Meatless Fridays: 52 Weeks a Year
Did you know Catholics are supposed to abstain from meat on all Fridays of the year, and not just in Lent? ‘Tis true, my friends, ’tis true. I learned that maybe 5 or 6 years ago, and since then, we’ve grown into the practice of abstaining meat on all Fridays of the year. It is in the Code of Canon Law 1250 and 1251: all Fridays are days of penance and abstaining from meat is the general practice, unless it is a solemnity. Hold up. Why is every Friday a day of penance? The same reason every Sunday is a day of rest and worship. Catholics are about many things, including remembering and commemorating and celebrating the life of Christ all the time. Fridays commemorate Christ’s Passion and death. Sundays commemorate the Resurrection as well as God’s command to keep His day holy.
The US Catholic Bishops have permission from Rome for Catholics in the US to substitute another sacrificial and penitential practice or work of charity in lieu of abstaining from meat. However! We are still encouraged to abstain from meat, as this is a simple and traditional way of observing the penitential nature of Fridays.
Ok, ok. It’s not always so simple. Sometimes there are social functions which only offer meat as the food. You could go without entirely, of course, but then it might be terribly awkward and even rude to the host. In those cases, do some other sort of penitential practice if it suits your situation better. And, let’s be honest, it’s not easy for many of us to feed our families fish or vegetarian meals, because fish is pricey and kids often turn their noses up to new things.
So, what’s a girl to do? We could eat tuna every Friday. It might get old. And if you’re pregnant, you’re supposed to limit tuna consumption, so there goes that idea. We could eat eggs. Not a bad idea. Huevos rancheros (minus any meat in the dish!) would be tasty. Salad? Sure, but not always filling.
Time to gather some ideas. Share the recipes. Deepen the practices the Church has shown us to be worthy and meaningful in our faith lives.
In other words, I’m asking you to share your favorite meatless meals with me, and I’ll be sharing some of ours. There are 52 Fridays in the year. Can we come up with at least 5-10 good recipes to love for every Friday? Sure we can. And then we can come up with more, because I love a good recipe. Don’t you?
Starting this Friday, I’ll be posting recipes for meatless Fridays. You can share a link to your post in the comments, or link to a favorite recipe in the comments, or ask me anything. It’ll be a fun, virtual cooking party of sorts. At least it will be a recipe swap, every few weeks!
I’m looking forward to this, Gina, as I’m always on the lookout for new recipes that have already been tested and approved by peers (ie: not chefs from a fancy cooking magazine) 🙂 Abstaining from meat on Fridays is not too penitential for us since half of our dinners tend to be meatless anyway. I’ll be interested to see if any contributors have other ideas to keep Friday meals sacrificial when cutting out meat just doesn’t feel so hard.
I would love to have you share some of your recipes!! I want to move towards two meatless meals each week.
Maybe just have water to drink? No dessert, no snacks? I don’t know. That is a good question about sacrifice, though!
Admittedly, I didn’t realize this till marriage (cradle Catholics, raise your hand —>me raising my hand with a little bit of hanging my head). Prior to marriage meat made into maybe half my meals. Since marrying my meat-must-make-every-meal husband, we have it in practically every meal. We have done meatless fridays a few times outside of Len but never consistently. This may be what I need to kick my cradle rear into gear. I can always start whipping up meals I used to make prior to marriage 😉 and stuff I make during lent 🙂 Look forward to this series!
Ooooh, Amanda! I was also married when we found out. I would LOVE for you to share some of your recipes, too!
Looking forward to the recipes! And I may have one or two I could share.
I’d love for you to share some with us!
Looking forward to learning some new recipes. We often try for “Meatless Mondays”, but always run out of tasty ideas 🙂
It can be hard to keep up with new recipes! Hopefully you’ll gather up some good new ones to try. Share any of your faves with us, too!
Oh I am so glad that I just found you from Pinterest. We also do meatless Fridays (cradle catholic here who also only with the last few years discovered that this is still required, oops.) Oh and we also are gf (and dairy free) and have 5 little ones. My kids love fish but where I struggle is finding food to pack in their lunch boxes for school. Looking forward to looking around your blog!
So glad you found me, too, Betsy! We are also gf, so hopefully you’ll enjoy the recipes I share.
School lunches are hard! Two of mine go to an enrichment program on Fridays, and they are often frustrated packing their lunches because they want lunch meat! We have been doing pb&j on gf bread (so $$$, I hate it), or apples and cheese, yogurt drinks, guacamole… I will work lunch ideas into this series, too! Hopefully some other readers will chime in with ideas, also.
Good idea – I plan to jump in! Will it have an actual “link up” set up, or we should just post in comments?
I can’t wait to read what you share! I can do a linky, would that be better than posting in the comments?
Such a fun idea, Gina!
today we are having lentils cooked with diced potato, garlic, cumin, diced tomato and diced green onion. on the side we will have rice (topped with a fried egg), avocado, and fried plantains. It’s a Colombian dish that is usually accompanied by meat, but doesn’t have to be.
Paula, that sounds amazing! Do you have a recipe, or do you usually just cook because you know the dish so well? If you have a recipe, I’d love to try it!
Oh, I did not know that!! Well, looks like Fridays will be meatless from now on. Looking forward to all the recipes. One of my go-to’s is black bean burritos. I can double it and freeze half so then I have some for another week.
That sounds like a great recipe!! I love things that can be doubled and frozen for later. I definitely need more of those in my recipe file.
We do black bean and cheese omelettes on Fridays with salsa, guacamole and sour cream. Or black bean tacos 🙂
That sounds delicious!