Sandwiches, soup, and fish are great options for Lent dinner ideas. This list of 200+ meatless meals includes the best dinners during Lent.
For ideas that are completely vegetarian, check out all of our vegetarian recipes.
It’s Ash Wednesday, which starts Lent.
That means your brain is probably scrambling, trying to find out what to make for dinner tonight. Don’t worry. We put together this list of the best dinners for Fridays during Lent to help you plan.
Side note: If you’re not Christian, and you have no idea what that means, let me explain quick. On Ash Wednesday and Fridays during Lent (Lent being the 40 days leading up to Easter), Christians are required by the church to abstain from eating meat.
So Christians who are generally meat eaters tend to scramble on Fridays and end up just ordering pizza. Pizza is fine, but it’s kind of boring. And there are so many more options for dinners during Lent.
We have over 200 meals listed, broken down into categories. So you can choose what you’re in the mood for tonight and find recipes.
Figuring out dinner every night is already so hard; this makes it so much easier.
Best Lent Dinner Ideas
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This list has a ton of no meat dinners for Lent. There are a few of our favorite recipes linked within each section, but you can check out the full list when you click the pink “Get all the recipes” button.
20+ Vegetarian Sandwiches That Are Perfect For Lent
Sandwiches are a really great for Lent lunch ideas. They’re light and easy to pack (if you’re still working from an office).
When many people think of sandwiches, though, they think about cold cuts. And yes, cold cut sandwiches are delicious and easy to put together — but they’re not Lent approved.
This list is filled with over 20 sandwiches that are Lent-friendly recipes. None of the sandwiches have any meat in them, which means you can pack them for lunch on Fridays or make them for a light dinner (which the church requests you have on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday).
Our favorite sandwiches for Lent:
40+ Vegetarian Soup Recipes For Lent
Lent starts in either February or March every year. It’s on a rotating schedule. When it starts in February and ends in late March or early April, it’s cold. So soup is the perfect dinner for Fridays during Lent.
Be careful when you’re looking at soup recipes, though.
So many soup recipes feel vegetarian, but they’re actually not. And vegetarian soups are the only ones that are Lent-approved.
A lot of soup recipes use beef broth or chicken broth in the recipe. Neither of those are actually okay to eat on Ash Wednesday or Fridays during Lent. So you want to make sure you’re making a recipe that uses a vegan or vegetarian broth.
Our favorite soups for Lent:
40+ Shrimp Recipes For Lent
Fish is Lent-approved, so many people have shrimp for Ash Wednesday and Friday during Lent dinners.
There are so many ways to make shrimp — grilled, boiled, air fried, in a broth, on rice. I mean, we all saw that scene in Forrest Gump where Bubba lists every shrimp recipe. And that scene bore an actual shrimp-based restaurant. So there are a ton of ways to make shrimp.
If you want, you could make a completely different shrimp recipe every Friday during Lent and not repeat any during the Lenten season.
Our favorite shrimp recipes for Lent:
40+ Shellfish Recipes For Lent (that aren’t shrimp)
Shrimp is technically a shellfish, but there are so many different ways to make shrimp. So shrimp has its own round up on Drugstore Divas.
So this list of shellfish recipes for Lent actually excluded shrimp. Mussels, clams, crawfish and the like are all on this list.
And of course, with so much variety, you could choose a different shellfish recipe every Friday during Lent and not repeat any of them. Honestly, you don’t even have to repeat the same shellfish if you don’t want to.
Our favorite shellfish recipes for Lent:
40+ Fish Recipes For Lent
Fish is a standard go to for Fridays during Lent. But you don’t have to go with your old standards this year. You can change up your Friday menus by choosing some recipes off of our fish recipes for Lent list.
There’s something for everyone on the list, ranging from accessible ingredients like fish sticks and canned tuna to high end ingredients like fresh fish. And of course, there are a ton of recipes in-between.
Our favorite fish recipes for Lent:
40+ Meatless Meals For Ash Wednesday & Fridays During Lent
This is our absolute most popular list of vegetarian meals for Ash Wednesday and Fridays during Lent.
It’s actually the only list in the entire post that is made up completely of our recipes (with the exception of Futomaki, which is my mom’s recipe).
The recipes on this list are meatless, as the title of the post says, but they’re also fishless too. All the recipes are completely vegetarian, so if you’re not a fan of fish (or if you’re like me and abstain from fish on Fridays during Lent even though it’s generally okay), this list of recipes is for you.
Our favorite recipes for Lent:
5+ Vegetarian Grilling Recipes
By the time Easter rolls around, the weather is usually really nice. So instead of eating soup because you’re cold, you’re looking for something to grill so you don’t have to turn the oven on.
Lent’s a long season.
This list has a bunch of vegetarian grilling recipes so that you can throw something on the grill on a Friday during Lent.
Our favorite grilling recipes for Lent:
More Lent Meal Ideas:
These are all great ideas for dinner during the Lenten season, but you need to eat breakfast too. For help with that, check out our list of Delicious Lent Breakfast Ideas.
And, don’t forget lunch. Get help with our list of Lunch Ideas For Lent.
What are your go to recipes for Fridays during Lent? Be sure to let us know in the comments.
Donna @ Modern on Monticello
Wednesday 3rd of March 2021
Thank you for sharing all these great recipes! My church doesn't officially observe the no meat Lent season, but meatless meals are good budget stretchers for any time during the year, and so healthy too. I am glad you included tuna cakes because those are one of our favorites.
Irene
Tuesday 2nd of March 2021
Great compilations and variety of ingredients, yummy!