a family. So like I said, you really want to keep it simple. You want your recipes to be things that don’t require a whole lot of time, a whole lot of strange ingredients, and simply aren’t too complicated to make. Now, There’s a plethora of vegan recipes out there, and some of them are very complicated because they use all kinds of herbs and spices and different things to make up for the flavor that certain, things like beans are lacking, compared to animal products.
And so It can be hard to find the simple recipes, but it’s well worth it. And after focusing on creating nourishing, simple, Lenten plans for several years now, I have found that after the first few weeks, it’s almost a comfort to just have a simple meal and not really think about it. And you just eat because, you know, you need to, and then you move on.
So, I say that to encourage you that some recipes may not sound exciting or delicious, and they may not be. That’s okay. It really, really is. Now, here’s the question though — if you are pregnant or nursing what do you do then? Now, of course, you always have to speak to your spiritual father But in general the Orthodox Church does not require pregnant or nursing mothers to fast and I personally have never fasted I do fast from sugar Because sugar is not necessary for your nutrition. In fact, it’s detrimental. So, why not cut it out as a form of fasting when I’m pregnant or nursing?
The problem really comes is when the rest of your family is fasting and you are not. So, some things I’ve done that have been helpful for me when I’ve been in these stages. is, first of all, I make sure I get a really nutritious, protein filled breakfast. Usually includes eggs, maybe a glass of milk also, maybe some breakfast meat, just very high filled protein, and it’s very simple, at least for me, you know, to make my eggs or whatever separate, and then I make whatever fasting breakfast I’m making for the rest of the family. This really doesn’t end up being too complicated.
For the other meals, what I’ll typically do is have some meat prepared on the side. So some cooked chicken, some ground beef, maybe some ham, something, you know, that I can add to our lenten meals to give me the protein. that I need. Some meals I might not even do that if it’s a high protein lenten meal and I’ve had my, breakfast, I’ve had some snacks with animal products, that have the protein and nutrients that I need, during those times.
And so in that way I’m getting what I need without having to directly eat it in front of everybody else. And I’m still able to just make normal fasting meals. and just add what I need to it for myself personally. Now, fasting with kids gets really tricky. I mean, there’s a lot of gray because it sort of depends on what you believe they need nutritionally, which is different for every child, I believe, and family.
But in general, you can definitely be more lenient with kids. For a long time, I didn’t really do much to make the kids fast, but as they’ve been getting older and I’ve realized, you know, this is really a short amount of time in the span of a year that they’re fasting. So, I personally make sure that all of our fasting meals are high in protein, even if it’s just plant protein.
So I know in that way they’re getting what they need. But I’ve kind of settled into, this pattern of all of our lunches and suppers are vegan. Snacks, I’m more lenient. Occasionally they’ll have cheese or yogurt, a few times in the week. On the weekends, we’ll have eggs. Especially Saturday morning, we’ll have some very simple scrambled eggs for breakfast.
And in that way, they’re getting a little bit of what they need. If they need a glass of milk, that’s fine. I just really try not to be super restrictive about it. And, especially my older kids, They’re starting to recognize the purpose of fasting and sort of trying to watch what they eat a little more without me saying, no, you can’t have that. They just choose not to have it. So my hope is that this creates a balance for them as they grow up and they will hopefully not think of fasting as this really restrictive, oppressive way of eating, but it’s supposed to be a tool that helps them sort of control their appetites and directs them back to Christ.
So those are all my thoughts on the different stages of fasting with a family. Now let’s move on to some meal planning.
Now, there’s a couple ways I’ve done this, and that I’m going to propose to you. And they work together. There’s two parts. So the first part is to make a meal matrix.
Now, a meal matrix is basically a table where you have different types of food broken up, and then you have a list for each of those types. So, for Lenten meals, I made a matrix. Where I have a list for bean recipes, and I have a list for seafood recipes, and I have a list for soups, because soups may contain beans, but They’re sort of their own type of food, usually just soup and bread, and that is something I definitely lean on heavily when it comes to fasting.
I did create printables of a meal matrix for Lenten meals, which I included in my Lenten series. And I have a box for each of these three types of foods. I also have a box for snacks, desserts, and other things that you want to list. So the idea is that you take this piece of paper, you pull all your recipes and you write down all the bean recipes in the bean column, you write down all your seafood recipes in the seafood column, you write all your soups in the soup columns.
