Grain Bowls and Rice Bowls

Pan Fried Tofu with Thai Peanut Sauce

April 8, 2021 by Lindsay 2 Comments

Our 100% favorite plant-based weeknight dinner that we eat at least every other week! Perfect spicy peanut sauce (make it in advance!), crispy pan fried tofu, and slaw with whatever greens you have make for the most delicious vegan rice bowl dinner that is healthy and comforting.

I don't think I've ever said this about anything before (I probably have), but this is hands down our favorite dinner.

We have other things that we love, other things that are in regular rotation, for sure, but this is our dinner. One that we've tweaked and crafted over the years and every time we have it we kind of sink into this "it's healthy but comforting" haze of joy.

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Lentil Bowls with Cauliflower and Tahini

March 22, 2021 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

The best buddha bowls with cauliflower and tahini sauce! These are so delicious for a make ahead lunch, and the pickled onions and tahini sauce can be made in advance for a quick throw-together meal. These bowls are vegetarian, gluten free, and can be served hot, cold, or at room temperature.

lentil bowl topped with pickled red onions

When it comes to "healthy" food, I'm careful to not use words like "cheat, guilt, good, bad," and so on. I think that thought pattern surrounding food can be so damaging, but also I agree that in terms of physical health there are foods that are better for our bodies than others, if we're talking lentils vs cheetos.

I love lentils for the cheap + toothsome + nutrition-packed punch they pack in a bowl like this. They are SO flavorful (because salt) and honestly I could eat a bowl of them on their own.

We made this into a fun bowl with bright pink pickled onions, a shortcut gremolata, and toasty roasty cauliflower, one of my favorite substitutes for meat because when roasted it has just the best texture.

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Meal Prep Chicken Grain Bowls

February 16, 2021 by Lindsay 7 Comments

Meal prep chicken grain bowls with all of your favorite toppings! We're going super easy for meal prep with one dressing for the chicken marinade and salad, a few chopped veggies, and lots and lots of time saved during the week now that your meal prep lunches are made!

Mmmmmmm meal prep ideas for lunch, aka something I think about almost every week. It's been one of the hardest things about quarantine for me; very few opportunities to leave the house for lunch and very little desire to have leftovers since we cook 7 dinners per week now too.

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15 Minute Hibachi Steak

January 26, 2021 by Lindsay 2 Comments

Steak in just 10 minutes! This recipe for hibachi steak has just 6 ingredients and cooks in about the same amount of time it takes to steam some rice. I use sirloin steak cubes for a super affordable option, but this is also delicious with ribeye steak.

YEAH YEAH YEAH!! ..is my reaction to hibachi steak bowls early in the week in January.

Since the dawn of this blog (you're like, calm down), hibachi recipes and Asian-fusion recipes have been some of our favorites to make, and your favorites to read. The top recipes of all time (and, kind of by a lot) are hibachi shrimp and spicy crab salad (like in sushi!), and honestly they're some of my favorites too.

I think with the hibachi method in general, the hot pan + quick cooking nature of things make them really attractive to us: real people trying to feed our families good food in a reasonable amount of time.

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Easy Black Beans and Rice

October 6, 2020 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

This gluten free black beans and rice recipe has just 8 ingredients and is done in about half an hour! I love rice and beans for a quick vegetarian dinner, and make these black beans in advance often for an even faster meal-prepped dinner. If you have some extra black beans, black bean salsa is great to have around for snacks!

Weeknight vegan dinner idea, here we go! Weeknight vegan/dairy free/gluten free/BUT NOT SAD dinner, to be exact.

Free of some things people avoid, not free of joy, etc.

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Lentil Quinoa Bowl with Walnut Pesto

September 30, 2019 by Lindsay 3 Comments

Lentil Quinoa Bowl with kale walnut pesto! These are my absolute favorite ingredients for a meal prep quinoa power bowl. The ingredients can all be made in advance and the kale and walnut pesto keeps perfectly in the fridge for at least a week, and even longer in the freezer. Enjoy these fun vegetarian Buddha bowls!

I am SO, so pleased that this is going to be your dinner this week (go with it). This lentil quinoa bowl is one of the best things to come out of my kitchen in recent months (and there are....a lot of contenders), is gluten free, vegetarian, and ridiculously yummy in a way that makes you not really that concerned about the health factor.

But the health factor is THERE with these lentil quinoa bowls. We're talking quinoa, turmeric lentils, roasted sweet potatoes AND tomatoes, and walnut pesto that we've made several times this summer for these bowls, pasta, and lots of other yummy things!

(PS this is not unlike the lentil quinoa bowl from Panera!)

The walnut kale pesto is not to be skipped, is my point.

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Chinese Ground Beef and Zucchini

June 10, 2019 by Lindsay 1 Comment

Perfect for summer garden zucchini or year round, these Chinese ground beef and zucchini bowls are SO good. Quick and easy, make-your-own-takeout style, and who doesn't love a rice bowl? No one is the answer.

This recipe was first published in June 2019 and was last updated February 2021.

