About a year and a half ago I tried to get into the "mason jar salad" craze. You get a quart jar (or 5), and put in dressing, then a bunch of veggies, and then squish in some lettuce. This is a great idea if you need it all in one to take to work. But I work from home. So I found it annoying to eat the same salad 5 days in a row, and the dressing got tiring and was always partially wasted since it never comes out of the jar all the way without scraping with a spatula. Which I did not do. Plus you have no idea how much salad you can cram into those things. It comes out and you have way more lettuce then you can handle.
So they did not work for me. But I decided to try again with just the vegetables. And I love it! This is my second week of making mason jar salad vegetables. I actually look forward to my easy lunch salad now since I can customize it so easily. The hard part for me with salads is prepping the vegetables. So if I do that ahead of time and make 4 or 5 quart jars of salad veggies, then all i have to do is chop/spin lettuce, add meat and dressing of choice. That way you can use whatever leftover meat you want, or meatless with eggs and nuts and cheese, or whatever.
I am currently deciding whether I want to try adding salad leaves to the jars too. We will see. It is kind of annoying using the spinner every day and I don't have a lot of time to spare to eat.
So far this is what I do so far, split between 4 quart jars:
handful of cherry tomatoes (or 1.5 clamshells split in 4)
1 cucumber, sliced into semicircles
8 baby radish, sliced
8 oz mushroom, sliced
1 colored bell pepper, chopped in big pieces
I choose 4 from that list, or whatever is on sale.
I'm also really loving the growers mix that aldi sells. It is enough for about 6 salads.
For meat I always buy 1- 6 oz package of southwest grilled chicken. I use that for 1 or 1.5 salads. Other toppings: leftover taco meat twice, shrimp and a hardboiled egg, leftover shredded pork, pistachios, beans, block parmesan cheese, and queso fresco. And lately for dressing I've been using light champagne vinaigrette from trader joes.
