Friday five.

We have a pretty sweet kitchen at our current farmstay and I've been going a bit nuts with the homemade meals. Last night I accidentally recreated the Whole Bowl's Bowl:

Or something like it, anyway. Their version has brown rice, red and black beans, fresh avocado, salsa, black olives, sour cream, Tillamook cheddar, cilantro, Tali Sauce and "trace amounts of attitude."

Mine had local ingredients (parsley from the garden, local Hawaiian onion and sea salt, kale and a jalapeno pepper from the U-Pick garden up the road) and not quite local ingredients (1.5 cans diced tomatoes, 1 can tomato sauce, 2 cans black beans, 3 cloves garlic and 4 chopped carrots from California, dried oregano from Australia, generic black pepper, brown rice from somewhere, frozen corn from I-don't-want-to-know-where).

I had a bad day yesterday so there were definitely "trace amounts of attitude" in my version as well.

Here's what I did, in five easy steps:

1. Saute carrots and onion until the aroma permeates the kitchen.
2. Add garlic, jalapeno pepper, kale, salt, pepper, oregano, and everything canned and frozen.  
3. Bring to a boil, then simmer 20 minutes or until you can't wait any longer.  Throw parsley in during the last 5 minutes or so.
4. Serve over brown rice with a blob of shredded cheese on top, along with a simple side salad of local greens and palmelo from the backyard.
5. Top bowl and salad with this amazing dressing (backyard avocados and lemons, of course!) and crushed tortilla chips.

My main goal was to use up all the veggie bits and pieces in the fridge and all the canned food we'd bought when we got here 10 days ago and hadn't touched.  My secondary goal was to make something that would last as long as possible so that we could prolong the 5-mile-return walk to the supermarket until next week.

Pretty sure I succeeded on both those fronts - we'll get four meals each out of this "bowl," which works out to roughly $1/person/meal, which by Hawaiian cost standards is pretty remarkable.

I totally winged the recipe.  It's just chili, so it wasn't rocket science, but I'm pretty proud of how it turned out.  I also think mine was better than Whole Bowl's.

See?  Attitude!  (But just a trace...)