Calling all Catholics! A Facebook friend asked if I have any good recipes for Lent, which is to say meatless, since we’re supposed to abstain from meat for the seven Fridays of the Lenten season. Despite the fact that our book is called Almost Meatless, it’s a perfect source for alternatives to fish sticks and pizza delivery from now until Easter Sunday. Since our recipes use meat to complement the dish, not as an integral player, it’s simple to convert them to meatless versions. Here are 19 recipes from the book that are easy to convert to completely vegetarian meals. If you don’t have a copy, click on the link to the right (the picture of the book) and order one from Amazon. You’ll have it in time to avert meaty temptation next Friday!

Oh, and if cooking is torture for you, it sounds like the perfect Lenten sacrifice to take on for the next forty days.

Asian Lettuce Wraps
Replace the chicken with eggplant, zucchini, tofu, mushrooms or shrimp. Marinate the alternative ingredient and cook as you would the chicken, sauteeing until the vegetables are soft and tender, the tofu is heated through, or the shrimp is cooked. Proceed with the rest of the recipe as is.

Tortilla Soup
Replace the chicken stock with veg broth and take out the chicken breast altogether. Stir in cooked black beans if you want some extra protein.

Thai Coconut Curry Soup
Switch to vegetable broth instead of chicken stock and eliminate the chicken for a completely vegetarian (and very quick to prepare) version. Alternatively, poach shrimp or a piece of mild, thick white fish instead of the chicken.

Chicken and Biscuit Pot Pie
Eliminate the chicken and continue with the recipe for an entirely vegetable-based pot pie. Use vegetable broth instead of chicken stock.

Eggplant and Chicken Puttanesca Stacks
Make Eggplant Puttanesca stacks, sans chicken. Start the sauce by sautéing the garlic, anchovies and chile flakes, then add the wine, simmer and proceed with the rest, using vegetable broth or water instead of chicken stock.

Chicken Pizza with Arugula Pesto and Sun_Dried Tomatoes
Skip the chicken for a pizza with Arugula Pesto and Sun-Dried Tomatoes (some sauteed portobello mushrooms would be pretty tasty as a chicken sub, though).

African Peanut Stew
Replace the turkey with mushrooms, tofu or eggplant, or just proceed without it. Use vegetable broth instead of turkey stock.

Vegetable Ragu Lasagne
Eliminate the ground turkey and proceed with the rest of the recipe.

Crab Pad Thai
As is, or, if you’re not a seafood person, replace the crab with tofu, or just make a veg version without a replacement.

Antipasto Salad
Skip the soppressata- the rest chock full of good meatless ingredients that makes this salad a meal.

Lentil Soup
Make the soup without the sausage. Stir in toasted fennel seeds if you’d still like the suggestion of sausage.

Posole Burritos with Escabeche Slaw
Use cubed zucchini or cooked pinto beans instead of pork.

Beefed-Up Bean Chili
Just eliminate the beef for a vegetarian chili (peanut butter is the secret ingredient).

Spinach and Chickpea Pouches
Forget the lamb, just use just a bit of extra chickpeas, spinach, veggies or feta, or a combo of all.

Shabu-Shabu Soup
Don’t add the beef.

Spiced Lamb and Vegetable Stew
Make it entirely vegetable-based by skipping the lamb.

Grecian Frittata
Vegetarian as is.

Chilaquiles
Vegetarian as is.

Pizza Strata
Hold the pepperoni and you’ve got a meatless version.

There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable. ~Mark Twain

In college, I used to look forward to my daily trip to Kennedy Hall, Villanova’s mailroom, where my assigned mail slot sat amongst hundreds of others. I’d spin in my combination on the tiny dial affixed to the miniature door at eye level and always hope that there would be a little yellow card leaning diagonally against one side of the box, as if it had been waiting there, twiddling its thumbs and whistling, to tell me there was a package for me to pick up at the window. A delivery like this usually meant a care package from home stuffed with treats or an oversized parcel from a good friend who sent it from some other college mailroom a few states away. When the yellow card appeared, it was like finding a golden ticket in your Wonka Bar.

Recently, I was working at my desk all bundled up in multiple layers to ward off the bitter cold that somehow crept inside despite the modern conveniences of windows, doors and insulation, and there was a knock at the door. One of those golden tickets was on the other side when I opened it.

Actually, it was a postal carrier holding a tidy, taped up box, addressed to me in handwriting I’ve come to know well from note cards, letters and packages similar to this one, which have arrived periodically over the last few months. My good friend, Jennifer, only a few towns away, had sent another bundle of creations from her kitchen to mine.

This time there were marshmallows. Real ones. Cut into squares that were thick and puffy like babies’ building blocks. And they were pink, as pale pink as the hue would allow before fading into white. And they lasted, oh, about 8 seconds before I spun open the twisty tie at the top of a sweet little floral cellophane bag and nibbled on one.

The marshmallows were immediately destined for mugs of hot chocolate, which is where they have spent much of their very abbreviated tenure under my watch. Jennifer’s confectionery pillows make store-bought ‘mallows look like little punky, remedial delinquents (we just polished off a bag in our house, so the comparison was vivid). The gifted ones melt into a creamy cap on the hot milk where the cocoa swirls into molten sugar pools creating designs almost too pretty to disturb. Manufactured marshmallows get spongy and just bob on top, bumping your nose when you go in for a sip. Jennifer’s pink puffs taste like a marshmallow should, which is to say rich with vanilla, smooth and sticky with sugar that has been warmed and whipped just the right way.

She swears they are a cinch to make, and soon enough I’ll give them a go. You can, too, because she shared the recipe on her blog, JenniferMcGlinn.com They’d sure be a nice surprise for a friend to find in the mail on a chilly day.

2 ginger snaps

1 marshmallow

Good quality chocolate, chips or chopped into meltable bits

Put the marshmallow on the bottom side of one snap. Put the chocolate bits on the bottom side of the other snap. Warm both adorned snaps in a microwave or toaster oven until the marshmallow billows and the chocolate melts (place on a plate, paper towel for micro or a toaster tray or piece of aluminum foil for toaster). Keep a close watch to avoid ‘mallowspolosion or chocolate burnage! Sandwich the two sides together and enjoy.

“I had a dream last night, I was eating a ten pound marshmallow.  I woke up this morning and the pillow was gone.”
-Tommy Cooper

It’s true, I do have a bun in the oven (read more about that here), but that’s not what this post is about.

I was flipping through the Jan/Feb issue of Saveur, my favorite food magazine in the downtime of the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. The pages are devoted to The Saveur 100, the publication’s annual guide to the world’s best foods. Included at number 26 was this Buttermilk Cluster from TheFreshLoaf.com, a website I was unaware of but am now hungrily happy to know.

More than 100 beautifully inspiring and captivating photographs accompany the contents of the guide, but the Buttermilk Cluster halted my wandering eyes and forced me to the copy it prefaced. “This website has taught me more about baking than a whole library of cookbooks” wrote Helen le Vann. When she described the buttermilk cluster as “soft dinner rolls that come out perfectly every time” I added them to the New Year’s Day menu I’d been tinkering with in my mind. Homemade beef stew, after all, practically requires hot bread slathered with butter, and these looked unbeatable.

They did come out perfectly and I’ll make them again soon to test Helen’s declaration that they’ll be that way every time.

If you’re looking to try your hand at the foolproof recipe, you can find it online at Saveur, on pg. 86 of the magazine, or at The Fresh Loaf.

“[Breadbaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world’s sweetest smells…there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.”
-M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

“I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way.  I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.”

-John Stewart