Salads in Jars

I just went back and looked and the first blog post I wrote about vacuum sealing salads in jars was in 2011 so I’ve been doing it for a very long time. This was the first blog post I read about doing this and then I tried it.

I love Thousand Island Dressing and I add a chopped boiled egg and a bit of grated cheddar cheese to it but right now, my favorite dressing is this Everyday Salad Dressing. I use in on my sandwiches too!

Have I consistently made salads in jars for the past 12+ years? No! We got on a kick for a while that we would buy pre-made salads in bags but I never felt 100% safe with those because there were several recalls during the time we were using them. There’s no logical explanation why I detest making salads for dinner except that I have to get out so many things and then put them all up. Also, I preferred to make the salads before I started cooking so they had to sit in the fridge til I was done cooking and my fridge is always stuffed so there was no room for salads. With the jars, I keep them in the garage fridge and can run out, grab one, divide it up into two bowls in no time.

If I’m halfway disciplined, when I come home from the store if I’m buying lettuce, I’ll wash it and divide it up among jars, make salads, vacuum seal them and they are great for at least a week. Right now, we have plenty of cherry tomatoes in the garden but there will come a time when I have to buy those too.

These are the salads I made yesterday. I put the heavy things on the bottom . . usually tomatoes, then carrots, then cucumbers, then black olives, then boiled eggs (cold), then lettuce and other greens.

This is the vacuum sealer that I use now. It fits both wide mouth and regular mouth jars. The salads work better (easier to get ingredients out) with wide mouth jars. This gizmo charges off the same cord I use to charge my cell phone so there’s always one ready to use in the kitchen. Vince says I shouldn’t use the same cord for everything so . . don’t do as I do. 🙂 The charge actually lasts a long time! I store all my upstairs grains and herbs in jars that are vacuum sealed so every time I open one, I reseal it. Yesterday I was thinking I needed to charge it because it’s been weeks and weeks since I charged it. When I plugged it in, it told me it was still 84% charged!

When I make the salads ahead, preferably on the same day I bring home lettuce, we always have salads with dinner and lettuce very seldom goes to waste. Over the weekend, I planted more lettuce to grow under the grow lights. Even with it growing downstairs, I will still make and vacuum seal the salads ahead of time because it’s so convenient. I had not been growing anything under the grow lights because of the finger. I’m still wearing a glove when messing with dirty or very germy things. It’s now been 2 months since I cut it and it’s hardly sore at all. It takes a pretty good hit to make me say ouch! That’s been a long time coming . . or it seemed like a long time. I cannot figure out why but every morning, I wake up with blood around it. Vince says “If blood can get out, germs can get in” so . . I’ll keep wearing a glove til blood can no longer get out! 🙂

Another good thing about these salads, they’re great when I want to make chicken wraps or tacos. I will take the breaded chicken breasts from Aldi (we call it red bag chicken because it’s in a red bag), air fry it, cut it up, add the salad and a little dressing I a wrap (the spinach wraps are our favorite). Same with tacos – cook the meat, grate the cheese, open a jar, chop up the tomatoes and black olives and add it all to the taco. We used to take out the carrots and cucumbers for tacos but now we just leave them in.

The salad in a jar is one of the best cooking shortcuts I’ve ever made!