One bowl
Today was the first day I cooked a proper meal in my home since leaving nearly seven months ago!
We've been living at home off and on for nearly two weeks now, but we only got a fridge a few days ago, and only went grocery shopping for the first time yesterday. Before that, we had a very ramen-heavy diet.
I've been writing a lot recently about how annoying it is to not have your own permanent claim to your own permanent home. We were living with family, but living in someone else's house means living by their rules, and living under their scrutiny. It's hard not to change in response to that. The biggest thing that changed was our diet.
The main way we ate before all this was in a very... one-bowl kind of way? I hadn't thought about it this way before moving out, but almost all our meals were designed to fit on only one piece of tableware, and almost exclusively in bowls. Lunch was almost always either a soup - we'd pre-cook soups on the weekend - or some kind of egg sandwich. We would even eat the sandwiches out of a bowl. Dinner was also bowl-centric. Here is the bowl:
I am pretty certain this is a very old IKEA bowl. It is glass. It is very scratched up. It is somewhat smaller in diameter than most dinner plates. It is, however, exactly the perfect size for almost everything we like to eat!
It is the perfect shape - shallow enough to pass as a plate. My husband has argued that bowls are superior to plates because things cannot fall out of them as easily. I have to admit: he has a very strong point. Once you start eating everything out of a shallow bowl, it's kind of hard to stop.
We'll have spaghetti with veggies mixed in and just dump it all in there. We'll have a stir fry, and each person will consume precisely whatever serving of stir fry fits in this bowl. We'll have lentils with vegetables. We will have something rice-centric, or egg-centric, and it all goes in there. All the foods touch, or they're all mixed together, so if that kind of thing bothers you, I cannot recommend the one-bowl lifestyle. I can, however, strongly recommend it to myself. It is perfect for me. One bowl.
The reason I personally cook this way is because I am not smart enough to cook multiple things at once, but I can cook one very nice and tasty dish at a time. The One Big Bowl is perfect for this.
For the last seven months I have been eating a lot of meals on plates, or on multiple plates, with multiple dishes. This hasn't exactly ruined my entire life, but I realized after a few weeks that I really disliked it!
Eating this way makes me eat a lot more than I'm comfortable eating, and I finish more of my meals feeling very physically uncomfortable. It's easier for me to take a second serving of something, then realize I didn't actually want it, then finish it anyway because I feel like I have to eat everything I've put on my plate. It's not good for my brain! I prefer one large bowl. When we cook for ourselves, we don't usually even have leftovers. It all goes in the bowls and we eat everything and there's not even leftovers much of the time. The one big bowl is king.
Anyway, I'm back at my house now and everything is great. Today I cooked us chopped celery, peppers, and onions, polenta, and vegetarian sausage. They all went in the bowl shown above. I ate them in a big pile together because that's what happens when you eat all your meals out of a shallow bowl. We had zero leftovers.
My life is serene again. I have control over my life. I cannot wait to eat a dinner consisting of a single delicious egg sandwich sitting in a shallow bowl with no other dishes and no leftovers whatsoever.
And now, instead of being mad about dinner, I am simply reflecting anxiously on the fact that I have no idea what this bowl is or where it truly comes from or what IKEA model name it has, if it's from IKEA at all. We broke one of the bowls a few years ago and there are only three left. I should really try to find more of The Bowl...