I also included just a matrix with four boxes that you can write your own categories if those categories don’t work for you. I have also done meal matrices where I write down instant pot recipes, crock pot recipes, stovetop recipes so that I can decide, okay, this day I need an instant pot recipe. This day I need a crock pot recipe based on what’s happening. And that has been helpful also for me. So there’s different ways you can use a meal matrix, but the idea is to get all of your recipes on one page categorized in a way that you can easily find what you are thinking of when you go to plan your meal.
Now you can use this meal matrix week by week like when you sit down to plan your week. You can plan out your meals, make a grocery list or you can use it to plan all of lent all at once Which I have done in the past and I will tell you it is a headache to do but once it’s done, it’s like magic. You don’t even have to think about what you’re making.
I just plug it into my weekly plan every week. And you know, occasionally I will not have made one recipe and I still have the ingredients so then I’ll switch it out, but it’s way easier than planning a weekly menu week by week.
So I’ve also included a chart where you can plan all of Lent on one page in the printables that’s part of my Lenten series that I talked about. So that’s sort of my methods. The two methods I go back and forth between. Sometimes I plan it week by week. Sometimes I plan it all at once. So you can decide which works best for you.
Now, another important thing to think about with meal planning is what are the staple ingredients that you need to have on hand. And for me, I tend to forget sometimes about the snack things or, just other condiments that are helpful during Lent that I don’t normally buy throughout the year. So some of those things for us are hummus, making sure I have plenty of coconut oil. If you have not discovered the magic of coconut oil, you need to do that. I use it for cooking. I salt it and we use it on bread instead of butter. You can use it in baking. It’s just a perfect substitute for butter. It can be solid or liquid just like butter. So it’s really a perfect substitute.
I’ve also recently discovered tahini sauce, which you can make yourself, pretty easily. You can find a recipe online or I’m sure there are versions in the store and, Trader Joe’s has a lot of vegan sauces and condiments and they have cashew yogurt which is not like normal yogurt but it is something to add to a dish to make it kind of creamy that helps a little bit. Fresh herbs definitely help a meal become more flavorful and brighter. So those are a few things. Obviously like I said you still want to keep it simple but it’s helpful to have these few extra things just on hand all the time to help the meals come together a little more easily.
Okay, so now I’m going to go through some examples of our favorites for different types of meals. So for breakfast, I like to get into the habit of making baked oatmeal regularly so I’ll make a big batch, we’ll have it fresh.
The kids usually do put milk on it. And, you could always have almond milk or coconut milk on hand to put on that. They like peanut butter on it and it’s usually pretty delicious and pretty healthy too at the same time. So we’ll have that and then it usually lasts us another breakfast or two.
Other forms of oatmeal are just the plain normal oatmeal and there’s also steel cut oats, which has a different texture, so it kind of switches things up a little bit. If oats are not your thing, then potato hash is really yummy. You can add in peppers, mushrooms, onions, you know, some corn, whatever vegetables, that you like. Squashes would be good. And if you like ketchup, that’s delicious, so that’s sort of an alternative , meal for breakfast also. There’s also just granola, cereal. There’s so many options for different kinds of milk these days. So, cereal and granola are still options.
So, for lunch, we almost always do leftovers, but if for some reason we don’t have leftovers, I have often made Mediterranean sandwiches, which are really yummy, so you just have some bread and you put hummus, cucumbers, roasted, , red peppers or sun dried tomatoes, avocado! Definitely need some avocado on the Mediterranean sandwiches. Anything you can think of, you put it on there. Pickled beets, I mean, whatever. And you just layer it up, and it’s delicious.
Don’t forget, just PB& Js. This is totally suitable lunch, for sure. And, if you don’t do bread, then like my husband and I, we’ll make a salad out of the Mediterranean sandwich ingredients. So You can do a vinaigrette over the hummus and add whatever veggies in and it actually sounds kind of not very good, but I personally think it turns out pretty good.
So, snacks. Alright, I’m a very basic snack person. My kids eat the same snacks over and over. I do not buy pre packaged type snacks, although there are probably plenty of vegan options among that, but one major staple snack, especially during Lent, is just nuts and fruit.
