Recipe – Double Broccoli Buddha Bowl

Occasionally there will be recipes that come across my feed and grab me right away.  I look at the post and go, “I NEED THAT” and make immediate plans to go to the grocery store and get the required ingredients.  This recipe pushed a lot of my “just right” buttons – I love quinoa.  I love broccoli.  I love avocado.  I love to pretend that I’m a healthy eater who purchases microgreens on the regular and isn’t overly fond of pasta.  It doesn’t hurt that the recipe is beautifully shot by it’s author over at 101 Cookbooks (who also brought us the rosemary olive oil cake), and just looked fresh and delicious.

So last week I decided to make it.  On my early week grocery run, I gathered up nearly every ingredient (except for coconut milk, which I found later at a different store), and it wasn’t that many, and they weren’t that odd.  It’s just the combination of all of them that makes them “fancy”.  I started to cook around 7, thinking I would just be cooking for me and the boy, but it turns out the girls hadn’t eaten yet either, and so I would be feeding them too.  Thank goodness the recipe serves 4-6 – and actually serves that many!  I worried at 7:30 that the girls would be eating super late, but by the time I finished putting things together at 7:45, it was a little late, and the kitchen was a mess (this recipe requires a lot of cooking vessels), but I didn’t feel like I was feeding the family at midnight.

I didn’t do everything perfectly.  I didn’t toast my almost slices.  I could have added more curry paste and liquid coconut milk to the pesto/sauce portion.  But other than that, it was wonderful.  A solid 45 minutes of doing all the things around the kitchen (not quite the 15 minutes as promised in the initial recipe), but definitely the worth the time and effort to have something homemade that could have been bought at someplace like Chop’t or Sweetgreen, and that makes me feel like perhaps I am the kind of fancy healthy person that buys microgreens regularly.

Vibrant Vegan Double Broccoli Buddha Bowl

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients:

3 cups cooked quinoa
5 cups raw broccoli, cut into small florets and stems
1 tablespoon green curry paste
2 medium garlic cloves
2/3 cup sliced or slivered almonds, toasted
2 big pinches salt
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup full-fat coconut milk

Optional toppings: microgreens, hot sauce, sliced avocado

Instructions: 

Cook the quinoa and set aside. [Note: 1 cup dry quinoa + 2 cups liquid = 3 cups cooked quinoa]

Cook the broccoli by pouring 3/4 cup water into a large pot and bringing it to a simmer. Add a big pinch of salt and stir in the broccoli. Cover and cook for a minute, just long enough to take the raw edge off. Transfer the broccoli to a strainer and run under cold water until it stops cooking. Set aside.

To make the broccoli pesto puree two cups of the cooked broccoli, curry paste, garlic, 1/2 cup of the almonds, salt, lemon juice, and coconut milk in a food processor. Pulse until smooth.

Just before serving, toss the quinoa and remaining broccoli florets with about 1/2 of the broccoli pesto. Taste and adjust if needed, you might want to add more of the pesto a bit at a time, or you might want a bit more salt or an added squeeze of lemon juice. Turn out onto a serving platter and top with the remaining almonds, and any other toppings you like – some slices avocado, greens or sprouts, and/or hot sauce are all good fits.

Details: Vibrant Vegan Double Broccoli Buddha Bowl from 101 Cookbooks

3 Comment

  1. Nicole Holstein says: Reply

    Hm this looks like it might make a good, healthy lunch. Does it keep well?

    1. maggie says: Reply

      I can’t say for sure if it keeps since the four of us finished it all. I’m positive the quinoa with pesto mixed in would keep. And the broccoli would probably be fine, if a little mushy on reheating (not the crispness you get from cooking it ever so briefly). The toppings you would have to pack separately and add after reheating. But if you were already doing a sort of bento-box type lunch packing situation (and could reheat in parts), it could probably work.

  2. […] Double Broccoli Buddha Bowl – this was one of those recipes that came across my feed reader where I went, “AHHH – THIS CONTAINS ALL THE THINGS I LIKE” and so immediately had to make it.  Who cares that it was ridiculously complicated?  And that it delayed bedtime by like, 45 minutes, so that the girls could eat dinner with us and their super hipster buddha bowls?  I felt so fancy for making it myself.  It seriously felt like the kind of thing that would come out of the kitchen at a ridiculously pretentious vegetarian restaurant, and the truth is that I made it.  Me, who eats so much meat, and generally lives on pasta.  It was a very proud moment. […]

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