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These healthy rice bowls are a delicious vegetarian dinner recipe, filled with kale, red pepper, and portabello mushrooms, and topped with a fried egg.
Do you have recipes that are special to you not only for their taste, but for the people your shared them with? This healthy rice bowls recipe was born upon returning from our holiday road trip back from Minnesota. Fresh out of the car from a 10 hour drive, we were craving something restorative and vegetable-filled. Alex ran to the store and came up with this inspiration featuring our new rice cooker. We ate it together, basking in the glow of a dinner solo after days of parties with family and friends. Keep reading for the healthy rice bowls recipe!
Related:14 Egg Recipes for Dinner
How to make healthy rice bowls
We enjoyed these healthy rice bowls so much that we couldn’t stop making it for dinner guests, new friends and old. Our rice bowls are filled with brown rice, tasty, nutrient-filled veggies, a squeeze of lime, and topped a fried egg. Here’s a bit about how to make these healthy rice bowls.
White rice vs. brown rice
Brown rice is a highly nutritious grain that has an impressive amount of vitamins, minerals and beneficial compounds. It’s less processed than white rice: white rice has its hull, bran and germ removed, but brown rice has only the hull removed and keeps the nutrient-packed bran and germ. As a result, brown rice retains the nutrients that white rice lacks such as vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. Brown rice also has more fiber than white rice.
This healthy rice bowls recipe has brown rice, for all those vitamins, nutrients and fiber! Making brown rice on the stovetop can take 45 to 50 minutes. So our preferred method is using our Instant Pot! An Instant Pot can also be used as a rice cooker. Here’s how to make rice in the Instant Pot (white rice and brown rice).
Chopping the veggies
This healthy rice bowls recipe includes lots of nutrient-packed vegetables: Tuscan kale, red pepper, portabello mushrooms, garlic, and ginger! Where we see people get tripped up is in cutting the vegetables. We have a video series of 20 Knife Skills Videos: How to Cut Everything that can help you with cutting everything from kale to garlic to ginger! See the recipe card below for links to all the videos that relate to this recipe. We’ve included our video for how to cut a bell pepper below, since this has helped us to speed up our kitchen prep time!
Video: How to cut a bell pepper
Are you wondering how to cut a bell pepper for these healthy recipe bowls but not sure the best way? Alex and I use a genius method for cutting bell peppers that doesn’t end up with seeds all over the counter! (Anyone have that issue?) Here’s our step by step guide for how to cut a bell pepper, including a video of me cutting bell peppers in our kitchen.
Related: 20 Knife Skills Videos: How to Cut Everything!
And that’s it! Let us know if you try our healthy rice bowls in the comments below!
Looking for healthy bowl meals?
Outside of these healthy rice bowls, here are some of our favorite healthy bowl meal recipes:
- Veggie Burrito Bowls
- Vegan Sushi Bowl
- Chickpea Couscous Bowls with Tahini Sauce
- Raw Falafel Buddha Bowls
- Greek Sofrito Quinoa Bowl
- Grain Bowls with Roasted Fall Vegetables
- Vegetarian Quinoa Bibimbap Bowls
- Chickpea Fattoush Bowls
- Thai Salad with Peanut Sauce Dressing
- Homemade Dolsot Bibimbap
- Stress Reducing Avocado and Quinoa Bowl
- Broccoli and Turmeric Yellow Rice Bowls
This recipe is…
This healthy rice bowls recipe is vegetarian and gluten-free. For vegan, use our Best Lemon Tahini Sauce and omit the egg.
Healthy Rice Bowls with Fried Egg
- Prep Time: 15 minutes
- Cook Time: 30 minutes
- Total Time: 45 minutes
- Yield: 4 1x
Description
These healthy rice bowls are a delicious vegetarian dinner recipe, filled with kale, red pepper, and portabello mushrooms, and topped with a fried egg.
Ingredients
- 2 ½ cups long grain brown rice (uncooked)
- 2 red peppers
- 2 portabello mushrooms
- 2 bunches Tuscan kale
- 4 garlic cloves
- 2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- ⅛ teaspoon red pepper flakes
- 1 tablespoon soy sauce
- 4 eggs*
- 1 lime
- Kosher salt
- Fresh ground pepper
Instructions
- Cook the rice according to How to Cook Rice or use our Instant Pot method.
- While the rice cooks, prep the ingredients: Slice the red peppers and portabello mushrooms. Chop the kale into bite-sized pieces. Mince the garlic. Mince the ginger.
- In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the garlic and ginger and cook for about 30 seconds until the garlic just starts to turn brown. Add the red peppers and mushrooms and sauté for about 4 minutes. Season with a pinch of kosher salt and pepper. Add the kale and sauté until tender, another 4 minutes. Season with another pinch of kosher salt, the red pepper flakes, and soy sauce.
- While the vegetables are cooking, in another skillet cook the eggs over-easy.
- To serve, place rice in a bowl, then top with vegetables and egg. Serve with a squeeze of lime juice.
Notes
*For vegan, use our Best Lemon Tahini Sauce and omit the egg.
- Category: Main Dish
- Method: Stovetop
- Cuisine: American
Wow. This is literally what I have for breakfast almost every morning (sans garlic, ginger, mushrooms)! It’s kind of strange seeing something so familiar in a recipe form. I love how easy it is to throw olive oil, kale, peppers, and an egg or two into a pan and it’s done in a few minutes. Very fortifying in the morning with soy sauce and lots of sriracha. :) Enjoying your blog so far! I found it in my search for flexitarian blogs and will continue to read.
I just made this for dinner and it’s delicious!! I had leftover quinoa so I used that instead of the rice.
This looks like a delicious and healthy combo!
Thank you for sharing this wonderful recipe!
May I ask what brand of rice cooker do you use and do you like it the best?
Hi Sandra! The brand of our rice cooker is Aroma. We’ve never had a rice cooker before, so we don’t have anything to compare it to. But we love it!
Yum, Love this!!! Just pinned this so I can try it! Thank you!
I eat a rice dish like this often- it is so easy and filling! Also love that you were able to meet Shanna and Tim- how fun!
Yes, it was such fun. Thanks, Erin! Looking forward to another visit with you too!
We so enjoyed meeting you guys, too, and being treated to such warm hospitality! And to everyone reading this, let me vouch for the deliciousness of this dish. I didn’t tell Alex and Sonja how weary we were of big holiday meals, so the fact that they served us this vegetable-rich dish was such an enormous blessing I can’t tell you. Totally want to make it again ourselves!
And PS – a rice cooker! We almost asked if you had one! The rice was cooked perfectly!
Oh, so glad you enjoyed it! It was such a pleasure to lunch together :) And yes, we just got the rice cooker and LOVE it! Not that we needed another appliance — but this one works wonderfully. It’s great to be able to throw the rice in and then not have to worry about it — and it seemed to cook the brown rice a bit faster than normal (around 40 minutes versus 1 hour). Totally worth it to us!
This sounds so fresh + healthy but also comforting. The egg on top is my favorite part!
Yes, adding an egg on top is one of our favorite things to do to “make it a meal” — an idea from one of our biggest cooking inspirations, Julia Child :)
I love rice bowls, and this one looks fabulous!
This sounds just lovely, full of brightness and freshness and everything that’s good about food.
Thanks, Kathryn! Yes, it was a nice contrast to some of the holiday foods from our past week!
This looks delicious! Can’t wait to try it!