This Buddha bowl recipe cooks all of the ingredients on one sheet pan

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Welcome to Best Bites, a video series that aims to satisfy your never-ending craving for food content through quick, beautiful videos for the at-home foodie.

A Buddha bowl consists of grains, a protein and brightly-colored veggies — really anything you want. Using a sheet pan to cook all of the ingredients makes it an especially quick and easy meal for at-home or on-the-go. However, you may wonder: Why is it called a Buddha bowl and where does it come from?

Well, the famed healthy dish first gained popularity in 2013 in “Meatless,” a cookbook by Martha Stewart Living. The recipe is vegan, but reads, “It’s more of a general formula than a hard-and-fast recipe since you can swap out different ingredients for variety and to make use of whatever you have on hand.”

Then, in 2017, Buddha bowls blew up on Pinterest. At the time, Delish referred to Urban Dictionary to explain that the dish is “an overstuffed bowl resembling the belly of Buddha.” However, Bon Appetit offered another explanation after speaking with Instagram influencer Alex Ashback, the woman behind @veggiesnithecity. It said: “Buddha bowls are about ‘balancing the different types of food that you eat,’ and not eating too much of any one thing.” And balance is an important concept in Buddhism.

So all in all, it’s a bowl with little bites of all of your favorite healthy foods. You can try our version below, but feel free to make it your own.

Total cook time: 35 minutes
Servings: 4 bowls

Ingredients

For tahini dressing:

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 450°F and prepare a large baking sheet with parchment paper or cooking spray.
  2. Add carrots and sweet potatoes to the baking sheet and season with olive oil, salt and pepper. Bake for 15 minutes.
  3. While vegetables bake, make the tahini dressing. In a medium-sized bowl, mix tahini, garlic, turmeric, salt and smoked paprika. Whisk to combine while slowly adding water.
  4. Once vegetables are done, add lentils to the baking sheet and season them with olive oil, salt and paprika. Return sheet pan to the oven and cook for an additional 3 minutes.
  5. Once done, drizzle tahini dressing over the carrots, lentils and sweet potatoes. Serve in a bowl over a grain of your choice.

If you enjoyed this recipe, you may also want to read about these three granola recipes.

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