Summer Quinoa Salad Jars with Lemon Dill Dressing

Let’s just start there, okay?

Because THERE is a very good place to start. It involves:

• Quinoa
• Cucumber
• Tomato
• Sun dried peppers
• Feta cheese
• Grilled shrimp
• Curlycue greens
• And a bucket of lemon dill dressing.

That would be enough, wouldn’t it? (I just ate it for lunch and I can assure you that it is and was more than enough.)

BUT.

I like it when things are a little more fun, a little more convenient, a little more real-life-able. Which is why this post is actually called Summer Salad Jars.

As in, let’s put this salad right on up in a jar.

Do you know what’s beautiful about this? The jar thing?

A) Jars. They look pretty in your fridge, and they SUPER CONVENIENT. It’s lunch in literally two shakes: shake the jar out, and toss it all up.

B) The tomatoes and the dressing sit in the bottom of the jar together and actually get BETTER and JUICIER and MORE FLAVOR LOADED the longer they sit in the fridge. The quinoa, too – it can handle that little bit of moisture from the dressing! Think of that lemony, garlicky, dill-punch of flavor just hanging out in there, giving your quinoa the royal treatment. How about a YES MA’AM on that one.

I haven’t been a huge supporter of jar salads in the past because I was skeptical that a lettuce salad, sitting a jar with a bunch of stuff for four days, would really be a good thing to eat.

But this is not a lettuce salad. That’s why I’m into it. It has the extra-delicious texture of a deli-style salad (you know, chicken salad, potato salad, that kind of thing) and all of its ingredients are sturdy enough to handle the weekly fridge sit.

And should you find yourself lacking for dinner, throw a few shrimp on the grill and pop em on top of your salad, with a few delicate curlycue greens in there for Instagram reasons.

Riiiight?! Are we not so hot with this right now?

Okay, easy meal prep. This week. Quinoa, veg, lemon dill dressing. Very healthy, very goals-y.