I hate to make my lunches in the morning. Wait, that's not true. The truth is, I have no idea how I feel about making lunches in the morning, because I have never tried it. I don't have time in the mornings to chop, scoop, portion, bag, stack or pack. I barely have time to grab. But I do hate to spend seven or eight dollars per day to buy lunch at work. Also, I want to eat healthy foods and avoid processed crap. I want to eat salad every day for lunch.
The salad problem is this: It’s pretty difficult to make an adequate salad ahead of time. Lunch salads could certainly be prepared in the morning before work, but that involves preparation, and what I need involves grabbing.
Which is why I was thrilled to find this post at salad-in-a-jar.com, which was featured on Lifehacker, detailing how to use mason jars and a vacuum sealer to prepare a weeks’ worth of salads ahead of time. So thrilled, in fact, that I immediately ordered the jar sealer attachment for my FoodSaver. $10.00 and four days later, I “canned” my first batch of salad.
I bought the wide mouth lid attachment, because it seems like it would be easier to stuff salad into a jar with a wide mouth than a into a jar with a narrow mouth. Unfortunately, I could only find four wide-mouth quart jars in my entire home. I have tons of wide-mouth pint jars, but I like a larger salad than that. I had a brand-new box of narrow-mouth quarts.
So I packed up my four jars, placed the lids on top, put the FoodSaver “jar hat” on the whole thing, and pressed seal. Not all four jars sealed the first time, but they all did eventually, after some shifting and a little swearing.
The salads were great, they lasted 3 days.
I went to my mom’s house for Thanksgiving, and talked her out of 6 or 7 wide-mouth pint-and-a-half jars. The perfect size for salad! Small enough to fit in my husband’s lunch box, large enough to hold a plateful of delicious fresh greens. According to her, that is all they are perfect for- they are too small for pie filling and too large for vegetables. I gave her my box of small-mouth quarts.
My second batch of salad turned out beautifully, but it was much harder to seal. I had to get help from my husband. He thinks that I didn’t have the tubing seated deeply enough into either the FoodSaver or the attachment. He got them all sealed, I think we made 9 or 10 jars. The whole process took about 30 minutes. This time, I used iceberg lettuce instead of romaine, thinking that the higher water content of iceberg lettuce of might make the salad turn brown faster. I decided to keep an eye on it. I also added garbanzo beans, radishes, green onion, and peppers. I thought about adding in some tomatoes or cheese, but I decided against it. I chose not to use tomatoes because I know it’s tricky to can them- you process them like meat instead of like vegetables-even though I am well aware that what I am doing is not canning at all. I chose not to use cheese because in this early experimental stage, I would hate to lose good cheese should my salads start to turn. Also the watery lettuce-I have a thing about wet cheese. Ugh.
Here is the salad I ate for lunch today. I packed it 10 days ago. It was fresh and crisp and bright. I bring a small container of dressing and sometimes I bring some pre-packaged croutons or dried berries or sunflower seeds. I just grab it all in the mornings and I am out the door.
