Categories: Food

Macro Bowls

If you want to know what is on delicious repeat over here, this is it. I’ve been making the macro bowls featured in Joe Yonan’s encyclopedic Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking. In the book he shares Diana Yen’s Steamed Veggie Macro Bowls – nutty brown rice topped with a rainbow of steamed veggies, drizzled with an incredible, creamy miso-tahini sauce. Diana does a five-spice tempeh component and finishes the bowls with furikake. I do tofu and finish with whatever sprinkle is at hand. Double, or triple the dressing, you’re set for life, or at least the rest of the week.

Macro Bowls: The Inspiration

Mastering The Art of Plant-Based Cooking is a 484 page beast of a book. Joe Yonan has authored a wonderfully comprehensive (globally inspired) cookbook and included an all-star list of contributors. If you’re the kind of person who owns just a dozen cookbooks and are plant-curious related to cooking, this book should be one of them. I’ve spent a lot of time with it in the past few months and kept finding my way back to the Macro Bowls. No stranger to macro bowls, these are special! I really love Diana’s tahini-miso finishing sauce here. So simple, so good! The five spice wink added to the protein component – genius.

What is a macro bowl?

Macro bowls are the ultimate feel-good food. They check the boxes next to important macronutrients like carbs, fat, fiber, and protein in a single bowl. They’re also endlessly adaptable, making them a great go-to all year.

Details: Brown Rice

The foundation of these macro bowls is good, well-cooked brown rice. I like the boil and drain method of cooking the recipe guides you through. It works brilliantly every time. So, if cooking rice makes you nervous, give it a try. For these bowls, a few of my favorite brown rices are: Koda Farms Organic Whole Grain Brown Kokuho Rose, Lundberg Organic Short Grain Brown Rice, and Massa Organics Medium-Grain Brown Rice.

Macro Bowls: Variations

Use what’s in season – I used in-season vegetables from the farmers’ market for the bowls you see pictured here – broccoli, delicata squash, and yellow beans. For reference, it’s December here in California. Other bowls recently have included cauliflower florets, small cabbage wedges, beets, and ribbons of carrot. When we make our way into spring, asparagus, fava beans, will be in the mix. And you can expand beyond steaming as a cooking method if you like. During colder winter months I sometimes integrate roasted ingredients (375°F tossed with a bit of olive oil), or do a combination of roasted and steamed. For this bowl I had roasted delicata on hand.

The Recipe:

The recipe below reflects all the tweaks and personal preferences I’ve come to make. I always make double dressing, sometimes more. This makes for easy leftover meals and drizzles. I also tend to use tofu and do a quick pan-fry to get it golden and hot while my steamer is heating up, and sprinkle the tofu generously with five spice when done cooking – this is the one I tend to keep on hand. And, per my comments above, I grab for whatever veggies I have on hand, a rotating cast. The nature of macro bowls is flexibility, so have fun with them.