My new playtoy

Update 9/26/2011 - I love this jar sealer.  I now always buy my lettuce in bulk at costco, bring it home, chop it and put it in the jars.  Makes meal time so much quicker and makes me more likely to eat salad.  I also seal my brown sugar (keeps it from going hard) my brown rice (hoping this keeps it from going rancid since I bought 25 lbs - it is not something I normally store because when it gets old it is bad.)  Same for nuts - I have pecans, walnuts and almonds that got to move out of the fridge opening up a lot of space there.   I also have some other grains that are prone to get bugs in them stored in jars.  Then there are the mixes I have stored in there -a taco seasoning that I made, a veggie mix of dehydrated veggies.....  Very useful toy tool.

Update: - The spinach didn't work so well, and it kind of ruined the salad.  It got all wet and mushy.  I'm trying again this week with just spinach and just salad (seperate jars) and tried to dry the salad a little better.  Will post results next week. I've also tried chopping some bell peppers and shredding some carrots - in other smaller jars.  Will post how that goes as well.

So I finally broke down and bought a foodsaver the other day.  Then I got a wide mouth jar lid attachment.  Totally my new favorite toy.  A friend of mine told me about this salad in a jar blog, so I had to try it.  I already buy the spinach in the huge bag at costco hoping I'll make green smoothies out of it, but inevitably (every time but 1 I think) I end up tossing a good portion of the bag.  I'll never buy the lettuce because I know it will go bad.  However, with the foodsaver at home, I bought both the huge bag of spinach, and the 6 romaine hearts and turned it into this.

So far so good.  I've used a couple on Cafe Rio pork salad  that we had yesterday and the day before.  I have to say it was so nice to have the lettuce/spinach mix all ready and just have to pop the top.  I made a bunch of lettuce/spinach mixes for salads and then a few pure spinach for smoothies.  Hopefully that will cut down on my waste.  

I also packed my nuts in these and took them out of the fridge - Yea, more fridge space.  I now need to go and pack my brown rice.  :)  Like I said, my new favorite toy.