Salad In a Bag

I've discovered another route to portable, durable nutrition besides soup. It's a challenge when I don't cook with meat, and try to avoid dairy products, to come up with filling sandwiches.

The whole idea is this: prepare the salad ahead of time with firmer, less wet ingredients. Add the wetter and softer ingredients the day you take the salad to work or wherever. So I've been making a lot of salads with chopped cabbage as the base. Other firmer vegetables which can be added include carrots, peppers, usually raw sunflower seeds, sliced almonds, corn cut from the raw cob, onions [always] and cooked [canned] beans for protein. I chop up these and place in a gallon-sized freezer bag. Then before I go, I take a sandwich bag and mostly fill with the prepared ingredients, then cut up the other ingredients and add, with dressing of choice, just to the sandwich bag. The freezer bag stays very fresh for several days. The perishable ingredients can include tomatoes, cucumbers, avocados, and even fruit such as grapes or diced melons.

The other option I discovered was to add leftover rice and lentils to the short-term salad for a change and extra protein.

Bag Salad

Durable Ingredients: [place into a one gallon ziploc bag.]
one fourth green or red cabbage, chopped or grated
two carrots, chopped or grated
one bell pepper, chopped
kernals from one ear of corn
1/2 cup raw sunflower seeds
1/2 cup sliced raw almonds
one can beans such as kidney or black beans, rinsed
one yellow onion, diced

Perishable Ingredients: [Add to one cup of above, in a sandwich bag.]
one tomato, cut into wedges
one fourth cucumber, diced
&/or one avocado, cut up
&/or cut up melon, apple, or grapes
olives
&/or pickled beets or jalapenos

Scoop about a cup of durable ingredients into a sandwich bag. Add perishable ingredients and some dressing of choice. Off you go to work, not even late. Eat the salad with a spoon or fork right out of the bag. If you feel ecological, rinse out and reuse the bag.