Nativity Fast Recipes: Simple and Nourishing Meals for Orthodox Christian Families
Easy, family-friendly meatless recipes to help you nourish your family and keep the Nativity Fast without the overwhelm
As Orthodox Christians, we take on the great task of fasting before the Nativity of Christ. As we prepare our hearts to receive Him, and as an ascetic discipline, the Church guides us to abstain from certain foods (namely meat, dairy, and on some days fish, oil, and wine). As we practice self-control through fasting, increase our prayer, and grow in almsgiving, we ask the Lord to help us in our fight against sin.
Fasting is a long-standing ascetical practice in the Orthodox Church, and one that takes a bit of intention and care, especially for those of us who are fasting with young children in our households. Between planning meals, feeding hungry little ones, and keeping up with the daily demands of family life, preparing fasting meals can sometimes feel like one more thing on an already full plate!
But fasting doesn’t have to mean complicated recipes or spending hours in the kitchen. With a little planning and some simple ingredients, you can prepare delicious, nourishing meals that the whole family can enjoy throughout the 40-day Nativity Fast.
Whether you are looking for easy Orthodox fasting recipes, meatless dinners, hearty soups, simple lunches, or family-friendly meals that even your little ones will enjoy, I have a wonderful recipe book and plan to make this all possible.
My hope is that these recipes will take some of the stress out of meal planning and allow you to spend less time worrying about what is for dinner and more time focusing on the spiritual preparation for the coming of Christ. After all, the goal of the fast is not simply to change what is on our plates, but to prepare our hearts to receive Christ.
Looking for easy Nativity Fast recipes? Find simple, delicious, and nourishing Orthodox fasting meals to feed your family throughout the 40-day Nativity fast.
My friend Presbytera Josephine Breen, who is also wife to an Orthodox priest and mama to three little ones, created a wonderful resource for us. For the past year, she’s been working on a project to share Orthodox fasting resources with families. She takes a very practical approach that I think will be both helpful and eliminate some of the mental load that comes with trying to think about what to feed your family for the next 40 days!
Introducing: The Wild Honey Nativity Fast Menu Plan
Whether you are cooking for a larger family, or it’s just for you and a few others, this Nativity Fast menu plan is for you. There are two options: the full edition designed for anyone cooking for a larger household while trying to keep simplicity and peace in their kitchen during fasting seasons. Each day of the fast features a different dinner menu, many of which are easy to batch cook if you’d like to set aside leftovers for lunches or your freezer. Or the simplicity edition which is perfect for couples, families, roommates, single people...anyone who’s looking to seriously simplify their fasting kitchen. Each week, you’ll find recipes for 1 soup, 1 pot of beans, and 1 20-minute meal. The soup and beans can be made ahead of time and kept in the fridge for easy reheating.
You can purchase the Wild Honey Cookbook and menu plans at this link:
Special Offer: Use code ASCETIC15 at checkout for 15% off for Ascetic Life of Motherhood Blog readers!
Fasting is not only a spiritual discipline, but it is one that is done under the guidance of an Orthodox Priest. So if you have any specific questions on how you and your family ought to fast during this season, please reach out to your priest and ask! I share these resources in hopes to give you inspiration and helpful tools to make this season a rich spiritual endeavor for your family.
How this project got started: Guest Blogpost by Wild Honey
I grew up in an Antiochian parish where food was definitely the primary lovel anguage! The parishioners were mostly Levantine (Lebanese, Syrian, and Jordanian) Orthodox Christians; all of them were incredible cooks, and they belonged to families who had been passing down practical fasting traditions for the better part of 2000 years. When my parents converted at this parish in the ’90s, my mom quickly began learning fasting recipes from her new community. Back then, grocery stores weren’t stocked with a wide variety of vegan substitutes, and you were lucky to find a good vegetarian cookbook at your library, let alone a vegan one. A traditional approach to fasting was the only one that made sense! She later added many Greek fasting recipes to her repertoire, and experimented with recipes from other food cultures that work well with Orthodox fasting rules. The recipes my mom cooked weren’t complicated, either. She was self-employed full time while simultaneously homeschooling two children and didn’t have the time or energy for elaborate recipes, especially not during fasting seasons.
When I married my husband, these were the fasting recipes that I brought into my own kitchen. Cooking is one of my favorite creative outlets, and over time I began developing my own recipes and adapting ones I found online to better suit my family and tastes. Before long, I had a plastic folder filled with marked-up printouts and cryptic post-it notes, and a phone full of blurry photos of recipe cards that I continually lost in my camera roll. When friends would ask for a recipe, I’d either text a link followed by 2 paragraphs detailing my adaptations, or a loose collection of instructions with vague or non-existent ingredient measurements. A couple years ago, I finally started typing some of my favorite fasting recipes into a Google Doc. As I worked, I realized that I had a lot more recipes than I thought. What began as a personal organization project eventually morphed into a full cookbook: Wild Honey.
Once the cookbook was finished, I started working on additional Orthodox fasting resources. I now have not only the Wild Honey Cookbook available, but also two different styles of menu plan for fasting seasons, and additional print-out fasting resources. These are the recipes and menu plans that I use in my own kitchen to feed my own family. My hope is that these resources will help to share simple, tasty, balanced fasting meals with as many people as possible! They can be used by couples, single people, families, roommates…anyone who needs to eat during the fasts! I have two different styles of menu plan available, each of which can be adapted as needed to your own household.
The Simplicity menu plans provide a plan each week for a soup, a bean dish, and a 20-minute meal. These can be prepared whenever your schedule allows, in whatever quantities you need. The Full menu plans provide a different meal each day (with 1 “leftover day” per week), following a consistent rhythm of recipe/protein types (e.g. quick canned protein on
Tuesdays, soup on Wednesdays). You can either follow the entire menu plan, or pick 1-2 weeks and rotate them for the duration of the fast. As you work your way through the menu plans, take note of your favorite recipes for future reference!
My goal with the entire Wild Honey project is to help you discover rhythms and recipes that can bring peace and joy to your fasting kitchen. One of the primary goals of fasting in the Orthodox tradition is to spend less time thinking about food, and I hope that the cookbook and menu plans give you the mental space to make this possible.
For the past year, I’ve been working on a project to share Orthodox fasting resources with families, and I’m so grateful to Kh. Destinie for giving me the opportunity to share more about this project here.You can purchase the Wild Honey Cookbook and menu plans at this link, and I’m excited to offer a discount of 15% off all products for readers of this blog! Use code ASCETIC15 at checkout.
Bon appetit!
Presbytera Josephine Breen
Meet the Author
Presbytera Josephine Breen was raised in an Orthodox Christian household in Portland, Oregon. She met her husband (now Fr.) Lukas while chanting a wedding, and they were married in 2017. Together they've lived in Oregon, Washington, and Massachusetts, where Fr. Lukas attended Holy Cross Orthodox Seminary. Since 2025, they have been assigned to a wonderful parish in northern California where Fr. Lukas is the assistant priest and Pres. Josephine leads the chanting. They have 3 beautiful children. Pres. Josephine homeschools their eldest daughter and runs a part-time business. Wild Honey is her latest project, born out of a passion for helping others to discover simple, traditional fasting food.
Looking for easy Nativity Fast recipes? Find simple, delicious, and nourishing Orthodox fasting meals to feed your family throughout the 40-day Nativity fast.