Lesson Plan: The Jesus Feast

We have come to the end of our three month study of Christianity, and we thought we would cap things off by cooking a meal for our spiritual center that we called "The Jesus Feast."  Because we spent much of the time learning about the times, place, and culture in which Jesus lived, we thought a great way to showcase what we had learned was to fix a meal featuring the food that was typical of that time in what is now Israel.

When I first proposed this idea, I thought we would have kind of a targeted pot luck type lunch with food from that period.  However, I'm blessed to have a wonderful friend, Miss Nika, who used to own her own restaurant and catering business.  She is, needless to say, a fabulous cook, and she is also so great at working with our middle school kids.  She really got into researching the foods of the time with the students, and ended up preparing a repast that had the entire spiritual center in awe of what the middle school class had created.

Because we have a lot of different eating preferences among our group, we ended up with three different menus:  one for vegans, one for vegetarians, and one for omnivores.  The vegan options included:

• lentils
• barley
• bulgar
• stuffed grape leaves
• cucumber salad
• mixed olives
• fresh and dried fruit and nuts
• homemade hummus and freshly grilled pita bread

For the vegetarians, we added:

• cucumber in yogurt and dill
• hard boiled eggs
• salad with feta cheese

Omnivores could also have:

• roasted chicken
• chicken garbanzo stew

So we ended up with a main serving table looking like this:

With an additional meat/hot foods table that we had an adult handle:

AND, of course, a dessert table:

That is a vegan (no eggs, dairy, or honey) cake on the left, a vegetarian honey cake on the right, with some yogurt and honey in the middle.  Also on the table were grape leaves, sweetened and plain almonds, dates covered with coconut, and dried apricots with pomegranate seeds in the middle.

So, truly, a good time and a good meal was had by all.  Plus, I think the students learned a lot, not only about the foods from the times of Jesus, but about working together as a team to feed about 50 people in a healthy and expeditious way.