Meal Prep Is Made Easy With Cobb Salad in a Jar

By Erin Cullum
Victoria Wall Harris
Victoria Wall Harris

Packing lunch for work is a pretty tedious task, especially when you're aiming to eat more salads. Toss your dressing in your greens, and your salad will wilt by noon. Pack your dressing separately, and you've got more dishes to wash later. Enter: jar salads. When you pack your salad in a jar, you can layer the ingredients perfectly so that the dressing stays on the bottom and the rest of the salad stays stacked until you're ready to shake it up.

Victoria Wall Harris

This Cobb Salad in a Jar comes from Salad in a Jar: 68 Recipes For Salads and Dressings by Anna Helm Baxter, which is the source of inspiration you need if you're sick of your same-old-same-old salad. With romaine lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, hard-boiled eggs, shredded chicken, avocado, and blue cheese, this is a salad you'll look forward to eating and that will fill you up for hours. The extra bonus is the homemade red wine vinaigrette — it makes a whole cup, meaning you can keep the leftovers in your fridge to use on salads all week long.

Victoria Wall Harris
Victoria Wall Harris

You can make this salad even easier by shredding a big batch of cooked chicken breasts and hard boiling eggs at the beginning of the week. Then lunch prep is as easy as chopping veggies and filling up your favorite jars. You'll be so glad you ditched the overpriced cafe salad for your own version, and you'll be inspired to experiment with even more jar salads.

Victoria Wall Harris

Cobb Salad

Yield1 quart salad and 1 cup dressing

From Salad in a Jar by Anna Helm Baxter

INGREDIENTS

    • Red wine vinaigrette:
    • 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
    • 1/3 cup red wine vinegar
    • 2/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
    • Sea salt flakes and freshly ground black pepper
    • Cobb salad:
    • 2 to 3 tablespoons red wine vinaigrette
    • 2 1/2 ounces tomato, chopped
    • 2 1/2 ounces Persian cucumber, chopped
    • 2 ounces cooked chicken breast, shredded
    • 1 large hard-boiled egg, chopped
    • 1⁄2 small avocado, peeled, pitted, and chopped
    • 1 ounce crumbled blue cheese (such as Gorgonzola)
    • 1 3/4 ounces romaine lettuce, chopped

    INSTRUCTIONS

    1. To make red wine vinaigrette: Place the mustard, vinegar, and olive oil in a small jar and season with salt and pepper. Seal the jar and shake vigorously.

    2. To make cobb salad: Place the vinaigrette in the bottom of a quart jar. Add the tomato, followed by the cucumber, then the chicken, egg, avocado, blue cheese, and, finally, the romaine lettuce. Seal the jar tightly.

    Notes

    This is a superlean protein booster. Not only does protein fill you up, it helps build and repair tissues and is a building block for bones, muscle, skin, and blood.