I’ve been very good about eating a salad 4 days a week for lunch for over a month now, but going to the supermarket salad bar almost every day takes a big chunk out of my 30-minute lunch break. So, I decided to make my salads and take them to work.
But, I don’t have the luxury of being able to spend 20 minutes every morning slicing onions and peppers and shredding lettuce, so I’m looking for ways to do as much prep once a week as I can, and I’m hoping to get good ideas on how best to store the sliced peppers and onions so they’ll be as close to fresh as they can be on Friday after being disassembled on Sunday.
In ziplock baggies? There really should not be any problem storing these veggies for about 5 days. Just make sure whatever you use is airtight, and keep the sealed containers in the fridge.
Five days might be pushing it for keeping sliced peppers and onions, but no reason not to see how it goes. For peppers, if there are issues you might try putting a folded paper towel in the baggie, to keep them dry (but seal the baggie well; you want humidity, but no actual water).
Worst case, you might have to do a second prep on Wednesday night.
Seconding ziploc baggies, or plastic containers if you have them. I like to chop everything up in advance, toss it in a container, and scoop some out whenever I need it.
Onions and peppers last amazingly long, even when cut up. I’ve found some bagged onions at the bottom of my fridge from the last time I used them- og knows how long ago- and they were still just fine! Peppers won’t last as long as onions, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t keep well.
If you’re having trouble with them staying fresh as long as you need them to be, put them in a couple different containers - the more you open and close a container, the faster things in it will go bad. So maybe cut enough for 2 days, put it in a ziploc/tupperware, then do another two day’s worth and put it in a separate container that you don’t open until the first one is gone.
I know you’re talking about fresh peppers, but it took me so long to figure this out and I threw out so many wilted peppers that I thought I’d share this - I buy a fresh green pepper, then I cut it up and freeze it in baggies (about half a pepper per bag). They store a good long time in the freezer, and are great for cooking after being frozen - it doesn’t matter if they’re not perfect then.
I do the same as Cat above. I dice up the onions, and slice up peppers, toss them in either a ziploc bag or a plastic container, and freeze them.
Whenever I need some, I just take a handful out and toss them in the pan. I’ve not noticed any problem with freezing, and I’ve been doing that for years.
Well, that’s great for cooking them, but frozen (thawed) peppers would be terrible in a salad, which is what the OP is looking to have for lunch.
I’ve kept sliced green peppers in a ziplock bag for 4 days and they were still good. Not as good as on day 1, but definitely still had some crunch to them. A twice-a-week prep session is what I would recommend, to keep quality levels high so you don’t get sick of salads.
Thanks, all! I like the idea of storing them in per-use batches to avoid having to open them until needed. That’s what I’m doing with my mid-afternoon snack almonds, but that was just for convenience.
If you don’t have access to a food saver (someone you know might be willing to lend you one that’s taking up space in your cupboard), sucking the air out of a ziploc with lettuce in it does help.
For an experienced cook? No, but some people don’t have good knife skills. They make the first slice wrong, and they nicked the big ball of seeds, and now seeds are everywhere, they have to rinse out the inside of the pepper, the counter, etc…
Plus, even if it was 60 seconds, that’s a minute for a pepper, minute for an onion, minute for some lettuce, minute for carrots, minute for cucumber, oh, and now a couple minutes at least to wash everything…
Maybe I’m weird, but I like sleep, and I leave myself pretty much zero extra time in the morning. I even have my alarm set ~10 minute later on the days I don’t have to shave to get that little extra…five minutes of prep for my lunch would make me five minutes late for work, so I get my lunch ready the night before…and if you’re chopping veggies and have the time, might as well chop them all at once for the week, right?
Yeah, but then you need to cut up the tomatoes, and the cukes, and wash the lettuce, and dig through the fridge and find the onions… I can see how the OP would want to make things fast and easy given that she’s eating a salad for lunch almost every day.
I like salads, but they do involve a lot of prep work, at least how I make 'em (lots of different veggies). Same thing with stir fry, everyone thinks it’s fast and easy, but if you want more than one or two things, the prep time is significant.
I’m often tempted to just buy a prepared salad at the grocery store, but the bare basic is about $5 and the price goes up with the addition of egg, grilled chicken, and cheese. Same with the salad bar - a handful of baby spinach, three strawberries is ridiculous. But convenient! … The bagged lettuce is handy but it just doesn’t keep, turns brown the day after…I keep a cut onion in a plastic container and slice off as needed, it lasts pretty well. Tomatoes cukes and peppers, I just cut in half and chop up, put the other halves in a plastic bag and hope to use them up soon. If not, well, out they go, but I can always trim off the soft parts and get something out of them. And I try to buy small vegetables, plum tomatoes, even gherkin cucumbers lying on the vegetable shelves sold by the pound in the grocery. And ‘baby’ peppers about 2-3" long next to them, which I use for color. a handful takes 30 seconds to de-seed and cut up.
Too bad those Debbie Meyer ‘green bags’ don’t do much of anything to keep vegetables fresh.
I’m just going to second the suggestion to add a piece of paper towel to the container of peppers. I prep peppers, cucumber and mushrooms on the weekends and eat salads with them all week with no problem but I put paper towel on the bottom of the container of peppers and top and bottom of the mushrooms and it makes a huge difference in quality by the end of the week.
I’ve kept broccoli nice and firm by slicing off the end of the stem and placing the new cut end in water. This also works for perking up broccoli bought unwrapped and a little tired. Does it work for lettuce? If so, you could carve off what you need and have that be one of the few bits of daily prep.
Sorry!