I was really craving Indian food for dinner tonight. The thing is I also really felt like cooking but I didn’t want to go out and buy anymore ingredients! I also didn’t want to be in the kitchen for too long. I know, I know… that’s a lot of requirements.

This is actually how I feel a lot of my recipes originate: it’s whatever I have in the cupboard, freezer or fridge. Improvise, improvise, improvise. So, same as always, use whatever you have on hand! If you have all these ingredients listed, great! If not, choose something else and let me know how you improvised/how it turned out tasting! You can choose to omit the yogurt and chicken and make this a vegan meal as well.

The great thing about buddha bowls is they are so easily customizable! Next time you’re having company over, instead of having the typical, average taco night that gets quite boring after a while, you can instead put all your various toppings into separate bowls and have everyone customize their own buddha bowls! Super easy, fun and very affordable! Also a great idea for a date night in! You can easily heat up your leftover steamed or baked veggies and have them as a topping option.

Ingredients:
– 1 red onion (medium/large size)
-1 pack of Chicken thighs
-1 pack of super sweet baby tomatoes
-1/4 cup hot sauce of your choice
-1/2 teaspoon of minced garlic
– A handful of cilantro
-A dash of garlic powder
-A dash of onion powder
-A dash of chili powder
-Pinch of salt
-Pinch of black pepper
-1 cup of rice
-3 or 4 tablespoons oil (I used olive oil)

Toppings:
-1 cucumber
-Plantain chips
-1 Avocado
-1 tablespoon greek yogurt
-1 pack of mixed greens/salad mix

Instructions:
1.) Cook the rice. I know sometimes cooking rice can be hard for beginners so follow this tutorial if you have a hard time with rice:

2.) Marinade the chicken beforehand if you can. If not, no problem. Add the oil to a hot pan, add the chicken in and then completely coat the chicken with the following spices & herbs:
-1/4 cup hot sauce of your choice (this goes first so the herbs can stick on to it and the liquid doesn’t wash away all the dry ingredients.)
– A handful of cilantro
-A dash of garlic powder
-A dash of onion powder
-A dash of chili powder
-Pinch of salt
-Pinch of black pepper

3.) Cook the chicken in 3-4 tablespoons of oil. After the chicken is cooked, do NOT get rid of the leftover oil in the pan. This will be the base of your sauce. Remove the chicken thighs from your pan and start on the sauce. See next step for sauce instructions.

4.) For the sauce/masala, I finely chopped a large red onion, added it to the spicy oil that remained in the pan from the chicken. After the red onion cooks down a bit, I added the 1/2 teaspoon of garlic. You can add a little more garlic if you enjoy your food on the more garlicky side.

5.) Cut the baby tomatoes into halves and add them to the sauce. Let this mixture cook down for about 5-10 minutes. You can add a little bit more hot sauce if you want more of a kick.

6.) All done. Now it’s time to assemble your buddha bowl! I start with half of my bowl full of fresh spring/greens mix and the other half of rice. I then add the chicken, then the spicy masala and then all the other toppings.

NOTE: I added a dollop of plain yogurt on top because I like the way that yogurt cools down the spiciness of the masala. If you like extra spice, you can add a dash of hot sauce to your yogurt and mix it in to make somewhat of spicy sauce!

7.) Enjoy! Drop me a line and let me know how your buddha bowl turned out!