I slowly waded into the salad kit waters by trying two on a BOGO. I figured at a price of two bucks per kit, it wasn't an outrageous splurge. Sure, it would have been cheaper to buy the ingredients separately, but I didn't need the quantity of all the different ingredients. I would have had to make the same salad night after night to use them all up, and while the individual ingredient price per pound would be cheaper, I just didn't need the volume. In addition to past prejudice against the fat, sodium and sugar content of kits, I was please to see that it really wasn't that bad.
I am upping the nutritional value by adding a grain -- which many of the kits also have. If I make the grains up in advance, they are cold by the time we want dinner.
This week I bought two rotisserie chickens so I could make jambalaya for Monday, and then stock and soup for "Souper Tuesday" at work. I cut the breasts off at TBGs request, so he could bring them to work to make wraps (with lettuce, hummus, etc.). He is trying to lose weight and eat healthy but in the HVAC/Refrigeration world, things are crazy busy right now so he can't get home for lunch. He takes wrap ingredients to work each day along with a hard-boiled egg. Whenever I make up nut butter, he brings a jar with a jar of all-fruit jam/jelly. This is better than what the guys normally do during the busy season -- subs or Burger King for lunch, egg sandwiches for breakfast.
Our salad tonight consisted of one kit, chicken bits from the two birds, additional salad, a side of watermelon and a thin crust whole wheat basil pesto & Parmesan + pecorino romano cheese. I made up three dinner's worth of dough.
Even with the convenience of the kits, dinner still takes about 30 minutes to assemble because I am pulling together a variety of ingredients. However, if I was doing it all from scratch, it would be closer to an hour and my fridge would be crammed full -- some of it would either go to waste, or I'd be taking additional time to grind it up for the dog (who is getting ground frozen veggies these days along with scraps from the stock making process). All in all, it's a win-win and I am not ashamed that I've embraced this form of convenience.
Is anyone else using these kits? What do you think of them?
I love the convenience of the bagged "salad" but I've found that even with their claims of Triple washed blah blah blah I still rinse them thoroughly. I have rinsed them lightly and found they were still dirty!
ReplyDeleteI agree. I am also using what we don't eat after two days in soup. I figure that will kill any germs from sitting in the fridge for a few days. Don't tell Gordon Ramsay that....
DeleteWell, I buy the greens in a box sorts of stuff. Mostly I get spinach, baby kale, or baby arugula. Usually I can find one of the above on markdown. I would actually love to try one of those kits, but I have yet to find one that doesn't contain at least one ingredient that I'm allergic to. Since the only variety of lettuce I can eat is iceberg, I guess that's not terribly surprising - but I don't understand why they have to put grated carrots in everything. I suppose they're doing it for color, but it puts so many things into the off limits category for me. I've never even gotten far enough to look at the ingredients on the dressing, but I'd bet it's full of land mines as well. Sigh. I guess I just have to look on the bright side - buying those big boxes of greens encourages me to eat more of them! :)
ReplyDeleteThe ingredients in the dressing is more along the lines of the stuff I generally try to stay away from too. Not being able to eat carrots must be such a bummer, they are one of my frugal go-to ingredients!
DeleteWe buy the kits, but only when they're on sale. Like you said, with just two of us eating salad, if I were to buy all the separate ingredients, they would go bad before we could eat them all. I buy steam in bag veggies for the same reason.
ReplyDeleteI buy the steam bags too. There are times when we don't eat the whole salad mix in two days, so I dump it into soup. That is why I add the lettuce only when we are about to eat. For us, at least Teddy can eat the leftovers when we buy whole heads of cabbage, etc. But even grinding that as needed takes time. I am buying a bag of frozen veggies and a bag of frozen fruit each week and grinding it all at one time with whatever is left in the crisper. The frozen veggies are a big help!
DeleteA rotisserie chicken and salad kit is our go to take out, dinner in 2 minutes. Better than burgers out! Also, I am not keen on kale but as part of a salad kit a little is ok so this way I get a wider variety of greens. In Canada buying everything separately is not always cheaper than the kits if you can get then on sale. I usually only buy one kind of lettuce at a time, this mixes it up for us
ReplyDeleteIt seems that for a lot of us two people households, this makes the most sense. With some of the "greener" kits with kale and spinach, I will add berries and goat cheese. Produce isn't as pricey in Ontario because there are a lot of farms there. I have been known to drive over the border to gorge on apricots!
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