I’m following a Daniel Fast for the first 21 days of Lent. Read more about how I will (and won’t) be blogging about it here. Read about what to do before you start a Daniel Fast here.

Today, I’d like to share with you my favorite Daniel Fast recipes. All of them are from either the recipe page on the Daniel Fast website or the Daniel Fast PDF, which is free when you register here.

Potato and Green Onion Frittata

I wasn’t sure about this recipe at first, mainly because I wasn’t sure about the tofu-and-potato combination. I like both of those ingredients separately, but I wasn’t sure how they’d go together. The answer: beautifully!

On Saturdays, I would make a full pan, slice it up, and put it into the fridge. Each weekday, my breakfast consisted of a reheated slice of this, a banana, and a clementine. Easy, filling, and delicious. I’ll probably keep this routine around even after the fast is over.

Greek Stuffed Green Peppers (aka my daily lunch)

These little delights were another pleasant surprise. I’ll probably keep making these after the fast, too. Again, easy to do five or six on Saturday and put them into the fridge for lunches.

I pair these with a simple spinach salad (spinach, grape tomatoes, oil & vinegar). I ate lunch with a coworker one day, and she said she was jealous of how much better my lunch looked than her turkey sandwich! I was glad I’d made that sixth pepper because I brought it to her for lunch the next day. : )

Garden Vegetable Soup

I made a huge pot of this the day I started the fast and put it into four containers. I froze two of them for the second part of the fast. Easy lunches, easy snacks. The lemon juice adds such a yummy kick.

Bean Curry and Rice

I love Indian food, so I was looking forward to this recipe from the time I started researching the fast. All those spices and healthy legumes–yum!

My husband didn’t participate in the fast, but this became one of his new favorite meals, too! Definitely keeping this recipe around for future meal planning.

Matzah and Hummus

You can only eat certain grains on the Daniel Fast, and you have to avoid leavened bread. The Daniel Fast guide includes a recipe for homemade crackers, but I was a bit overwhelmed with all of the cooking I was already going to be doing. Now I have to bake crackers, too? Help!

Part of my family is Jewish (that probably deserves its own post–just roll with it for now!), so I’ve grown up loving matzah ball soup. I decided to skip the homemade crackers and eat matzah instead. You can find it on your kosher foods aisle.

My new love of fruit

Oh, fruit. Fruit, fruit, fruit. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I thought I was a good fruit-eater before this fast. I mean, maybe I didn’t eat fruit with every meal. Maybe I chose snacks I didn’t have to peel or core instead of fruit occasionally. I wasn’t a non-fruit-eater, if you know what I mean.

But let me tell you something: I now love fruit so much I could sing its praises from the rooftops. Didn’t see that coming? Me, neither. I figured popcorn would be my go-to snack during this fast. In fact, I only bought apples and bananas on my first grocery trip because I figured I’d have a banana with breakfast and an apple as a snack each day, and the rest of my meals and snacks would be veggies and grains.

Boy, was I wrong! I have never eaten so much fruit in my life, and I love it. I had to take this picture of the bowl of clementines right when I got home from the store because I knew they’d be gone in no time.

Clementines, you are here to stay.

Flavored Water

You can only drink water on the Daniel Fast, which isn’t much of a sacrifice, right? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to drink most of the time anyway? Hmm…

Maybe this will be easy for you, and I certainly thought it would be easy for me, but I quickly realized that I like having a variety of beverages during the day. I drink a lot of water, but I also like to have herbal tea in various flavors or decaf iced tea with a splash of cranberry juice. I missed the variety, but I read in the Daniel Fast resources that it’s okay to have water flavored with fruits and herbs.

Enter this website. So many creative combinations to make delicious flavored water! My current favorites are cucumber + mint, raspberry + lime, and blackberry + sage.

Full disclosure: That pretty pic is just for you, gentle readers. I really make flavored water by the pitcher, and my pitcher has one of those filter things so I don’t get fruit bits in my water bottles. I like to keep things honest around here. ; )

Salty-yet-healthy snacks (which we scarfed down so quickly, I didn’t get a pic!)

When I went grocery shopping for the beginning of the fast, my first stop was our local CSA. I got huge bunches of collard greens and mustard greens, and I followed Alton Brown’s recipe to make them into delicious chips.

I have always loved popcorn, so I kept that around, too. Delish.

Well, there you have my favorite meals! Many of these will be going into my recipe file because they are easy and healthy and did I mention cheap?

Any of these sound good to you? Any other easy / healthy / cheap recipes to share? My grocery budget and I are all ears!