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!

Rocking 2013 Already!

This year has already been really great for us.  Life has been going well & we are happy!  We had both independently thought up some good New Year's resolutions & shared them with each other on our drive home from Spokane on NYE.  It was interesting how we had so many similar ideas & reaffirming to me of how well Zak & I function together.  I'm pretty proud of our relationship. :)

 Our resolutions/goals came down to two basic catergories:

-eating: healthier, less, better, more natural/organic, meal planning
-spending & budgeting: determining needs vs. wants, savings, limiting credit card use

So far I am proud to report that we kicked January's butt with these goals!  A lot of these ideas were some pretty significant changes for us.  We have had to re-evaluate our lifestyle & priorities and we have done a pretty good job of it so far.

With our food goals, we decided to limit fast food to only once a month (and/or traveling) and not to use it as an excuse for a quick dinner.  With that comes with better meal planning and it's been a struggle for me in the past.  But sitting down with Zak and planning meals together has helped.  We have also decided to cut red meat out of our diet unless we are out on a fancy date & get steak...or we are making homemade burgers in the summer with the local, quality beef from the Co-Op (our goal is to one day shop mostly at the Co-Op).  Vegetables have played a more prominent role in our meals, snacking & we have tried to have a least one to two vegetarian meals each week.  We have a lot of chicken & tilapia in the freezer for good protein meals.  We've switched out white grains for brown, but I need to work on making the brown rice better...we've only made it a handful of times and haven't perfected it!  We've had a lot more healthy snacks in the house.  I'm a big snacker & chips are a huge problem for me.  Instead of chips, we have been buying things like veggie straws (now available in the tasty zesty ranch flavor!), pistachios (pre-shelled? amazing!!), baked crackers (Ritz sour cream & onion are great), and these amazing nut cluster things from the brand Sahale. Basically everything they make is delicious.  We have a lot more fruit & veggies in the house & make smoothies with lowfat yogurt or 100% fruit juice.

But my favorite, nerdy thing is portioning out all these tasty snacks, etc.  Zak got me a food scale a few years back for Christmas & ever since then, my life has changed.  It's SO useful for measuring out proper amounts of food & if you're trying to eat better, I seriously recommend getting one.  So I have all these snack ziplock bags of veggie straws, craisins, walnuts...in case you were unaware, I'm pretty into organizing.  This has been a big help for me.  Having the visualization of what I'm eating helps me make better choices about what I eat each day.  Also, I've tried a bunch of apps for counting calories (I was a big fan of Spark People for the past few years, but they have some problems with their app, in my opinion), and this one I found (by random happenstance) is awesome!  It's called Lose It! and I have it on my iPhone & it's great for many reasons: a) I keep it with me all the time so I can log things in real time (previously would have to either do it before or after, with my iPad) so it's a lot easier, b) I can simply scan the barcode of a product & it almost always has it in its database, making it so much easier to add a food (vs. imputing the calories, total grams of fat, etc.), c) I can add & edit recipes within the app.  For me, that's a huge deal.  Previously, even with the Spark People app, I'd have to go on a computer to create a recipe.  This app has easy ways to track exercises & share goals as well.  It's awesome!  I don't know if this link will work, but here's my profile: http://www.loseit.com/index.jsp#Community:Profile!id=4663368

We had a dinner party with our couple friends (Bryan & Chad, Kandace & Gabe) a few weeks back and were talking about 'adult things' like budgeting & grocery shopping.  It was kind of interesting to see how other people do things & I was asked for my opinion about everything, which was surprising to me.  I guess I give off an air of being 'with it', who knew?  I told everyone about how we've been budgeting--deciding what are our collective needs and wants and how to be better about impulse spending.  We don't have a ton of debt compared to people our age, but we would like to be better about paying it off as soon as possible.  In addition to our monthly payments, where we try to pay more than the minimum amount due, I got a jar where we put in $20 every other week that will go to paying off a big chunk of our credit card debt.  In another jar, we put in $20 the other week for our 'Cost Plus World Market' fund.  We love that store & would basically decorate our entire place with stuff from there...once we can afford it.  We've made up a list of things we'd like to purchase in the future (bedspread, dishes, rug, snacks & drink splurge) and plan on going up to Spokane every once in awhile once we've saved up enough for our item.

In addition to that, we have been having a good time relaxing at home with Penny and with our friends.  We took Penny down for her final visit to Lewiston and it she got the go-ahead for regular 'puppy activity'.  Her leg has healed well, the vet was pleased with her progress and as long as we don't let her get overweight, she should be fine.  We're thrilled, and so is she, obviously.  She loves to run around in the yard, has made puppy friends with our friends' dogs & the neighbor dog.  She loves playing tug of war, catch & general silly games that Zak plays with her.  She's gotten a lot bigger & healthy-looking.  We're now working on teaching her some new things.  She's so sweet & loves cuddling up with us on the bed, although she still sleeps in her kennel every night.  We're very happy with her.

the night after her cast came off, the leg was so sad & tiny

:)

this is usually how I wake up on the weekends: Zak will get up earlier than me, let her out & she RUNS to see me (usually Zak waits until she's sitting (im)patiently at our bedroom door around 9:30 or 10)

one night we took her over to Kandace's to play with Simon (her 3 year old Pomeranian), she did NOT want to leave so Zak had to carry her to the truck

ok, how can you say no to this face?!

she LOVES going on car rides, she does this every time and it's the cutest thing "I'm driving, Dad!"

