I promised to share more of our easy veggie bowls... so here's another!

Oh how I love cooked onions.  I like them fried.  I like them caramelized.  I like them sauteed.  Oh, the sweet sweet yum!

Ahem... so I put them into a veggie bowl...

Am I the only one who gets all misty-eyed over veggies?  And not just because I was cutting onions?
Anyway.  Back to the bowl.  We had to blanch a few bags of green beans so as the onions cooked, Jemma and I snipped the ends (her term for cutting off the stems).

I really think she helps me cook just so she can sneak in extra tastes.

Once the were clean and snipped, I plunged them into boiling water until they were bright green, then put them in cold water.
I wanted to include a protein, so I grabbed a bag of beans I had pre-cooked and frozen from the freezer.  To defrost them, I just poured the boiling green bean water over the beans in the strainer.  Just as easy as canned, but cooked in bone broth!

I don't even know what greens we used.  Sorry.  But, I mixed them with the beans.

A week or so ago I posted about my love of bowls.  No, not the dish, the meal.  Although I do like a pretty bowl to eat a tasty bowl out of.

Anyway, this week I am sharing some bowls made recently.  The first is root-veggie heavy, as I was trying to use up the late spring veggies before the summer veggies started rolling in.

I really just make the veggie bowls to use up whatever I have lying around.  On this day, it was red onions, kohlrabi, and parsnips.
 I tossed them with olive oil and salt, then roasted them.
While they were roasting, I cleaned and cut up some collard greens.  I also cooked a few cups of pearl couscous in chicken broth to have for the week.  At the same time, this was going on behind me.

Yeah... I caught you!

Once I was done admiring the cuteness, I mixed the collards with the hot roasted veggies and hot couscous.  They wilted the collards nicely without rendering them mushy.
Tossed with a balsamic vinaigrette (I promise to share the recipe soon... I call it magic sauce because Jemma and Juliet (and John!) gobble up anything I put it on!), it was perfect.

See?  Easy.
John added in some leftover pork because he felt like having a heartier dish.  It was great both ways!

What do you like to include in your bowls?

I was always a huge fan of salads.  One of the things my roommate in my college apartment said she missed when I moved out was the little containers of salad ingredients waiting the the fridge, ready to go.  (After we would go food shopping, I used to clean and slice up all the veggies so that we could make a salad quickly, any time we wanted).  As time has passed, though, the salads have evolved.

It started when I added grains in.  Leftover couscous?  Throw it in.  Extra quinoa?  Yes, please!  Then, when I started dating John, I would add in the leftover hummus or baba ganoush that was in the fridge.  Over time, it became more about the add-ins than the actual salad part.  When there were no leafy greens (the horror!), I would still make it, but I was at a loss as to what to call it.

Does a salad with no leafy greens qualify as a salad?  It's one of life's big questions, I know.

So, I called it a grain salad.  Except, sometimes there were no grains.  A veggie salad, then?  I guess, but that didn't really capture it either.  I started just calling them bowls.  It was easier.  I've tweaked them over time, but the premise is the same.  Take grains, veggies, and a protein, mix them together, and top them with a yummy sauce/dressing.

It gets crazier.  (Can bowls of food be crazy?)  I started having them for BREAKFAST.  Leftover grains, nuts, and fruit.  Usually topped with maple syrup because everything is better with maple syrup.

Turns out, I didn't invent these!   I know!  Crazy, right?  Apparently they are called "buddha bowls" or "glory bowls."  Somehow I have spent a decade living under a rock and never knew this.  I still just call them bowls, and they are delish.

Some recent bowls:
Root Veggie Bowl
Green Bean and Sauteed Onion Bowl


I'll be sharing some of my recent bowl recipes in the upcoming posts.  What are your favorite combos?

We have two little berry fanatics on our hands.  We cannot keep enough berries in our house!  Luckily, we get quite a few from our CSA every week.  In addition, my parents have a raspberry patch in their backyard.  One HUNGRY little girl eats them all before we can take any home, but she enjoys them.  We planted a blackberry plant behind our house a few years ago, but the deer enjoyed it so much it was down to a stub.  We transplanted it to our garden, protected by the fence.  Last year it gave us a handful of berries, but this year it is dripping with 'em!  They will be ripe pretty soon, and we can't wait!

In the meantime, we have been picking some wild berries that grow in our neighborhood.

Wild Wineberries

We have a few patches on our property, and they are not hard to find elsewhere.  Every morning during the baby's nap Jemma and I have been going picking.


We received a new (to us) berry recently from our CSA, the red currant.  After John explained that it is a CURR-ent, not a curr-ONT like I've been saying it. Jemma and I plucked them from their stem.

Red Currants

They look like little rubies!!!  They were delish with granola and a little coconut.

Barley with berries and pecans

Couscous with strawberries and honey

What's your favorite berry?  Do you grow any?

This post was shared on Fat Tuesday!