Mark your calendars for February 11. That date is the kick-off for a key tradition in the Russian Orthodox Church's celebration of Lent: Butter Week.

Now in our cholesterol-obsessed country, it may smack of treason to have a whole week dedicated to butter. But if you ever needed a reason to love Russian cooking, Maslenitsa, or Butter Week, is it.

Some sources do call Maslenitsa Pancake Week, because pancakes--blini--are the centerpiece of its meals. But in Russian Orthodox Church traditions, it is the last week to eat butter, sour cream, eggs, milk and the like before the onset of Great Lent, which starts this year on February 19. (All meat is given up the week prior to Maslenitsa.) Russian Palm Sunday is April 1 this year and Pascha, or Russian Easter, is April 8. For a full list of Russian Orthodox Church holidays, see the "Calendar of Feasts" on the Orthodox Church in America's Web site. And if anybody has the time to import these dates into Google Calendar, please let me know. Its current Russian Holidays calendar only includes government celebrations.

Here's the "Butter Festival Blini Feast" menu suggested by Please To The Table, a great Russian cooking resource to buy if you don't already own it: Blini with black and salmon caviars, herring in mustard sauce, herring in sour cream sauce, smoked fish, wild mushroom caviar, mixed vegetable caviar, butter, sour cream, chopped scallions, hard-boiled eggs, and vodka. As Rachel Ray might say, Yum-o.

I am relatively sure, given the limited resources of their orphanages, that my kids never celebrated Maslenitsa like that before they came to America. (They're not alone, as this blogger notes about many of the Russians who moved to New York City's Brighton Beach neighborhood.) I am also not sure that their birthparents belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church, although that has always been my assumption.

But they love pancakes, and sour cream even more, and Maslenitsa is a way to get all that on the menu. I have tried many blini recipes over the years--even before my kids arrived--to greater and lesser success. Please To The Table has quite a nice recipe, which I can't, for copyright reasons, reproduce here. But I recently got King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking and its blini recipe is now my gold standard. You have to use buckwheat flour, but the nice folks at King Arthur make it quite easy to find on their Web site. Whole Foods also usually carries it.

Happy eating!