Salad in a Jar!

This spring, my friend, Karin, had the idea to create some pre-made salads "in a jar"

that we could grab and eat for lunch or use as a side dish for dinner.

We both used Pinterest to find variations on the theme.

 To extend the fun, we even went grocery shopping together prior to assembling our salads!

What?! Who does that?

We chose to make 5 different salads, we took home 2 of each recipe

for a total of 20 salads made in one afternoon!

We made

Taco Salads

Strawberry poppy seed salads

Chicken Cobb Salads

Quinoa Fruit Salads

Quinoa Vegetable Salad

In all, it was a fantastic venture!  

The end goal was met: we ate more salads when we prepared them ahead!

We've since made them together one other time and 

I made them with my Freezer Friends as well.

Here are some tips if you want to do this yourself:

1) Use grape tomatoes so that they don't get soggy

2) Layer the toppings on the bottom of the jar then stuff as many greens in the top as you can.

3) When you serve the salad, turn it upside down into the serving dish.

3) Skip dressing in the jar - just dress it when you eat it.

4) If you make taco salad, put the nacho strips in a baggie on top so that they stay crisp

5) The non-greens salads (quinoa) worked really well, 

just like you'd buy in a deli but they didn't last as long

6) toppings that worked well were: carrots, snap peas, blue cheese & boiled eggs.

7) Our favorite greens were a combination of swiss chard, spinach, red leaf lettuce and purple cabbage

8) prior to assembly, you pretty much set up a salad bar on the kitchen counter 

with all the toppings first and a huge bowl of greens last. 

We walked through with our individual jars gradually filling them up!