Orthodox Easter lent. My take.

During lent, Orthodox Christians abstain from eating meat and any food of animal origin, eggs and dairy included. I am not really a fan of potato pie day in, day out, so I prefer to use this time to prepare and eat more Asian dishes. Hummus is lent-friendly and so is my pickled kale and beetroot salad.  

 Indian palak paneer, a spinach - cheese dish in a traditional cumin-red chili-tomato masala made with tofu instead of cheese, here with homemade eggless rye noodles.

 The picture does a great disservice to this dish! It tasted a zillion times better than it looked. 

Of course, you will not see many Serbs eating either hummus or palak paneer at the time of Easter lent (or at anytime, for that matter). 

Dry fruits and nuts comprise some of the more standard lent foods.

My mother's take: mushroom pie made from homemade buckwheat crusts...

...with lots of pepper! The Pie of All Pies, if you ask me, though I am no authority on the subject. 

And then her breads...

One more buckwheat-rye affair or....

... this peasant's pogacha (sourdough bread). It doesn't get any simpler than this. 

Flour, salt, water and baking soda. That's all.

A thing of beauty.

Homemade rye pasta....

Homemade pasta takes a lot of work and nerve. It's one of those endeavors that turns not only your kitchen but your entire home into a work station. It is also a race against time as you have to alternate between rolling out strips of dough, shortly airdrying them on a clean and dry flat surface (king-size bed covered with a clean tablecloth will do the trick) then pressing them through the pasta machine once or twice before finally cutting them into pasta shapes of your choosing, either manually or again, using a pasta machine, all that before the paper-thin sheets of dough completely dry when they are no longer pliable. We have a manually operated, Chinese-made, very basic pasta machine, just like the one in the pic above but I am so ready to invest in an electric one or at least a manual one with a bigger variety of shapes.

These are rye noodles as they just came out of the machine.

We had some that same day in a chicken soup. No matter how much you reheat the soup the homemade pasta never falls apart, unlike the store-bought kind. Makes you wonder what they put in there.....

I put some in the freezer to cook them later like fresh pasta (few things in this world are better than fresh pasta) and air-dried  the rest to be cooked and eaten like your regular dry pasta (except that the homemade kind is light years away)... For the extra-daring, experimental folks (there are days when I feel like that but this one was not one of them, esp. with my mother aorund) I recommend making penne using knitting needles or metal skewers. Lightly wound strips of rolled out dough around a needle or a skewer, glue the ends together to get a tubular shape of whichever length you like, carefully take it off the needle and let dry, cook or freeze.

Sorry for the smudgy images. My phone has to be held superstill to take good photos and I was taking these with my mother running from the bedroom where pasta was drying to the kitchen table where we had set up the pasta machine, her hands full of pasta and screaming at me to leave the phone and help her with the darn thing. It was a Spaghetti Incident, all right!

And the cooks before they declared the war on each other.