Good Friday

I have mentioned these wonderful Liturgical Teas before that Alice at Cottage Blessings has created and shared... we did one at Candlemas as a luncheon, and on Good Friday we did the second Lenten tea as our dinner menu. It is kind of snack-y and meatless and sweetless, so it works well as a Good Friday meal, heavy enough to be the main meal of the day yet not over-indulgent. You can see the link for all the scripture references and explanations.

I lifted the Mount of Olives from the first Lenten tea because my children are obsessed with olives, like any good Nadolski descendant (except you, Tim!). And it went well with the next item:

The King's Crown, referencing Pilate questioning Jesus if he was a King. I made ours with a mixture of cream cheese, sour cream, and taco seasoning as the base layer, then a layer of refried beans mixed with cilantro, followed by a tomato layer, and then topped with cheddar and Monterey jack cheeses. The tortilla chips form the points for the crown. Yummy!!

This is purple (boysenberry) fruit leather. It represents the purple cloak they put on Jesus when they were mocking him.

And here are mini Crowns of Thorns: round crackers, sunflower seed butter, and broken rod pretzels.

These look weird, and that is because they are made with our chickens' brown eggs rather than with white ones. They are Golgotha Eggs, for the "place of the skull" where Jesus was crucified. They would be much more representative of skulls if they were white, I realized after the fact!

The muffins were a simple recipe so as not to be like a treat: basic whole wheat muffins from the LLL cookbook. They have cloves and cinnamon in them, and a couple tablespoons of honey. I cut the tops off and hollowed them out to represent the tomb. Then the girls placed a bit of food in the tomb when we read about Jesus being laid in the tomb and covered it with the "stone," the muffin lid.

These tortillas are for Jesus's seamless garment topped with mozerella cubes for the dice, standing for when the soldiers cast lots to see who would win the garment.

We also had grape tomatoes (100 halves, from 50 tomatoes) to represent the centurion, and we had balsamic vinegar for the vinegar offered to Christ on the cross.

Chris read from our children's Bible as Caroline and Cecilia tried to identify the foods that stood for certain events. After dinner, we prayed the Stations of the Cross from this CD (it's still on sale!) as a family.

When we read about placing Jesus in the tomb and said that the girls could put a piece of food in their tomb muffins if they wanted to, we found that Cecilia tried to stuff all of her hard-boiled egg pieces into hers!

Here's Caroline finishing up her dinner (she had to have her photo taken as well after we took the one of Cecilia with all the egg in the muffin!).