I love eating veggie bowls for my work lunch. However I don't make them at home as often, so with this stay-at-home period I am hoping to add a bowl into the lunch rotation once a week!
Bowls are super simple and super adaptable to what you have at hand - making them particularly attractive options these days. A good bowl essentially has a few components, each prepared separately and put together at the end customized to eater's taste:
- Cooked grain: this serves as the base. It can be plain cooked rice, wild rice, couscous or quinoa.
- Protein: baked tofu is my favorite but can also use roast chicken or boiled egg.
- Veggies: roasted broccoli, sliced onions, avocados, cucumbers, carrots, chopped cabbage, micro-greens all good :)
- Garnish: sliced nuts or sesame seeds
A good bowl comes together quickly and is a healthy powerhouse. This version with wild rice is my particular favorite. The only other thing I would add to this is sliced avocado but we were out of avocado and so skipped it. This is how I put it together.
- Wild rice: in instant pot cook 1C dried wild rice per package instructions. I added 2C water, a little olive oil, pinch of dried rosemary, 3 peeled cloves of garlic, salt & pepper. Cook for 28 minutes high pressure and then natural release.
- Baked tofu: marinated tofu in peanut butter + soy-sauce + dash of water + sugar for 15 minutes. Then baked at 400F for ~15minutes. Broiled 1 minute at the end.
- Roasted broccoli: roasted broccoli at 400F for 15 minutes with salt, pepper and olive oil. Remove from oven when broccoli looks to slightly charred. Drizzle with lemon juice.
- Veggies: slice onions, cucumbers.
- Garnish: Top with sliced almonds.
Enjoy!
A few weeks ago when I realized that we were going to be in this work from home phase for atleast a few weeks, along with pantry buying, a spur of the moment purchase I made was a kindle! We borrow books quite often from library - my daughter is an avid reader and goes through atleast 20 books in 2-3 weeks and is always asking for something new to read. So not having access to our local library and being stuck at home was going to be hard.
However all public libraries now a days have an amazing collection of e-books on their e-library sites usually served through apps like Overdrive or Libby. The only concern is that reading on phone for an extended period of time can be stressful to eyes. And in addition I don't like to leave a phone or laptop with kids unattended. So Kindle made perfect sense. Our library app was compatible to the kindle and so we borrow e-library books and send them to Kindle.
I love the e-ink display - it's so easy on eyes and feels paper-like and very light. The lack of distraction when reading is a huge plus. My only quip is the UI interface is a bit sluggish and with gray-scale only it's not the best experience to browse new books and choose what to read, so I do the choosing the next book part on a phone, but once a book is chosen and pushed to Kindle, it's the best e-reading experience.
Anyhow, we are loving it a lot. Our e-library has more than plenty choices for kids and I am finding a lot of high value content there too particularly as our local librarians are curating content to appeal to the demographic and the suddenly increased reading appetite of their patrons!
I hope you too are finding creative and relaxing ways to take your mind off of the news and spend the time well and stay sane!