Money Saving Tip: Bagged Lettuce

Do you do it?  I know I do it all the time!

I put salad on the menu, which happens a lot these days, and as I’m shopping for vegetables, I head straight for the bagged lettuce.   I mean, what’s not to love about pre-washed, pre-chopped salad greens?

Recently though, I picked up a few bags of chopped romaine at $2.59 a bag.  As I continued on with my shopping, I had to pause because as I was reaching for a fennel bulb, I saw the heads of whole romaine right nearby.  With a grand price tag of 99 cents a head.  I looked at the bags in my cart, looked at the heads, and promptly took the bags of lettuce back to their section.   I then selected two heads of romaine at a whopping two bucks.

Now, when I arrived home, I did end up discarding the very outer layer of leaves.  Seriously, how many people likely touched these heads of lettuce?  But then I trimmed the ends, and then chopped one whole head up.  I washed it and spun it in my salad spinner, and then tucked it into a freezer bag, and into the fridge.  And just like that, I had my own bagged salad in the fridge, and that gallon bag was nicely filled from the one head of romaine.  While I didn’t weigh it, I can honestly say that my bag was much larger than the one at the store.

So we’ve been enjoying homemade bagged lettuce ever since.   Once the bag is emptied, a quick rinse is all it takes and then I can reuse the one bag a few times.  It’s so convenient, and it’s a great way to have fresh salad greens on hand until the garden greens are ready to go.   It’s a huge budget saver, as we go through a lot of salad these days.  The only drawback?  When you go somewhere else, and you’ve been spoiled on romaine salad, and you get served a salad with iceberg… well, it’s hard to enjoy it, as I found out this past Mother’s Day unfortunately.

Homemade bagged salad.  I don’t know about you, but this was a duh moment for me, as in, why didn’t I think of it sooner?