Buddha Bowl

One of my favorite no recipe, recipes is Buddha Bowls. Basically a Buddha Bowl is a meal comprised of a whole bunch of ingredients thrown together with a sauce added.  If you look on Pinterest, you will find a whole lot of recipes for them, which you can of course follow, but they are really easy to make with whatever you have on hand.  This makes them great for now, when so many are eating out of their pantry.

I think that traditionally Buddha Bowls were vegetarian, but I have added chicken to mine in the past.  Traditionally, they are also served cold, but for this one, I did heat my rice, onion, and mushrooms.

The other great thing about these are that they can be meal prepped.  I stored the ingredients in different containers depending on whether they were going to be reheated or not.  The week that I made these ones, I also didn't feel like making my own sauce, so I used a store bought one.  If you want to try your hand at making one, my favorite Buddha bowl sauce is this one by Davida over at The Healthy Maven.

If you want to recreate the bowl that I made, I sauteed a sweet onion and some Baby Bella mushrooms and roasted some frozen broccoli.  I added them to some brown rice and this is what I reheated each day.  The rest of the bowl was some baby spinach, diced cucumbers,  and matchstick carrots.  Finally I added a soft boiled egg.

What I'm Eating Lately: Beef Stew

Happy Monday!  Today is the day that we finally get the remodel started on our house.  Te contractor should be here soon to demo the bathroom and we're meeting with the designer at 1 to begin work on the kitchen.  Since we have no clue what the next 2 to 3 weeks is going to bring, and just how dirty our house is going to get, I wanted to have a warm, comforting meal yesterday for dinner.

I love beef stew - when it's made sans tomatoes.  I especially hate beef stew that is made with vegetable juice cocktail, and it hates me back :)  So we created a recipe that was easy, and had no tomatoes.  I also don't like overly fatty stew, so we make sure to use a lean cut of meat.  Yesterday we used some sort of round, it was marked as lean stew meat, and we could easily see that there wasn't much fat on it.

First we tossed the beef cubes in some seasoned flour and browned them in a bit of olive oil.  Towards the end, we added in some chunks of sweet onion.


Once everything was nice and browned we added the broth and the seasonings, brought everything to a boil and then turned down the heat to a simmer, covered it, and let it simmer for an hour.  Now, I have to mention our secret ingredient to the stew.  To give the stew a bit more depth of flavor, we added cumin to it.  It didn't give it heat, just a smoky, earthiness, that we really like.

Once the hour was up we added the carrots and potatoes and then a slurry of cornstarch and water.  We actually ended up doing that twice, I think because our meat to broth ratio was a bit high on the broth side.  After it came back up to a boil, we turned down the heat and simmered it, uncovered for 30 minutes.

Beef Stew
1 pound lean stew meat
2 tablespoon flour seasoned with salt and pepper
1 medium sweet onion, chunked
2 teaspoons minced garlic (I'm lazy and buy the pre-minced kind)
4 cups low sodium beef broth
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 pound of carrots chunked
6 small to medium red potatoes cut in half

What I'm Eating Lately: No Time To Cook

Most weekends I cook up a recipe of some sort to bring as my lunch for the upcoming week.  It helps to ensure that, one, I'm not buying lunch every day, and two, that I'm eating something healthful.  Unfortunately, some weekends, I'm just too busy to spend much time in the kitchen.  The first weekend of January was one of those.  Sometimes when that happens, I'll just buy enough cans of soup to last me the week (I've been reaching for the Progresso Light Soup a lot lately), but that weekend, I really wanted to cook.

Organic Sprouted Thai Red Curry Rice

On a trip to Whole Foods a while back, I had picked up this rice side dish, and then never made it.  It turned out to be the perfect thing to cook up for lunch for the week.  Even though it simmered for something like 30 minutes, it wasn't something that I had to watch, so once it started simmering, I was able to start on my next project, which was undecorating from Christmas.

Once it was cooked, I divided it up into four bowls and topped with some frozen veggies that I had cooked up.  It turned out to be quite a nice, quick lunch.  The only issue, was that I really didn't have a good protein to top it with.  If  do this again, I will add either mushrooms, or shred some chicken to have with it.

I also forgot to take a picture of the finished dish - sorry.


So what is your go to quick lunch to pack?

What I'm Eating This Week - Meal Prep Taco Bowls with Roasted Veg and Chicken

This week's lunch is a great, veggie heavy meal prep bowl with a Mexican twist.

First the veggies.  These are ones that I picked up recently at the farmer's market.

There's a pepper, a zucchini, a yellow squash, two banana peppers and some carrots - including two purple ones.







Have you ever had purple carrots before?  They taste like regular carrots, they just look really cool.  Here's one cut in half.






I chopped all of the veg and then tossed with a tablespoon of olive oil and some taco seasoning.  I get my taco seasoning at Whole Foods.  And then I roasted them at 350 for 30 minutes.

The bowls come together with some cauliflower rice, the veg, some leftover chicken and some peach mango salsa.

Really easy, really quick, really yummy :)