 
We took her on a 'snow adventure' with Kandace one weekend.  It was so much fun, watching her run around and be a regular puppy!  She loved the snow and was happily leading Zak everywhere.  It was our first time walking on a frozen lake, so that was pretty cool.  Kandace was a bit nervous, but the water was very frozen and it was a fun adventure!  We had one very tired puppy that night.

trying out the frozen lake/reservoir...!

Zak's a cool dog dad

WE MADE IT SAFELY ACROSS THE FROZEN WATER!

she was RUNNING in the snow

derp

all tied up

how cute are they?

so happy!

our first 'family picture'

she had her head on Zak's lap the entire ride home, she was so pooped!

Zak's life has been pretty busy, but he is doing a good job balancing everything.  In addition to his classes that are almost all his major classes (he only has one general left, it's psychology 101), he is doing rugby this season AND working (even got a big raise!).  He generally likes his classes, as they are all pretty much focused on what he wants to do in the future.  He has applied to 15-20 different summer jobs, internships and other forestry-related things.  We don't have any idea of what our summer will look like, but hopefully will have a better idea in a month or so.  Hopefully he'll be able to get the weekends off for his sister's wedding & Bryan & Chad's.

Rugby has been an interesting addition to our life.  Zak hasn't played a team sport in about a decade and is not the most athletic, but it seems like rugby just might be his thing.  I still don't know a lot about it, but it's been fun learning about it!  Zak met some of the guys last semester, some were in his classes, and that's how he got in with the rugby team.  Everyone's really nice and it's like a big group of fun people.  The aftermath of Zak's first practice was pretty intense, he was sore for a few days!  Last Saturday was the school's first game in Pullman.  They have two teams, an A team and a B team.  The A team are all students, while the B team can be 'rugby enthusiasts'? and newbies, so that's where Zak is for the moment.  After watching a game of rugby, we both have a much better idea of what to expect.  It's a pretty manly, intense game without pads or helmets, just dudes making strange human pyramids and movements.  I know the ball can only be thrown backwards and that it's never really 'dead', as opposed to football.  There aren't a lot of timeouts, which makes the game go pretty quickly.  It's basically football + soccer + wrestling.  I like it!  The A team won (rare for a UI team!), and the B team came in close.  It was pretty fun for me to watch Zak play a sport.  I've never seen him do that.  He got tackled pretty rough and took some guys down as well.  He is now proudly sporting some intense bruises.  Overall, he is having a really fun time and enjoying himself.  The team likes him and it's been really good for him.  I'm a pretty proud wife. :)

I have been very busy with work.  It's been the busiest & most stressful month of my time here!  In addition to catching up after the holiday break, being sick, schools starting up again (read: LOTS more orders!), our company was purchased by National Instruments.  The official press release can be found here: National Instruments Acquires Digilent Inc.  We had been sworn to secrecy for the past two months and it's nice to finally be able to talk about it!  Basically, we are still Digilent, but are now basically a subdivision? of NI.  No one is getting let go or laid off, we are still going to operate as before, but now we have a bigger company to 'answer to'.  Our benefits will change a little (go up from free to ...actually paying!) in April, but overall, it's a pretty sweet deal.  The NI guys came the first week back to work after the new year and we had meetings for a few days, as well as a big dinner in Pullman (hey, good free food? yes I tried the lobster & mussels, they were great!).  It's going to be a bit of a stressful transition, but I'm not complaining too much because I'm very happy with my job.  It's been really good for me and Zak and I have such job security that it makes our life so less stressful.  So there was that and several days of 100+ orders (a typical day had been 30-45) and some other complications.  But overall, a good busy month.

I also recently got my nose re-pierced!  It had closed up last spring when I took it out for a job interview and I have been letting it heal the last few months.  But I've been wanting to get it re-pierced for awhile and I decided to just do it a few weeks ago.  I went back to the place I went a few years ago and had a great experience.  The piercing guy was super nice, helpful & gave me good advice about my piercing for my second time around.  I can tell it's healing a lot better than my first time.  I guess it had been pierced lower, which is better suited for a hoop.  As I plan on not wearing a hoop, it was re-pierced a little higher than my first time.  I've been very diligent about cleaning it and I can tell it's healing well.  I just have to find my nice diamond stud Zak got me to have the piercer put in in a few weeks!  Also, a little fun note--Jenna got her industrial pierced (the bar in the ear) the same day I got my nose done!  It was fun.  We were both excitedly texting back & forth, anxious for pictures of each other!  I've been giving her advice about cleaning it, etc.  Hers will take longer to heal, but she loves it!

she's so cute!!

I'm actually more excited about it than this picture shows

Whew, what a long update!  We have been busy but very happy.  Life has been going well for us and it's a nice change.  The weather has even been pretty nice.  We've had a few storms, but lately they've been melting away pretty quick afterward.  For instance, it's about 45 degrees today and there is no snow ... anywhere.  I love it!  Especially because I'm still not 100% about driving in winter, as I am still a newbie!  Overall, life is good and we are pumped to keep up the good work & progress we've made!  Now here are some bonus pictures of Zak for you to enjoy:

Zak got contacts & then reading glasses to correct his up-close vision...Penny ate these Dollar Tree glasses, but look how handsome he is!  He'll be a handsome older man ;)

being dorky at Wal-Mart :)