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The Batter Thickens

A food blog balancing sweet treats & healthy eats.

Hot Honey Chicken Bowl (from Sweetgreen)

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The proliferation of fast casual restaurants that make salads and bowls needs to be studied. They all have a name that sounds as if it was generated by the same focus group: Crisp and Green. Green and the Grain. Sweetgreen. Tender Greens. Chopt. Mixt… It makes your head spin. The amount of times I’ve mixed up sweetgreen and Tender Greens? Crisp and Green and Green and the Grain? They all use the same three fonts and all their logos are green. Their prices are all basically identical. It’s amazing to me how they all stay in business.

Regardless, I do like most of them. A salad or a bowl is the perfect meal, and when you’re in a rush and haven’t had time to plan a meal, it’s nice to have options that are at least a bit healthier. And one of my favorites is sweetgreen. Specifically, they have added this Hot Honey Chicken Bowl that is really quite tasty. The menu lists that it contains: “Blackened chicken, warm roasted sweet potatoes, veg slaw, crispy onions, herbed quinoa, hot honey mustard sauce.” And a bit of research proved that… that’s really all there is! No secrets!

A quick consultation of Sweetgreen’s menu breakdown, which was very extensive, revealed the ingredients for the slaw dressing and the hot honey mustard sauce. Both are very simple as well, aside from the umami seasoning in both, which I just left out. There was also dried parsley and sunflower oil, but I decided to keep things simple with ingredients I typically have on hand.

I’m not someone who enjoys meal prepping. It always sounds good in theory, but frankly… I like cooking, and don’t need to streamline my life that much. And I prefer to just make a meal every few days and eat the leftovers in between. With a recipe like this, you just make enough for a few bowls, save each ingredient, and then assemble your bowl each night. It’s a breeze. And I realize some of the beauty of getting sweetgreen (or any of the other 37 fast casual bowl options) is that you don’t have to cook anything yourself. But when each of those bowls cost $16… it’s nice to just have a simple meal at home.

Honestly, bowls are the way I feel humans were meant to eat. I bet the nomadic, hunter gatherer tribes of the past ate bowls every night. Out of a bowl made out of a leaf or something. A few nuts, a few berries, some meat if they had it. I suppose they wouldn’t have been able to pull off the grain bowls, given the lack of agriculture. But fast forward a few years to Ancient Rome? I KNOW they loved a bowl there. With some olive oil and hummus… A pita on the side… Bowls are a meal second only to soup in their inevitability.

Anyways. I’m just trying to say that this style of “bowl” food feel right, in a primal sort of way. Even if now we’ve ruined them by offering them at 148 different versions of the same restaurant.

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Hot Honey Chicken Bowl (from Sweetgreen)

  • Author: Audrey
  • Array: Array
  • Total Time: 0 hours
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Ingredients

For the hot honey mustard dressing (enough for one bowl):

  • 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
  • 2 tablespoons hot honey (or, 2 tablespoons honey and 1 tsp crushed red pepper)
  • 1/2 tablespoon apple cider
  • pinch of salt

For the veggie slaw (makes ~3 servings):

  • 1/2 red cabbage
  • 2–3 large carrots
  • 2 tbsp mayonnaise
  • 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
  • 2 tablespoons hot honey (or, 2 tablespoons honey and 1 tsp crushed red pepper)
  • 1 tablespoon apple cider
  • pinch of salt
  • 1/2 tsp lime or lemon juice

For the bowl:

  • 1 cup cooked quinoa
  • a handful French fried onions
  • 1 cup roasted sweet potatoes
  • 1 serving chicken (shredded rotisseries, grilled, blackened, breaded, however you want it)
  • 1 scoop veggie slaw
  • 1 recipe hot honey mustard dressing

Instructions

  1. First, cook your quinoa.
  2. Chop your sweet potatoes into cubes and toss in olive oil and salt, to taste. Roast for 25 minutes at 400 degrees F.
  3. While those are roasting, prepare the hot honey mustard dressing by combining all the ingredients and whisking together, with a fork or electric whisk.
  4. Chop your carrots and red cabbage. Combine the rest of the slaw dressing ingredients together, and then toss the dressing with the veggies. (The hot honey mustard dressing and the slaw dressing are very similar.)
  5. Once everything is prepped and ready, combine the quinoa, slaw, roasted sweet potatoes, chicken, and fried onions in a bowl, and drizzle with the hot honey mustard dressing. Enjoy!

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