Welcome!

Hello and welcome to Mason Jar Maven. I guess you can tell that I am jumping on the Mason Jar Salad bandwagon. But let's be honest; there are far worse wagons to jump on (the leggings in lieu of pants bandwagon being one of the most egregious. But I digress.

As I begin this blog I am 5'10" and weigh 238.2 pounds which is slightly heavier than a baby elephant, but less than I weighed 4 months ago when I tipped the scales at 264.2. Overall, I would like to get out of the infant pachyderm weight class entirely, and in my experience, diet and excise are key; with diet being the lion's share (keeping up with my zoological theme here) of weight loss. As was said last season on The Biggest Loser, "you can't out exercise a bad diet." Preach. I've definitely tried and failed.

So I am committed to eating healthier! Yay!!!!! The only problem is, I don't have time for that. I have five jobs, literally. I teach full-time Monday-Friday, host trivia two nights a week, work as a tour guide (for two Boston-area venues) on weekends and vacations, and seasonally referee and umpire basketball and softball respectively. Realistically, I work 60-70 hours a week.

My biggest challenge is time; I never get enough sleep, and just don't have enough hours in the day. I often leave home at 6:00 AM with multiple outfits in the car, and don't get home until 10:00 PM or later. Food is ALWAYS on the fly unless I decide to start cooking when I get home, which is usually ridiculously late. So I have tried to make better dinner choices, I've found healthy and quick breakfast solutions, but lunch has been an issue. I got into a bad pattern of eating in the school cafeteria or grabbing a bagel with peanut butter at Dunkin on my way to school. Basically I was eating crap, and my waistline showed it.

When I really committed to eating healthier, I needed a quick, easy lunch solution that wouldn't require a lot of prep. I hate lunchbox sandwiches, they ALWAYS get soggy (even peanut butter gets weird). And anything requiring a microwave turned a 22-minute lunch into a 15-minute or less lunch (not including trying to get to the restroom or copier), because usually there was a wait to heat up lunch. Thus, for the sake of time, I turned to protein bars. I tried EVERY brand under the sun. The ones I liked were expensive, fat-heavy, and weird ingredients that I didn't recognize. Also, I never felt satisfied, and then I'd binge-eat something crappy after school, negating the "healthy" wrapper-clad lunch I'd subjected myself to. So after a year of eating essentially chocolate-covered Play-Doh for lunch, I decided to get back to eating real food.

I word about food. I love food. Breakfast, lunch, supper, hors d'oeuvres, snacks, desserts; I love it all. Sometimes I betray my feminist tendencies and long to be a 1950's housewife, cooking three delicious meals for myself and my family all day, every day. Love planning it, cooking it, and EATING it. So, I needed to find a way to get real food back into lunch.

FINALLY I get to the point. A friend (Shout out to Jen C) was eating mason jar salads at work this summer and explained them to me. The rules seem simple enough:

1. Dressing on the bottom.


2. Store them upright


3. Layer ingredients from wet to dry (tomatoes on the bottom, lettuce on top)

I've added the rule of having cooking/assembly take 70 minutes or less (10 minutes a day if it were spread out over the week). Because who, other than the president maybe, DOESN'T have 10 minutes a day?! Cut back on Facebook trolling or YouTube surfing, and carve out that 70 minutes a week, and then lunch becomes as simple as grabbing a jar out of the fridge!

So I've been doing these for a month now and I'm a huge fan! So like fans of things are wont to do in the modern era, I've decided to blog about it in the hopes that others may reap the benefits of my trails and errors and join in on this awesome life-style change.

I will make mistakes, and some of these recipes will flop. Some of them will be originals, others will be adaptations of salads I already know and love. I will be calculating calories with MyFitnessPal, and I will share that info. My goal/plan is to post one recipe a week. So here we go!