Lent Dinner Ideas

Spaghetti with marinara, salad & bread
There are tons of choices of pasta with pesto & veggies
Tuna cassarole
Seafood gumbo with rice
Potato soup
Vegetable soup
Quesadillas with rice & black beans

How about Vegi Lasagna? I'm sure there are a ton of great recipes out there... or you could use your regular one and just skip the meat.

We often do vegi taco's too - beans/rice, vegi's and cheese... my kids just do cheese.

Or -I've done cheese/vegi pizza's for my husbands Catholic family during lent before too.

Add some minestrone with the veggie lasagne and yum!

Red-beans and rice
Cheese enchiladas with rice and beans
Shrimp with pasta
Any kind of pasta with whatever kind of sauce sounds good
Crabcakes

We're Catholic, and these are some things that we like. :)

I'm part Japanese, so I've made shrimp and veggie tempura with rice and that goes over well because it's different. If it's a dinner with those who eat meat, you could do chicken teriyaki on the side for your family. I'm Catholic and I wouldn't mind if I went to a dinner and there was a meat entree along with a veggie entree.

But the tempura itself is easy to do. Sometimes if I'm in a hurry, I will get the frozen shrimp tempura from Trader Joe's (not sure if there is one in your area) and bake that while I'm doing the veggies. You can buy the box of tempura batter and I would recommend using ice cold water to mix it with (generally 1 1/2 cups ice cold water to one box of tempura batter mix - mix well only once and don't mix again). For 5 adults and 2 children, you will need two boxes to make enough veggies for everyone.

I fry them in a pan with about 2 inches of hot oil in the pan, so you will have to turn the veggies to brown the other side. The veggies that you could do are: julienned carrots, sliced potatoes, sliced sweet potatoes, sliced zucchini, whole individual green beans, sliced red bell pepper, mushrooms, and broccoli florets (I usually do the red pepper last since it will color the batter). This is very colorful too on your table. Good luck!

Now this is making me want to make this for Friday night too. : )

There are tons of vegetarian dinner ideas that you could use depending on what your kids will eat. Here are a few that come to mind:

-Vegetarian Chili, cornbread, avocado salad
-Veggie Lasagna/eggplant parm/baked zitit with salad, garlic bread
-Baked Mac and Cheese, green veggie, vegetarian baked beans
-Homemade pizza/calzones with salad
-Mexican-bean burritos, cheese enchiladas, make your own tacos, etc
-Mushroom risotto with veggie sides and bruschetta
-Stuffed Peppers-this is one of my favorite recipes, but there are tons out there http://www.eatingwell.com/recipes/greek_orzo_stuffed_pepp...
-Falafel, babaganoush, pitas, tzatziki, salad

meatless nachos, broccoli cheese soup, tomato bisque soup, eggplant with marinara sauce. You can serve it all (including the other suggestions) Hors d'oeuvre style.

Meatless chili made with beans and chopped veggies is one of our favorites ! I serve it over Tinkyada (organic) brown rice noodles because I'm a huge pasta lover !

Meatless lasagna, garlic bread and a big tossed salad. It's easy and it feeds a lot.

Spaghetti wth meatless sauce
Aldi's Lasagna rolls (special buy this week!)
Pancakes/French toast/Waffles
Tuna noodle casserole
Eggs

For any recipe that has cooked ground beef or turkey, you can substitute Boca Crumbles--they are vegetarian and found in the freezer section of the store. You can also substitute TVP (as below). I have found this in the baking section near the specialty flours, or if you have a gluten free/specialty area in your store, it might be there.

Baked tilapia. There are several good recipes/variations for it posted at www.allrecipes.com

Vegetarian chili with textured vegetable protein, or TVP, replacing the ground beef. I add diced carrots, celery, black beans, tomatoes, etc. to the chili and serve with corn bread.

Chili Mac, minus the ground beef. The refried beans are plenty of protein w/o the beef.