Salads?

now that I'm feeding only myself five days a week, I'm eating too much meat and carbs. Can someone suggest some nutritionally decent salads whose ingredients won't go bad immediately?

Get a salad spinner or put some paper towels in with your spring mix or 50/50 mix.

The ready made ones from Trader Joes last about a week in the fridge, and are quite good.

Making at home? grilled chicken with tomotos and feta over romain, classic ceasar with shrimp, butter leaf lettuce with cashew apples and a vinagarette come to mind as being healthy, cheapish, and quick.

To make some banging boneless skinless chicken breast, coat in grapeseed oil or basting oil, salt and pepper, paprika, herbs de province, parsley, rosemary and honey. Bake at 350 for 50 minutes or better yet grill. If grilling you can go up to 400 for 40-45 minutes as the char will more then make up for a loss of moisture.

Romaine seems to last longer for me. Whatever you want to add, carry to work whole and cut into the salad just before eating. This particularly applies to dressings, and softer things like tomatoes. Onion, peppers, that sort of stuff stays nice added early.

Add a can of tuna, again, just before you eat.

Personal fave is romaine, strawberries and red onion with poppyseed dressing.

I usually add peanuts for crunch, but many people abuse me for that habit.

If you google mason jar salads you can get quite a few ideas.

Use the wide mouth jars for easy filling and emptying. The salad will last over a week since there isn't any air getting into the jar from when you seal it, until you open it to eat.

I'll make up a week worth of sales on Sunday and put them in the fridge for the week.

I usually put onion, tomato, cuke, broccoli, red green and yellow peppers, beets, chick peas, shredded carrots, and a mixture of bag salad mixes (Italian, spring mix, baby spinach).

I don't add dressing or olives until I take it out to eat.

To add some meat to it, I'll take a couple pounds of boneless chicken breast, cut it into cubes, marinade it, cook it, and then put it in the fridge and take a serving to put on my salad.

Or if we have chicken for dinner, like split breasts, I'll cook extras and then take the meat off to have for sandwiches and salads. I'll shred the meat and mix a serving with Frank's red hot to put on the salad.

there is always pizza salad

or also actual pizza salad, covers all the food groups. bread, meat, dairy, veggie.

It's not terribly hard... some lettuce, some bell peppers, some cucumber, some celery, a little radish and carrot for color.

It's extremely not hard if you just buy a pre-fabricated salad in a bag. I used to buy these for the pre-sliced veggies to put on sandwiches, too. These usually contain tomato, though, and tomato can go off and do unspeakable things to itself in a dark corner.

Iceberg lettuce has little nutritional value. The greener the vegetable the better it is for you.

We eat a other of romaine and mix in spinach leaves. Lot of sweet onions - I like tomatoes so I grow a bunch in the summer. I also use a salad spinner.

Three ingredients. Spinich, strawberries, and raspberry vinaigrette.

Toss the spinach in like the badass motherberkeleyer you are, dice some strawberries up, and throw dem bitches on, then cover it all with the vinaigrette.

It's delicious and the ingredients can be used fro many other things.

Lettuce is ridiculously easy to grow too. Like a couple storage totes on your deck full of dirt easy.

I buy giant bags of salad from costco or the retaurant supply store. By the time im donr, im not entirelu sure they satisfy even the legal definition of salad.

RealMiniParker wrote:

"You seem to have accidentally given me the food that my food eats."

this reminded me of those "Real American Heroes" commercials (later changed to "real men of genius" because 9/11) that used to be on the radio in the early '00s or so... one of them was for the inventor of the taco salad- a 12,000 calorie salad that's healthy because it's a salad..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPZBc2j2qqA

Seriously? You don't eat two days a week?

If meat eaters acted like vegans

In reply to bravenrace:

I think he feeds more than himself the other two days, like possibly wife and kids. The other five days, he's alone.

I just use all baby spinach, throw in a handful of trail mix (peanuts, almonds, cashews, raisins, m&ms), some black olives, grilled chicken, black pepper and ranch dressing. Sometimes grind a piece of bacon over the top, hard boiled egg... or substitute chicken with whatever lunch meat or ??? is lying around.

The spinach lasts longer than lettuce in the fridge too.

My work lunches are normally a mix of romaine and spinach, bell peppers (I really like the little baby ones since I would use only a fraction of a whole pepper at once), green onion, diced cilantro, and tomatoes of some kind (I tend to use grape tomatoes since they're the least messy in the Tupperware container I use). I tend to use whatever leftover meat we have from the previous week and put about 2/3 of a cup of it on top- the most common thing we have left over is taco meat, and it works great. Taco meat doesn't really need a dressing with it, but you can still use a bit if you like. With other meats it, use a bit of whatever dressing sounds good. I've also in the past just used straight balsamic vinegar as a dressing to good effect.

For dinners sometimes I'll grill steak and melt a mix of basil & shredded parmesan mix on top of it. Slice it and put on a bed of romaine, diced red onions (I like them diced, SWMBO tends to go with 'loosely chopped' both because she likes bigger pieces of onion and doesn't really have the knife skills to do diced...), tomato, and potato straws. I like a peppercorn or parmesan ranch dressing with the steak salad. You can do a steak Caesar almost the exact same way, just add some thin-sliced parmesan and use Caesar dressing instead.

In reply to RealMiniParker:

Yes, I know. Sometimes people don't get my humor....

I really like these. I've tried the BLT, Ceaser, Santa Fe varieties. All pretty good and last for a while in the fridge.

RealMiniParker wrote: If meat eaters acted like vegans

What the E36 M3? I haven't seen any vegans posting in here. All I've seen are a bunch of meat eaters talking about how to prepare meat in a thread about salads.

If vegans acted like the kind of chest-thumpy chuffed up twits who make these things you'd never hear the end of it!

Go to salad for me is:

Chicken
Spinach (and maybe some spring/baby greens as well) Sliced almonds Sliced strawberries Feta cheese Red onion Bell pepper Radish Carrot

Then I put some good olive oil and balsamic in a small tupperware container. Shake it up at lunch, pour on salad.

Thanks for the ideas, but what I was hoping for were possibly some alternatives to leafy stuff and maybe more recipes with hard veggies like broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, cabbage, etc. You can spice 'em up with a few nuts/seeds or maybe a splash of shredded cheese, but any suggestions along those lines?