Jars of Salad

My best friend Kandace told me about this idea a few weeks ago and we finally had a chance to execute it last weekend.  I'm not sure where she found this idea, but it was intriguing and it worked, and seemed like a fantastic idea for us working ladies with lunchtime dilemmas.  Basically, one can 'vacuum pack' a salad in a jar and do a week's worth of lunches in one sitting.

It seemed a little 'too good to be true', but we decided to test it together.  On Saturday we went shopping together for the ingredients for our salads.  Kandace went with a more traditional garden veggie salad, whereas I went for an apple/cranberries/walnut type of salad.  Once we had all our ingredients (& the jars for them washed), we just went for it.

The 'formula' is:

1. dressing / wet on the bottom
2. veggies & crunchies in the middle
3. lettuce on top

So for Kandace's, she did ranch dressing with cottage cheese, cucumbers, shredded carrots, green onions, cherry tomatoes, green bell peppers, sunflower kernels and some handfuls of a combination of two bags of mixed greens.

Mine was layered as follows: raspberry vinaigrette (sugar free), walnuts, dried cranberries, sliced almonds, feta cheese crumbles, cooked & diced chicken, cherry tomatoes, diced apple, topped with romaine lettuce.

us with our salad jars!

The tough part was sealing up the jars so they'd stay fresh for the week.  Kandace did some research and we put our heads together and came up with a system that worked really well.  We boiled a few cups of water, placed the lids in a big bowl & poured the water over them.  Then we let them sit for 5 - 10 minutes.  Then, using tongs, drained the water out of the lids and placed them on the jars.  Zak used his brute strength to seal them up extra well and that was that!

I'm proud to say that this idea ROCKED.  And totally worked!  I was pleased to hear a POP each time I opened the jar.  Every day this week, Kandace & I would text each other about our salad success.  I was curious how ours would differentiate, since she had more veggies that could have theoretically go bad or soggy by the end of the week.  But it worked well, everything stayed crisp, fresh & delicious.  Mine were also great; the only thing I noticed was that some pieces of feta or apple were slightly tinged purple from the cranberries.  My mom asked me how well it worked, just shaking up the jar to mix it all up.  I had varied results, depending on how much lettuce I had shoved into the jars.  Some days they mixed up more or less ok, some days I had to just dump it all out and put some of the drier pieces of lettuce back in the jar to shake up to get all that remaining dressing.

The pictures below are from the 3rd or 4th day, you can (kind of) see how everything still looks pretty & fresh!

can't get the picture to turn :(

In conclusion, this is a GREAT idea and I am thrilled with it.  I made another batch of salad jars for this week, using the remainder of my ingredients from last week.  Next week I might experiment with some of the ingredients.  But for now, it's awesome & I seriously recommend it for anyone interested.  It does take a bit of work assembling them, but the payoff is totally worth it.  It's been so nice not having to worry about what I'm taking for lunch every day.  I just grab my salad jar, an apple or an orange and head off to work.  Plus, I'm eating better & healthier and even look forward to eating this salad every day, mostly because of how good it is, but also because I put a fair amount of work into it!