Salad in a Jar!

[telophase]

So Toby and I have a bunch of Mason jars left over from the wedding. When I ran across the concept of salad in a jar on some blog I was linked to, it was a natural.

It's a way to make a hearty salad in advance and store it in the fridge for up to 5 days. You layer the ingredients in a Mason jar with the lettuce on top (to make sure it doesn't touch the dressing), and there ya go. We made 3 each this weekend, and had them for lunch on Monday and Tuesday, and dinner today (we both felt like going out at lunch), and we just made two more each for Thursday and Friday.





Mine are the two on the left, Toby's are the two on the right. You can tell we have very different tastes in salad. :)

Mine, from the bottom up:

(I don't like most dressings, and am happy with naked salad)
Cucumber
Green onion
Carrot shreds
Hard-boiled egg
Diced leftover pork kebabs*
Black beans
Shredded cheddar jack
Quinoa
Iceberg lettuce (most darker lettuces taste unbearably bitter to me)

Toby:

Makoto Ginger Dressing
Red bell pepper
Green onion
Hard-boiled egg
Diced leftover pork kebabs*
Shiitake mushrooms
Crumbled feta with basil and tomato
Black beans
Quinoa
Romaine lettuce

* Not the ones I was asking about a while back! Different pork kebabs, grilled with bacon and onion. MMMMMM! We had one serving left. Our earlier salads had shredded rotisserie chicken instead - we picked one up from the store rather than cook it ourselves. We also had bacon last time--had 6 strips of bacon left that we needed to eat before they went bad, so we fried 'em crispy and dumped them in.

If you've got dressing, right before you eat, shake the jar up and then pour it out. Or, if you've got a long enough fork, eat out of the jar. If you use dressing, especially an acidic one, you'll find the vegetables sitting in it pickle a bit. Toby reports that red peppers sitting in Makoto ginger dressing for a few days taste fantabulous. (Possibly not his exact words. I might have paraphrased.)

Anyway, this was the blog post I was originally linked to, which has a drawn schematic for what order to put things -- it's mostly: dressing, denser bits, proteins, lighter bits, lettuce.

And here and here a guy experiments with a week's worth of salads in a jar.

You've got to be careful carrying them, as they're glass. I've got a bento bag that goes with a food jar which fits a plastic Gladware container that I use for a bowl and the jar, nestled into the bowl, perfectly. Toss in a fork, and it's ready to go. And it's VERY NICE to have my lunch already made.

Down side is that it takes us 45 minutes or so to chop everything up, boil the eggs, cook and cool down the quinoa, but you can make a bunch at once and if you were making something for dinner that had a few of those items in it, it'd cut the time down drastically.

I think maybe I'll try a pasta salad next time, without lettuce, and see how it goes.

Comments

[torachan]

I've seen this mentioned quite a bit and find it interesting, but not enough to actually go buy jars and be fancy like that. XD It does make me want to think about making up some salads in tupperware or ziploc bags ahead of time and just not adding dressing until the day, though.

I occasionally buy salads at lunch (we sell some really tasty ones in our bento area for just $2.99, so it's not even terribly expensive), but I'm really trying to not buy lunch (or snacks) as much (it's even a goal on Health Month this month) and that combined with the fact that we've finally got summer weather and I'm not wanting hot lunches means salads sound great.

[kore]

YUM. That looks amazing!

[telophase]

We had the jars from the wedding, so it worked out. :) But I think putting them in any container would work, as long as the lettuce isn't touching anything watery or acidic.

If we have dinner with refried beans or taco meat, I often make taco salad for lunch, but I can't combine much of it beforehand: salad and other vegetables in a container, then beans and/or meat in another container to heat up in the microwave at work, then cheese and sour cream in another container, and finally taco chips in a ziploc bag that I don't store in the fridge at work for fear they'll stale quickly.

[telophase]

I'm surprised at how well it keeps!

[lady-noremon.livejournal.com]

Looks 'fantabulous'ly delicious :D

[rurounitriv.livejournal.com]

Clever idea! If whatever you had in it wasn't acidic, you might also be able to put these in a plastic jar instead of the glass ones - would make things a little lighter to carry and less worry about glass shards in your lunch.

[estara.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that tip. I really need to see if I can get comparable jars here. That would be ideal for school break as I can't be bothered to get up early enough to do things like that on the day itself.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

It is! XD

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Eh, we've got the jars from the wedding, so it's either use them or toss them, and I've got the bento bag to carry them in so it all works out.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'd think any container in which you can layer the ingredients and keep leafy things from touching the liquid/acid things should work. (If we actually ate mayonnaise more than once in a blue moon, so we had giant mayo jars, they should work well!)

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Another thing to try if you like spicy-hot: Get fresh mustard greens. Wash. Cut into pieces. Parboil and, without rinsing in cold water, transfer to a jar and seal airtight. Leave it out overnight to ferment. Then transfer to the fridge and let ferment more. When you are ready to eat, make sure there is still a vaccum: If not, consider tossing it out.

When you open it, it should have a very spicy-hot smell, and lost most of the bitterness. Mix with sesame oil and soy sauce. Eat carefully: It can be from mildy to very peppery, kind of like horseradish or wasabi.

Yum!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Huh, interesting!