Easy Buddha Bowl Brilliance

I’ve got a time saving, wallet saving, sanity saving, healthy habit promoting food tip for you this week.  Why didn’t I think of it sooner?

I am so over lunches, school lunches, work lunches, brown bag lunches, whatever man, I’m over it.  My son is almost done with high school and I long ago gave up any semblance of even trying to care about who in my house eats lunch.  Stick a fork in it, I’m done.  I have clever friends who taught their kids to make their own lunches in grade school so I fully accept that any misery here is self inflicted. You can’t be good at everything and in the world of parenting I apparently suck at teaching kids to make their own lunches, and, potty training was a dismal failure that we will save for another day.

So, with four mostly adults in the house we have slowly moved towards an every man fends for himself model depending on the week, amount of groceries in the fridge and how many cute dog videos we’ve been watching online.  That’s probably the truest thing I’ve said today.

This week however I can share with you a hope that all is not lost, lunch can be redeemed and everyone can be happy.

I did three things last weekend, first I cleaned up my Tupperware cupboard so everything had a lid and they didn’t all fall on the floor when you opened the door making a huge mess.  Second, I cleaned all of the old stuff out of my fridge, and third, I spent a chunk of time washing, peeling, chopping all kinds of veggies and then stored them all in individual containers in the newly cleaned refrigerator.  Along with that I had some baked sliced chicken breast, shredded cheese, and quinoa.

Voila, everyone was able to grab a container and assemble a unique lunch that took all of 90 seconds to prep and was guaranteed healthy and different every day.  We all loved it, vegetable consumption jumped 500% and nobody bought food elsewhere.  Of and a bunch of random salad dressings  got used up.

Here is my grocery list:

• mixed greens
• shredded carrot
• grape tomatoes
• cubed cooked beets
• diced orange and yellow peppers
• cubed roasted sweet potato
• sliced fennel
• slice green onion
• sliced cucumber
• sliced raw asparagus
• packaged shredded cheese
• sliced cooked chicken breast
• quinoa cooked in vegetable broth

I was planning to add some chick peas and extra greens once we ran down on supplies, but we totally didn’t need them. Ditto for the avocado which I’ll use for something else this weekend.  And if the brilliance of how easy this worked wasn’t enough the was an additional benefit that might be even better.

Dinner.  By the end of the week, we are over cooking and meal planning. No more, I’m too tired to be creative.  Guess what we did?  Omelettes.  We took all of the stuff that wasn’t used up and could be re-sourced into omelette fillings, add cheese and again, voila.  Everyone was happy, it took no time, it cost next to nothing in extra ingredients, and required zero brain energy to plan it out.  And it sounded so fancy “Chicken with asparagus and spinach”

It’s been quite a while since I felt like I had a brilliant idea. but I’m telling you if I can get everyone in my house to eat spinach and fennel and beets and be happy about it, then it has to be a brilliant idea.

It’s not too late to plane for next week, try something new.