Sweet Potato Quinoa Bowls

Food Prep and Cooking

Katie:

With most of the Green Chef meals we've tried so far, the prep proceeds with each step falling neatly in line with the next. We have perhaps had a few extra minutes here and there but things are usually quite on time. For this recipe, we were stuck waiting on the roasted sweet potatoes and peppers for over 10 minutes with everything else being already completed.

Nick:

I think the problem here is the quinoa going 14-16 minutes against the roast veggies going 20-22; on top of that the quinoa finished a few minutes early, so we just sat around for a while and then went to watch Father Brown. Nothing too exciting here, though; cook quinoa, roast veggies, make "colelsaw" (cabbage and mango with dressing on top), combine. We'll come back to that "combine" later. (ominous music)

Post-meal thoughts

Katie:

We'd come to an agreement after the last dish with the 'put most of this dressing on then save some to drizzle at the end' instructions; we're not doing that anymore. The kale--or slaw in this case--doesn't have enough flavor on its own to warrant shorting it on dressing for a drizzle. I think we're going to have a new agreement...put the kale/slaw/whatnot in a separate bowl. Having the slaw in with the quinoa made everything taste not so good. The bites with just slaw were fine, as I said, we learned our lesson last time about saving some for the drizzle. The bites with just quinoa and roast veggies were fine but the bites with a combo of all three or some variation were not great. The dressing on the mango slaw just did not go well with the quinoa flavoring and the roasted veggies.

I think we would have liked this much better in two separate bowls or on two halves of a plate.

Nick:

Hooh boy, I did not like this. I think the problem with this dish comes down to one instruction: "Top with the slaw." On their own, the quinoa is fine, the roasted veggies are great, and the - I guess I'm going to call it slaw - are good. Mixed together, though... there's some kind of unpleasant sour flavor produced when it's all mixed up that I really didn't like. If I got a bite with enough roasted veggies to overpower this, it was absolutely delicious, but that was not easy to do. Katie was guessing it was the agave dressing from the coleslaw; I don't know enough to say for sure, but I think that's right. Having the slaw in a separate bowl I think would have made this quite good - one or two bites of mixed up quinoa and veggies, a palette-cleanser bite of the, umm, "slaw". All mixed up, though... this had a date with the garbage disposal pretty quick. Well, now we know for next time, AndKnowingIsHalftheBattleGIJoeAmericanHereo etc.