There are many benefits of making mason jar salads, including:
- MEAL PREP – You can easily make enough salads to cover your meals for the week.
- SAVE $$ – Preparing and bringing your lunch to work can save you money compared to going out and buying a salad.
- HEALTHIER SALADS – Preparing mason jar salads can make it a lot easier to resist temptation when faced with fast food options. You choose the dressings, toppings and veggies.
- VARIETY – There are so many combinations that you could be enjoying a different salad every day of the week.
- EASY – You don’t need to purchase a lot of ingredients, you just need to switch one or two ingredients in each salad to have a different taste combination each day.
- CLEAN UP IS A CINCH – Mason jars are easy to clean and since glass does not stain or retain flavors or odors, they’re easier to keep clean compared to plastic lunch containers.
To keep your salad fresh and crisp, make sure you layer your ingredients properly! Here's the order in which you should be layering everything.
- The dressing. This always goes on the bottom.
- Grains and proteins. Grains (like quinoa), proteins (like chickpeas, edamame) or anything else large and chunky goes in next. This layer helps keeps the dressing separate from all the other top layers and also helps bring extra flavour to the proteins.
- Everything else except leafy greens.
- Leafy greens.
How to eat these salad:
Some people eat their salads straight from the jar. A few minutes before eating, tip the jar upside down (so that the dressing is now at the top) and let gravity do its thing – the dressing will slowly trickle down through the salad. Right before you eat the salad, give the jar a few good shakes and then take off the lid and enjoy!
However, if you’ve packed your salad nice and tight (which helps keep the ingredients from shifting in the jar and getting soggy too early), then this might not work. If this is the case, then grab a bowl and pour the salad into the bowl. Stir to combine the ingredients and enjoy!
Here's some great ingredients to purchase to use in mason jar salad combinations:
- Chicken
- Chickpeas
- Quinoa
- Bocconcini cheese
- Shredded cheese
- Cucumber
- Red onion
- Cherry tomatoes
- Edamame
- Lettuce
- Spinach
There are TONS of recipes online for this if you do a google search or you can adapt most of your favorite salad recipes to make these.
