There was a time in my life when I had plenty of spaciousness to take a clean, aesthetic picture of my bowl before I ate lunch. Kind of like an eyes-eat-first ritual, I’d sit, smell, admire, photograph and dig in. These days are gone.
Lunchtime in our house is currently pure chaos. Little Leo is just home from his morning at school, typically needs a snack and is ready for a nap, and Pete and I are trying to wrangle something delicious before diving into our afternoon blocks of work. In true, if you give a mouse-a-cookie fashion, when I invite Leo to share a snack with me in the kitchen, he pushes his little stool over and squishes himself right in the midst of the lunchmaking. All of a sudden we’re volleying his million-and-one questions, making sure he can’t reach the knives, pulling his curious little fingers out of jars, getting him sips of water when he doesn’t like the taste of the smattering of ingredients he didn’t ask about before sampling, catching tiny cars before they hit the ground.
Sometimes I have no idea what has even made it into my bowl. Sometimes it takes me nearly 30 minutes to make it. Sometimes I have to eat it with that same, curious tiny human in my lap, doing my best not to drop grains or dressing in his hair.
This past week, this bright, light, nourishing, flavor-bomb of a salad cleared the chaos. It’s truly everything I want to eat in this precise, springtime moment, and I’m calling it the Spring in Cali Bowl. Perhaps because it’s crunchy, grounding, herby, textural, fresh vibe is transporting me to sunnier, more lush and tranquil places — all the things I want from our dry Colorado landscape right now. But it’s also because this bowl contains everything our early spring bodies need to lift out of spring.
Literally, this bowl is lifting me out of winter. Here’s what I mean.
Before we dive into any of the Ayurvedic properties of this excellent recipe, let’s take a moment to remember that there are few things our bodies need more after a long, cold, blustery and hard winter than lunch in the sunshine. Sitting on the patio, maybe barefoot, feeling like your cheeks and shoulders might get sunburned, finally not eating soup. That’s how I’ve been enjoying this bowl this week – in a generous bowl, bursting with flavors and textures, with a little jar of tahini green goddess dressing next to me in case I need more zhoosh, a slice of lemon in my water, and my head in the clouds; this meal is telling my body “you’ve survived.”
The reality of late spring is that the natural world is both cold and slowly warming, dry and slowly moistening, sleepy and sluggish but waking up, and heavy and dense but lightening a bit more each moment. Winter is fading, and spring is arriving. And because Ayurveda recognizes that the weather outside the body dictates the weather inside, it’s safe for us to assume that we want and need to straddle this dualism with our food, movement and lifestyle choices to stay balanced and aligned as well.
What’s that even mean? It means we need warmth to balance the cold, moisture (fat) to ease the transition, spice and spark to break through the sludge, and lightness to allow the heaviness of winter’s blanket to fall away.
And this bowl is a pretty perfect picture of what that can look like on a day when spring is on the up, and winter feels for sure on the way out.
Everything in Ayurveda is about qualities, and recalling that opposites balance each other, while like increases like.
Kapha dosha is the bioenergy in nature that provides stability, strength, endurance and steadiness. This dosha also brings heaviness, stuckness, density, stickyness, cloudyness, coolness and moisture. We can think of it like a huge, cold, wet blanket; very difficult to move, to dry out. So, instead, we want to think about melting it away.
Warmth, agitation, pungency, spiciness, spark, clarity and lightness will all help kapha to soften and shed, revealing a glow from within after a long winter’s hibernation – the same deep rest we’re all (hopefully) emerging from as spring arrives.
This bowl does all of these jobs easily, without over depleting us as winter slowly shrinks into the background.
Here are our superpowered ingredients and their strengths:
When paired with a plant-based protein, and when eaten with a warm grain base, this lunch is truly pure heaven for those of us looking to nourish, lighten and freshen up our days as spring sprouts.
…is the motivation behind my Kitchen Practice lately, and is absolutely on repeat!
We have a pot of grains on the countertop most days, and lately I’ve been swapping out heavy, cloudy rice for barley (because Kapha.) I eat the grains WARM. Always. I toss them into a bowl straight from the rice cooker, and then add all the other goodies on top.
The only thing I’m making ahead is the dressing because it’s that good and makes the bowl. It will keep easily for 4-5 days (where as you’ll want to make the other components every 2 days to prevent fermenting/histamines.
The rest comes together easily. Sometimes I broil pumfu or mung-bean tofu (or just tofu) amidst the chaos of lunch preparation. Other times I have some leftover from the night before. It only takes about 5 minutes to do it in realtime, so it still fits an insane day and the crunch when it comes out of the oven is SO GOOD. Pete has been enjoying this bowl with simply roasted chicken breast which is also quite good and suitable for the season.
Lastly, if you want to make this your own, go for it. Millet or brown rice would have “similar” (though not the same) qualities as the barley. The protein can be subbed for chicken or another plant without changing the Kapha benefit. The radishes are hard to sub, so is the avocado – if you miss them you’ll skip out on a bit of the warmth and grounding. The tahini green goddess is obvs non negotiable.
I hope this one finds you preparing to lunch in the sun, sponging up all of the spring flavors and textures our bodies need to signal their emergence from the darkest days!
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