Easy Sweet Potato and Black Bean Burrito Bowls

I have a complicated relationship with eating healthy. Infatuated with flavor and relentless in my pursuit of yum, I find it hard to incorporate whole wheat when the blank-canvas flavor of white flour is generally superior in a recipe. Why hold back on oil (or better yet, butter), when fat turns food crisp, golden brown, and satisfying? And salt is not scary to me — it’s pure magic dust. So healthy eating, for me, can’t feel like a sacrifice. It has to include texture, color, richness, and aroma. To put it simply: It has to taste good. Full of well-seasoned vegetables and covered in spicy, creamy, and crunchy toppings, this Easy Sweet Potato and Black Bean Burrito Bowl — or some variation of it, it’s customizable! — is what a nutritious, wholesome meal looks like to me. The health benefit is just a bonus: Its true star, just like anything else I want to eat, lies in taste.

The only problem with “bowl” recipes is that they require a lot of different ingredients in order to make them filling, exciting, and flavorful. Here, I reused as many ingredients as possible to cut down on your cooking time… and your shopping list. There’s lime in the rice, the avocado, and the crema topping, for example, and I kept the seasonings super simple to avoid frequent trips to the spice cabinet. If the ingredients list is still too long for your liking, feel free to ditch any elements that you’re not excited about. If cilantro doesn’t get you jazzed to cook, skip it. If crunchy bell pepper sounds boring, leave it out. The only essentials here are the rice, the roasted sweet potatoes (feel free to swap them out for a different roasted veg), and at least one topping. Take that formula, and some inspiration from the recipe below, and build a dinner that’s not only healthy but also unequivocally delicious. Just as it should be.

Let’s make Easy Sweet Potato and Black Bean Burrito Bowls