By DIY Grain Bowl
This grain bowl was a huge headache to make. If I absolutely loved it, maybe I’d make it again…but I didn’t absolutely love it. It was good, but not worth the headache.
First we had a hell of a time finding “Jerusalem artichokes.” My husband finally found them at Whole Foods under a different name, and even the cashier didn’t recognize them and had to call for help to find out what the price was.
Next, the prep time listed was WAY off. It says “Prep Time: 10 minutes.” HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I wish.
I know they’re not counting the time it takes to prepare the ingredients: chop onion and chard, peel and dice artichokes, cook the brown rice. All of that took me over an hour. Especially peeling those horrible little wonky-shaped artichokes.
Both my husband and I were already turned off by how difficult it was to find those darn artichokes, and the fact that it took so long to peel and chop them (given their small size and odd shape) made us really jaded about this recipe before we even tried it.
The rest of the recipe was a little more simple. The artichokes were roasted in the oven, the onion and chard were cooked over the stove, and a dressing was made of vinegar, mustard, honey, shallot, garlic, and hot sauce. In the end, it’s all thrown together in a bowl and topped with an egg and walnuts.
That brings me to another, very unclear part of the recipe: the eggs.
It says to bring a pot of water to boil, add in a splash of vinegar, put the eggs in there for two minutes, and then strain it out and put on top of the bowl and add salt and pepper to taste.
Does anybody see the problem with this?
I put the egg in with the shell on, since nowhere did it say to crack the egg. But then it never says to peel the egg either, and why would you add salt and pepper to an egg with its shell on?
I think ultimately I was supposed to poach the egg, but I didn’t realize they wanted me to crack the egg into the water. So we ended up with under-boiled eggs. I just poured the yolks out into our bowls and threw the rest of the egg out since it was too runny.
All in all, this recipe was a huge hassle, and the end result was not worth it.
Taste: 8/10
I did like the end result, but not enough to make this again. The dressing was tasty and made a nice addition to the brown rice and veggies, and the artichokes did taste quite good once they were roasted.
Difficulty: Challenging
I found the Jerusalem artichokes to be the biggest pain here, not only because it was tough finding them but because they were small and awkwardly shaped to peel. Another issue was the unclear directions around the egg.
This recipe has a lot of different things going on (chopping, boiling, peeling, sauteing, etc.), and it takes an incredibly long time to prepare everything before you even start following the recipe directions.
Cost: Average
You’ll need to pick up quite a few different ingredients for this one, though most are probably already in your kitchen. Things you will likely need to purchase include Jerusalem artichokes, shallot, chard, walnuts, etc.
Suggestion:
If you’re going to make this one, I suggest listening to their starting paragraph where it says you can substitute pretty much any vegetable, grain or protein for what this recipe calls for. I highly recommend finding an alternative for those Jerusalem artichokes. I know I sound like a broken record here, but they were not fun to work with.
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