Oh hey, easy dinners that light up my life.

Are bowls over, or are we still good with everything we make going in shallow bowls with lots of toppings? Please say bowls aren't over.

These particular bowls are exceptionally delicious. We're working with a yummy brown sauce that comes together so quickly thanks to a Microplane grater that eliminates chopping of teeny things AND can get little kids involved.

Then, we have ground beef, zucchini from your summer garden (or, like, the store), and crunchy water chestnuts mainly because I adore them. This is one of those "regular" meals that is also highly flavorful and a perfect weeknight dinner.

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Spicy Crab Salad Poke

June 11, 2018 by Lindsay 11 Comments

Imitation crab salad poke bowl with our own spicy crab salad sushi and homemade poke bowl sauce! This dish has mostly storebought ingredients with a few quick things to prepare for extra fun and special weeknight sushi bowls at home.

...what can I say except, you're welcome?

We've been watching a lot of Moana around here lately. Which is PERFECT for this island fusion bowl to start your week, theme movie + dinner totally unplanned.

Obviously it goes without saying that the Moana-obsessed toddler in this house would turn her nose up in disgust at the lack of only crackers in this bowl, but it's developmentally appropriate to be a total ass about diverse foods at this age, so I forgive her.

People over 2, however, you will adore this. It's an addition to one of the most popular recipes on the site, this spicy crab salad. I know there are many that turn their nose up at anything with fake crab and mayo calling itself sushi, and that's fine. But-however-also, this stuff is popular for good reason: it's delicious, and so simple to make on your own.

I love spicy crab ANYTHING when we order sushi, right next to my all-raw authentic fare, but the ingredients are so simple and cheap that it seems silly to save spicy crab for special sushi nights.

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Grain Bowls with Garlicky Spinach, Roasted Sweet Potatoes, and Tahini Drizzle

January 2, 2018 by Lindsay 4 Comments

....and so much more!

HAPPY NEW YEAR, truly. I know this is the teensiest bit cliche to start the year with something so trendily healthy, but it's also delicious so I'm sorry I'm not sorry. I am a thousand percent behind bowls of any kind for meals. Grain bowls, Mexican rice bowls, poke bowls, all of the bowls. I MAINLY like them because it's a lot of healthy stuff piled on a crap-ton of carbs, but that's on me. You don't technically have to use 8 cups of a starch before you get to the veggies, or you can and you know I'm not here to judge.

The flavor combination in this bowl is somewhere in the middle of Italian and Middle Eastern, and let me just tell you how well that works. The sweet potatoes and tomatoes are roasted until caramely and soft, spinach is wilted with anchovy and garlic, and the whole thing is topped with a tahini drizzle, feta, and lemon juice. The flavors are unreal together, and the great thing about bowls like this is what you can customize them to what you have on hand, what you enjoy, etc.

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Thai Squid Salad

February 22, 2016 by Lindsay 1 Comment

Super yummy Thai Squid Salad recipe with vermicelli rice noodles and tons of crunchy vegetables. The Thai salad dressing here is sweet, savory, and punchy from lots of lime juice. I make the dressing and chop the veggies in advance, then sear the calamari while cooking the rice vermicelli noodles for a super quick low carb weeknight main dish salad dinner!

LUNCH!

Or dinner. Or part of dinner.

A lot of times we're total go-outers on weekends for lunch - it's a good time for Beck, we like restaurants, and when it's nice we love sitting outside at one of the gazillion options Greenville has for outdoor dining. BUT, in an effort to save money and keep things simpler with the baby, we've been doing more of that at home too - fun lunches on weekends that are a little bit fancy but still healthy and easy to make, because anything complicated totally defeats the purpose of eating in, right?

So this Thai Calamari salad recipe. Super healthy, full of flavor, can be prepped in stages based on what kind of time you're working with. The Thai salad dressing is really the kicker, and you can swap out veggies, seafood, nuts, WHATEVER based on what you have on hand, what you like, what you feel like - you're the boss!

Just make a version of this soon, is my point.

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Power Vegetarian Cobb Salad

January 20, 2015 by Lindsay 3 Comments

Vegetarian Cobb Salad with Quinoa and Power Greens is one of our favorite quinoa power bowls! Inspiration from a classic cobb salad but amped up with herby quinoa and a delicious roasted garlic vinaigrette. I love this for meal prep; store all the ingredients separately and cut the avocado right before serving.

Here's your recovery from that 3-day awful food and drink bender you just finished up last weekend.

You're welcome for that.

I know a lot of people for whom every Monday kind of turns into a New Year's resolution fest - are you like that? MONDAY is when I start to get my act together and be nicer and less dramatic and eat more quinoa.

Why Monday? I have no clue. Anyone who watched all the football on Sunday knows that Monday is just another recovery day that might involving laziness and fried foods, amirite?

Although, to be fair, I actually ate this on Saturday in an attempt to be slightly well behaved. And then washed it down with 948 light beers BUT THAT'S HEALTHY.

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Grain Bowls and Rice Bowls

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