in my slop era

Spring has sprung, and so have my vertebrae. I've had to add full-body stretches to my morning routine, else my back will ache non-stop in the office. Perhaps I'm now in the stage of adulthood with irreversible joint point, but I'm an optimist and choose to believe this comes down to seasonal seesaws in temperature and air pressure.

It's been just about a year since I've had to go back into the office full-time, so it's only now that I've realized how violently the weather shifts down in Northern Virginia. I swear March is a damn hyperbolic time chamber with the way it compresses the four seasons into one week. Every week. I think the worst was the second week of the month: I pulled out a crop top for a sunny Saturday, then had to telework on Monday because of the snow.

The most annoying thing is cooking. My well-insulated apartment was a blessing during the winter, when I could simmer broth for hours and let the stove take the load off my heating bill. During the warmer stretches, "good insulation" quickly reframes itself as "horrific air circulation." CERN should inspect my kitchen because there's something cursed on a subatomic level about how well it traps heat.

It's a bit of a problem when my current past time of leftover-maxxing requires generous use of heated cooking appliances. A veggie stir fry requires a wok, a braised meat sauce needs an oven – that kind of thing. Eating raw scraps out of the fridge doesn't really hold the same appeal as the aforementioned prep methods. I've tried to make pasta salads before, and my stomach didn't really enjoy the slimy texture of cold veggies.

At best I can make use of my gas stove for ten minutes. Anything past that, and I have to leave my windows wide open overnight, which is risky when the current weather can drop as quickly as it can suddenly climb. But is there really anything that requires minimal heating, is easily modified at component levels, and tastes really fricking good?

Behold: The Humble Slop Bowl.

chicken rice bowl

• Chicken thigh (thanks Ethan Chlebowski for the seasoning ratio)
• White rice
• Pickled red onion
• Chimichurri sauce

salmon avocado salad

• Salmon fillet
• Sliced avocado
• Spring mix salad (mesclun if you want to be snobby)
• Crumbled feta
• Pepitas
• Lemon vinaigrette

What beauties these are. I can broil a chicken thigh or fry a salmon fillet in the ten-minute limit permitted by my apartment's insulation. The "body" of each bowl also doesn't require much transformative energy from myself – pop some rice into my rice cooker or buy boxed salad mix from the grocery store. Most importantly, additional garnish (ex. pickled onions, pepitas) can be bought pre-packaged, finishing out both recipes at insanely low activation thresholds. It's easy to mix and match components to your taste, all while maintaining a variety of colors and textures that make the bowls look appetizing even when they're slopped up.

Anyways, a small question: when did "slop bowl" become such a prevalent term? Am I the last American my age to discover these words can be packaged in this order and easily understood by my peers? I've actively limited my time on social media, which has done wonders for my mental health, but I wouldn't think I'm so disconnected from the culture so as to miss on something this commonplace. I mean, look at all these hoity toity articles.

Maybe I was slow to catch on because people were using "slop bowl" for restaurant chains I wouldn't otherwise group under a blanket term.

• Roti and Cava: Those are some sloppy bowls, for sure.
• Chipotle: I suppose so?
• Sweetgreen: Stop the slop slander!!

They seemed like arbitrary distinctions at first, but I thought more about how I tend to eat those bowls and may have figured out some logic in the black box that is my brain.

• Roti and Cava: The workers somehow get maximum splash radius for each sauce without getting much mixture between each other. I choose the sauces I do because I know their flavors taste good together, so you're damn right I'm gonna mix those sauces together. The food getting mixed in with the sauces is secondary, and if that's what qualifies these guys as slop bowls, who am I to deny the people?
• Chipotle: For each of the bowl components, I like different ratios of guac to sour cream, so the mixing I do is localized to a side ingredient area. It's also easy to spoon out the guac and sour cream from the main bowl because they're much thicker than the above sauces.
• Sweetgreen: So we're just going to call all salads "slop bowls" then. Otherwise it's psychotic to eat a salad in separate ingredient portions, with the dressing un-mixed on the side. Be for real.

All in all, I'm glad to have chanced upon these bowl recipes as I wait out the thermal purgatory that is my building's central air transition...

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