THAT'S IT!!! The entire focus of my blog! What I hope to accomplish is to spot and share little things I do here in my home that constitute quick and easy solutions or niceties my readers can use! What am I waiting for?!?
Allow me to sing the praises of Marie's salad dressing jars. I speak of the empty, de-labeled, washed jars that once held sinfully delicious saladfuls of, oh, say, Blue Cheese or Chunky Blue Cheese dressing. Yes, before experiencing the joys of my Marie's salad dressing jar suggestion(s), you must first make the sacrifice to enjoy about three months of decadent creamy goodness atop piles of healthy green stuff. I'll wait.
Oh, you're back! Now you can play along (in between sessions with Richard Simmons to work off those salads!). You can start with just a single jar, but you'll find it's a lot more fun if you have at least a dozen.
Put some in the cabinet where you keep drinking glasses. If you bought the smaller size when they held salad dressing, the jars are a perfect size for beverages. Around my house, we set up one with ice water every morning for each person. The lids are great to keep curious cats out (especially when serving milk) and it's easier to put unfinished drinks in the frig.
Speaking of drinks, these jars are VERY convenient for mixing juices from either powdered flavorings or frozen concentrate. Add a portion and water, close the lid, shake, and it's ready to drink or store. Sure, you can keep using a large pitcher, but this means no clumsy serving, drinks have lids to keep bugs out when sipping on the porch, and there's no need to worry about fitting the pitcher into your dishwasher.
Do you drink a lot of tea? We do. When I open a new box of tea, I put the tea bags into a Marie's jar. Many of the flavors we drink are ones we buy over and over, so I have a small piece of the package cut out and stored in the jar to identify the variety. The active jars sit on a lazy susan along with one extra jar where I store the labels of inactive varieties until we buy them again.
I keep lots of foods in the jars and because the style of the jar is so classic (clear glass with plain black lid), I think it dresses up the cabinets and looks good on the countertop while I'm cooking. Some of the things I keep in Marie's jars include salt, sugar, corn starch, chocolate chips, and nuts. I haven't said much about the larger jars because I don't find them as versitile, but they do a great job holding raisins.
Now, the good people at Marie's do make some lower calorie dressings in tall, skinny jars and one should not overlook the wonders of these. If you ever make your own salad dressings, they are a handy way to serve and store because after you shake them, the mixture pours out evenly without dropping all the mustard seeds into one salad - ugh! These taller jars are perfect for holding flowers, real ones you bring in from the yard and tissue-paper ones you make to brighten a winter day.
I hope Marie's salad dressing jars brighten YOUR day today, or soon!
