Mason Jar Salad Roundup

I've joined the Mason Jar Salad revolution. They are a fantastic way to have lunch, as long as you keep them interesting (at least for me anyways). If you take 2 hours on a Sunday afternoon / evening, you have all of your lunches prepped and ready to go for the week. This is especially key in the summer I find, when we are grilling a lot and not necessarily making big batches of food that can be used for lunch leftovers.

The basics for Mason Jar salads are the same wherever you look. One key I've found is making sure you have wide-mouth jars, the smaller mouth jars will work, but are kind of a pain in the neck. Another key is to make sure you have a large bowl at work to dump your jar contents into. Eating the salads out of the jar is nearly impossible. I just grabbed a large tupperware container that I wash and keep at my desk.

Rather than blogging any specific recipe, I've decided to add links to the ones I used in my first week of salad making. Now, I may have been a little over-ambitious, and I actually wouldn't recommend going this crazy. Between cooking quinoa, roasting veggies, making salad dressings, baking chicken and cooking noodles, it got a little nuts. The next week I just took inventory of what I had in the fridge and made salads from what was there, which was just as good. The key for me is to make sure you mix it up. I would get sick and tired of eating the same salad every day!

You can find a great tutorial here, that explains the basics around building your own salads.

Greek Mason Jar Salad: For this one I used a homemade balsamic vinaigrette. Instead of the chicken I used a can of chickpeas I had.

Burrito Bowl: This is less a salad and more reminiscent of the great burrito bowls I would have at Red Burrito every weekend I had school. I actually baked the chicken and roasted the sweet potatoes. The lime-cilantro quinoa was so good that I've made that again as a side-dish for another meal.

Asian Noodle Salad Jar: Loved this one! Would definitely make it again. I made a few modifications, including using sriracha instead of the sambal oelek in the dressing. Great flavours.

Quinoa Beet Salad: The beet vinaigrette could have used something, not sure what yet, will have to experiment. I did add some goat feta to this as well. The method for roasting the beets in coconut oil was very good, will definitely do that again.

Overall the salads were all great, however as I said above, don't feel like you need to make 4 very different salads for one week. The week after I made one dressing, roasted some veggies, chopped and prepped the other ingredients and then just tried to be creative with the flavours. Enjoy!