And they can have apple, banana, orange with their nuts. They can have dried cranberries or raisins or dried apricots. Whatever they choose out of all the options that I have on hand is, is available for them. Apples and peanut butter is a snack that we have often, especially when we’re fasting.
PB& J, again, sometimes. Granola bars, again, I will sometimes let them just have cheese or some yogurt. Hummus and veggies, and then smoothies also, you can find, plant based protein powders and use coconut milk or some other type of milk and bananas and whatever you like to put in your smoothies. That makes a great snack also.
Now for suppers, like I said, I do a variety of soups. So I have a black bean soup recipe that we love, tomato and rice soup, cabbage soup, I do different varieties of rice and beans, so I have Puerto Rican rice and beans, I have sweet potato and black beans that mix that goes on rice, and I have a curry chickpea recipe that I love.
That goes on rice also. And then I like to mix in some seafood here and there. There’s a lot of shrimp recipes. And I also have a clam linguine that we enjoy a lot. So I’ll mix those in one or two of those a week. Just because seafood is expensive. And it’s also, Kind of like a treat in a way. So I I mix it in for nutrient reasons But I don’t want to be using it too much.
So that’s that’s how I do that personally now a few tips for you First of all, like I said, I will be sending out recipes with my Lenten series every week. Well, one recipe. And I will include links to a couple in the show notes for this episode on my blog. And then I’m sure, you have your own recipes.
There are Lenten recipe books out there. And like I said, there are tons of vegan recipes online. But a few things to think about as you’re collecting your recipes is maybe try to think of a few formats of meals that your family likes that is really easy to switch up. So, with shrimp, you can pair shrimp with a pasta or rice and you can Switch up the different seasonings that you use to make it a different cuisine.
So you can add Italian seasonings to make it more Italian. You can toss on some soy sauce and sesame oil to make it Asian. You can add some Mexican spices to make it more Mexican. It’s very versatile if you just do your basic rice or pasta and then some shrimp with a veggie. Chickpeas and rice, again, you can make it More Mexican, with Mexican spices, or Mediterranean.
And then soups, again, you can do types of chilies, you can do vegetable type soups, and add in some white beans. So these three basic meal formats, shrimp with a starch, beans with a starch, and soup, you can really mix and match them to be the flavors that you want at that time.
So those are nice to have in your back pocket, already thought through, and very easy to make.
And again, just one last time, remember to keep it simple.
Now, I have three other episodes on Lent that, you can go back and listen to.
They are all pretty much different. They overlap just a little bit, but mostly they’re very different. So I have an episode from February 2020 where I walk you through planning your own Lent. I have questions for you to ask yourself as you go through and try to plan Lent.
I have one from March 2021, which I share at that time what my personal plan for Lent, was going to be, and I have one from February 2022 that gives you three Lenten mindsets that are helpful to have as you enter into Lent. So, I recommend listening to all those again. If you just listened to one, I recommend the one from February 2020.
So. That was a lot, but just remember to keep in mind the focus of fasting and Lent in general. It is to point us to Christ, to help us focus on Christ. So let’s keep that in mind as we think about the modifications for our own family, as we create a meal matrix and a meal plan.
And as we go about shopping for our ingredients and preparing our meals, let’s remember to keep Christ with us with every onion and garlic clove we chop, every pot of rice we make, let’s keep Him with us.
To wrap this up I want to end this with some verses from the Vesper service of the first Tuesday of Lent.
Let us keep the fast not only by refraining from food, but by becoming strangers to all carnal passion that we who are enslaved to the tyranny of the flesh may become worthy to partake of the lamb. The son of God is slain by his own will for the salvation of the world. And to celebrate spiritually the Feast of the Savior’s resurrection from the dead. So shall we be exalted in the glory of virtues through our righteous actions, giving joy to the Lord, the lover of man.
I wish you all a blessed Lent and I’ll be back with you in April.
Outro: “This is a listener supported presentation of Ancient Faith Radio. I want to thank Ancient Faith for producing this podcast and Natalie Wilson for the Beautiful music. You can find natalie@nwcomposing.com, and you can find me on my blog, all these things.net, where I share the show notes to each episode. I also send out a monthly newsletter to sign up for that. Go to hannahevazquez. substack. com. As always, dear mamas, keep seeking the presence and kingdom of God.”
