Hungry? This grain bowl is easy and healthy

Chef Cassandra shares her tips for a quick and easy grain bowl, using ingredients you already have in your pantry.

Video Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CASSANDRA LOFTLIN: Hello, my name is Chef Cassandra, and welcome to my home kitchen. Today, I'm going to show you how to make a grain bowl. We'll start by turning on our sauce pan to medium high. And I'm adding in some vegetable oil. And we will lightly toast the quinoa before we add in our liquid to cook in.

Now, to our chicken, we'll add a little bit of fresh ground black pepper. And while that's cooking, we'll go ahead and make our sauce. An [INAUDIBLE] sauce, we will use a few things. One will be a little bit of chili garlic. So this gives us a little bit of heat and spice. Now, for my fish sauce, this is going to give us a lot of umami and the salty-- that's why we didn't add salt to our chicken.

I have a little bit of sweet to counteract the heat. I'm using honey today. It's one of my favorite sweeteners. And then last but not least, we'll add in our aromatic, which today, I'm using a little bit of minced garlic. My chicken tenders are talking to me, and they're telling me you're ready to be flipped over. And the technique that we're using to cook fish is we're searing the chicken, we're getting a nice browning, but we don't want them to be too tough, so we're going to finish them off low and slow.

[INAUDIBLE] more sauce-- we'll give this is a nice little whish, and we'll add this straight in to our chicken tenders. All right, and we'll let that finish cooking nice and slow. It smells absolutely delicious. Our quinoa is finished, and you can gently fluff it with a fork. You can see there's no excess water in the bottom. I'll take a healthy scoop of quinoa, two pieces of our chicken. We'll add this to the grain bowl, along with some of that delicious sauce we made.

Now, for garnish, you could use fresh fruits and vegetables if you'd like-- a little mango would be nice. I have today a little bit of spinach-- so we can tuck that in and make it look really nice and pretty. First, a lime or citrus always goes really well. I have some sliced carrots, leftover from salad from this afternoon's lunch. So we'll tuck those in-- just make this fun.

It's a good way to use up little odds and ends that you may have in your kitchen. A sprinkle of toasted sesame seed, and here we have it. This is our nutritious, delicious, adaptable grain bowl. Thank you so much. Stay safe. Be well. And eat well.