33 Bowl Recipes to Keep Your Belly Full and Life Easy

for food lists

Lately it feels like everyone, including me, is totally slammed. People are going back to school, or raising people going back to school, or partnered with people going back to school; people are starting new jobs, or work at their old job is intense; the locks on people’s apartment doors are broken and their landlord isn’t responding to their texts about it. Maybe the last one is just me, but I feel like a lot of us don’t have a ton of time to cook just now. That’s what Bowls are for! The bowl: an unassuming mix of a protein, veggie and grain, perhaps with some kind of sauce, quick to cook and eaten all in the same dish. (Not a smoothie bowl. Those are bullshit, sorry.) Maybe you even pre-cook your ingredients over the weekend and then reheat them when you’re hungry. Then you get to go about your week eating balanced meals that keep you full, and never having to eat a Lorna Doone that you found in your purse for dinner because it’s all you have the energy to consume. Winner!


1. Roasted Mushroom, Creamy Kale and Cauliflower Rice Bowl

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2. Paneer Satay Bowls with Peanut Sauce

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3. Ultimate Rainbow Bowl with Cabbage, Sweet Potato, Chickpeas, Avocado and Quinoa

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4. Braised Bok Choy, Leek and Spinach Rice Bowl with Poached Egg

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5. Sweet Potato and Broccoli Bowl with Orange Sesame Almond Butter Dressing

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6. Ahi Tuna Poke Bowl with Spicy Salmon

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7. Spicy Shrimp Burrito Bowls

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8. Roasted Sweet Potato, Apple and Chicken Sausage Bowl

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9. Green Goddess Vegetarian Bowl

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10. Deconstructed Sushi Bowl with Miso Ginger Dressing

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11. Veg Mediterranean Bowl

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12. Curried Corn Rice Bowl

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13. Mixed Grain Bowl with Beetroot Dressing

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14. Slow Cooker California Chicken Bowl

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15. Honey Soy Glazed Hawaiian Bowl

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16. Mediterranean Chicken Bowl

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17. Shredded Barbacoa Beef Bowl

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18. Korean BBQ Rice Bowl

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19. Pork Shogayaki Donburi

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20. Thai Noodle Bowl with Fried Pineapple

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21. Black Bean and Plantain Summer Bowl

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22. Miso Eggplant Rice Bowl

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23. Bruschetta Chicken Bowl

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24. Cuban Grilled Chicken Bowl

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25. Spring Roll Bowl

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26. Chicken Broccoli Bowls with Peanut Sauce

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27. Creamy Polenta Ratatouille Bowl with Savory Baked Tofu

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28. Thai Peanut Tofu Bowl

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29. Kimchi Bowl with Red Curry Almond Sauce

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30. Turmeric Tahini and Roasted Beet Bowl

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31. Gluten-Free Gourmet Pizza Bowls

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32. Honey Chipotle Chicken Bowl

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33. Cajun Chicken with Cilantro Lime Rice

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Rachel

Originally from Boston, MA, Rachel now lives in the Midwest. Topics dear to her heart include bisexuality, The X-Files and tacos. Her favorite Ciara video is probably "Ride," but if you're only going to watch one, she recommends "Like A Boy." You can follow her on twitter and instagram.

Rachel has written 1141 articles for us.

14 Comments

  1. Funnily enough, I had a bowl for lunch (restaurant bought mashed potatoes and gravy, with canned corn)! ;P It was good, but surely not nearly as good as these bowls look! Most are so gorgeous!

  2. Umm — those look and sound wonderful, but I read through 4 or 5 of them and they are all so much work! There’s nothing fast about it. Most require cooking more than one thing (roasting veggies, cooking rice or quinoa) then doing some more prep to it, assembling the dressing or sauce, which in some cases requires appliances such as blenders, and most make more than the 2 servings of at least half the ingredients…. Shoot, for all this work, I could have a pot roast in the slow cooker, veggies steaming on the stove, boiled and mashed potatoes and had a meal your grandmother would recognize! Not dissing all the work, but wow, it isn’t easy to make these things.

    • I have to admit I was thinking the same thing. Don’t get me wrong they look scrummy and I would totally make them for guests but for a stress free meal for one? Even the thought of washing up all the pans used in cooking that makes me stressed!

    • You don’t really need a blender to make sauces (I’ve never needed to). Rice + something else pretty much makes the base of most bowls. You can toss rice in a rice cooker (or a slow cooker), even stuff veggies in there, and cook up something else however you want, tada done.

      What you mention seems like way more work to me – I make this sorta bowls very frequently (not that uncommon in my cultural background, curries and such work better with rice than on their own) and they really don’t take that much time.

    • Based on my sample size and professional research (reading the About section of 5 of these links until I couldn’t take any more pictures of straight rich white women in gourmet kitchens, ahem), 100% of these recipes were made by white stay at home moms or professional food bloggers.
      I’m going to start a food blog that is nothing but pictures of leftover takeout and ramen noodles. It might be a little more realistic for our demographic.

    • Yeahhh…for a lot of these, I think I would skip a lot of the prep and just buy the premade stuff at Aldi or Trader Joe’s (cauliflower rice, I’m looking at you). Unless I’m *trying* to cook for an hour and a half just to impress myself.

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