Green rice bowl!

Good morning to you all! New meal prep Monday post for you today! We've got a vegan green rice burrito bowl. It's spicy green rice, frijoles negros, roast sweet potato and pumpkin, zucchini and carrot noodles, tahini sauce, boiled broccoli and sliced avocado.

The basis of this meal is a fab herby green rice, which I found on the blog Cookie and Kate. Rather than cooking the brown rice in plain water, it's cooked in a pungent mixture of spinach, coriander, jalapeño, onion and garlic.

Green rice

I love how ludicrously green the cooking water becomes.

Green rice cooking

Ta-dah! Brown rice can be bland, so this is a great way of infusing the rice with lots of flavour. What a great idea!

Green burrito rice

The components

For the other ingredients, I went with a vaguely Mexican theme - good old frijoles negros, sliced avocado, and spicy roast sweet potato and pumpkin. And I added some boiled broccoli and spiralised zucchini and carrots, because vegetables. And some tahini sauce, because everything is better with tahini!

We'd actually been to the market that day with a friend of ours who wanted to start meal prepping too, and we bought heaps of vegetables to cook together! (Her meal prep included grilled teriyaki chicken, Chinese broccoli, pickled ginger, pickled cucumber, zoodles, some of the roast sweet potatoes/pumpkin, pickled ginger, and plain brown rice).

Vegan Green Rice Burrito Bowls

As I was putting the bowls together, I realised that this was an accidentally vegan meal. With heaps of different vegetables (are we doing the 10-a-day thing?), fibre-filled brown rice, protein from the black beans, and healthy avocado fats, all in the one easy-to-eat bowl!
Roast Sweet Potato and Pumpkin
Preheat the oven to 220C. Peel a small sweet potato and cut into 2-cm chunks. Peel a similar sized piece of pumpkin and cut into the 2-cm chunks. Place the pieces into a baking tray. Drizzle with a little olive oil and season with cumin seeds, paprika, salt and pepper to taste. Stir to coat the vegetable pieces evenly. Bake for 15 minutes or until soften and lightly browned.

Tahini Sauce
Mix together 2 tablespoons tahini, 1 pinch of sugar, 1 pinch salt and a squeeze of lemon.

Frijoles Negros (Black Beans)
Heat 1 teaspoon olive oil in a small saucepan. Add 1 diced onion and 1 minced clove of garlic. Cook until softened, approx. 5 minutes. Tip in one 400g tin of black beans (liquid and all) and cook for 5-10 minutes, or until heated through. Add a pinch of cayenne pepper and a small handful chopped fresh coriander and stir through.

Zucchini & Carrot Noodles
Wash 1 small zucchini and trim the edges. Peel 1 small carrot. Put through a spiralizer. (Alternatively, grate the zucchini and carrot, put them through a mandolin or just julienne them finely with a sharp knife).