Saturday lunchtime – Come Salad Way (or: Lettuce Be)

The visit to the supermarket was very exciting. There’s something quite nice about wandering around looking at food and knowing that if I wanted it, I could just buy it and eat it. I had to stick to my list, though, otherwise I might have seriously considered going to customer services and asking how much it would be to buy everything, just so I had some choices.

Out of my list of recipes to start with, there was one that bizarrely seemed to be right at the top of my list, to the point where I had a huge craving for it yesterday as I was sleeping. Wanting a recipe isn’t that unusual; what was unusual is the fact that it was a salad bowl. Here is the recipe I was looking at. Technically it’s a buddha bowl, rather than a salad bowl. I’d never heard of this before; apparently it’s so called because the bowl should be so full of food that it expands out a bit at the top like the stomach of the buddha. Otherwise they’re just a medley of different foods, usually vegetables and other healthy-style foods which are designed to be nourishing and good for the soul – perhaps a more charitable interpretation of the “buddha” part of the name.

It met the criteria of involving rice and beans, so was definitely viable for my Saturday meal, but it contained so many other things that looked so delicious when compared to rice and beans that I think the selection of flavours was too much for my brain to cope, and it passed out whilst spamming “Yum!” to the rest of my body.

I can now divide the world into two types of people. People who think this is the most delicious thing they've ever seen, and people who are wrong.

The centrepiece of the dish is the “taco chickpeas” – essentially chickpeas cooked in some chopped tomatoes and a bunch of spices. I think this is one of the reasons I love chickpeas so much – they’re really good at absorbing flavour. By themselves, they’re not quite so interesting.

The rest of the ingredients present in the dish were:

·         Lettuce. Classic space-filling salad vegetable. Doesn’t really taste of too much, but for some reason that didn’t faze me too much. It’s almost like I have some recent experience of that.

·         Avocado. I keep forgetting that avocado exists – I quite like it but I don’t very often remember to cook with it. I bought a 3-pack today, though, so hopefully that will spur me on to greater avocado dishes.

·         Rice. I forgot that I’d put this on and burnt it slightly, but only a little bit. The rice in the dish tasted fine, but the washing up will be a bit more interesting.

·         Tomato. There’s nothing quite like a fresh tomato. Mostly because a fresh tomato is dissimilar to lots of things in a lot of ways, that’s not really a comment on whether it’s good or not. But it is good.

·         Radish. I don’t think I’ve ever had a radish before (at least not knowingly). I ate the entire bowl and still don’t really remember eating one, so either I have a small mouse hiding behind my bowl stealing radishes when I’m not paying attention, or it’s just a relatively unremarkable food.

·         Sweetcorn. Sweetcorn reminds me of Switzerland, in that both are relatively neutral to me. I’ll happily eat it, but wouldn’t usually think to buy it or add it to things.

·         Cucumber. This wasn’t in the original recipe, but I love cucumber more than the average person (I usually get through a whole cucumber every three days or so) so it seemed like a good addition to the salad bowl family.

·         Cheese. This also wasn’t in the original recipe, but if you think I’m going to go two meals in a row without having cheese when I have the option of having cheese, you’re crazy.

I don’t know if it’s the fact that I haven’t eaten a proper meal for a week, but I think this bowl might be the tastiest thing I’ve ever eaten in my life. Fortunately, I have lots of all of the ingredients so can make it again tomorrow with minimal effort. (Or this afternoon if I get peckish). In any case, this was definitely a much better meal than the porridge for breakfast.

It was also very filling. I can’t work out if that’s because there’s actually a fair amount of food in there or if it’s because my stomach is still slowly waking up from its temporary hibernation. I suspect I’ll be doing this a few more times in the future, so I’ll probably be able to work it out from that. Perhaps in the future my buddha will become more well-fed – at the moment he’s comparatively thin.

It was also really nice to have a full-flavoured meal for once. It’s already done wonders for my energy level (as may the decent quantity of sugar that’s come from finishing the bottle of Coke that had been sitting in my fridge for a week). One of the things I hope to make use of for as long as possible is the fact that food with any flavour is deeply appealing at the moment; in particular, dishes like this that are really healthy (perhaps sans the cheese, but I’m only human), so hopefully this will spark a reasonable length of time of eating stuff that’s good for me and enjoying it.

I have my rice and beans-based dinner dish already planned out, so join me this evening for the final blog post of the Mean Bean challenge.

 Note: The Mean Bean challenge has now finished, as have the expanding blog posts. Thanks to your exceptional generosity, Tearfund will be getting £430. If you have enjoyed this blog and feel able to donate to get that figure even higher, the link is here.