Soggy Ensalada Saga

I’ve loved salads all my life. And salad fixings. Carrots and yellow peppers and cucumbers and grape tomatoes and red onion and feta cheese and artichoke hearts and hearts of palm and salt and pepper croutons and OLIVES. Especially olives!

When I was a wee lass, I used to put black olives on my fingers and gobble them off one by one. My mom was paranoid and dismayed and called my pediatrician when, soon after an olive-eating-extravaganza, she went to change my diaper and...alright well that’s just TMI.
Needless to say, I likey de lettuce deliciousness. Perhaps not as much as Kelly, who used to order salads for dessert. I wouldn’t take salads over sweets. But I do consume their “healthy” scrumptiousness on a daily basis.

So I’ve found it quite troubling as of late that all greens (for the most part), no matter what brand you buy, but especially Earthbound Farms, are gross and soggy and wet and wilty.

I’m quite nostalgic for the good old days when bags and containers came sans condensation. It’s not fair! It’s a given that, these days, bags of romaine and arugula and field greens and spinach and baby romaine are going to contain waterlogged, slimy lettuces because their casings are covered in water droplets.

Am I losing my memory? Well, yes, but for reals, yo! I don’t recall greens ever coming that way. There never used to be precipitation in the packages…and now it’s perpetual. Interminable. Eternal.
You’d think that, in these modern times, soggy lettuce would be an impossibility. I know, I know – the produce is transported in A/C then when it gets out into the hot weather and goes back into the cold, the dew forms. Or, more likely, the lettuce was simply bagged when it was still wet.

But seriously. Come on!
There’s nothing worse than those little red romaine greens that turn brown and slimy and poison the other lettuces with their muddy, mucky ooziness.

Gross!

I’ve tried all the tricks. Wiping the sides of the bags and containers with paper towels. Leaving the paper towels in the packaging to absorb the droplets. Putting them in plastic bags. Storing them in the produce drawer only.
But no matter what, the bags and the plastic containers always, always find a way to perspire. To sweat. And, of course, to drive me crazy.
Sure, I get sick of picking through every single leaf that ends up on my plate, checking for wetness and wiltedness. But there is, unfortunately, no better way.

I suppose I’ll just have to don my Green Goddess cap and come up with an invention that will put an end to the ick factor.
STOP THE SOGGINESS.