Small jars, big bag: portioning snacks once a week
Big bags of nuts and dried fruit are good value. They are also bottomless. If I eat straight from a large bag while reading or working, I have genuinely no idea how much I’ve had until I notice the bag is suddenly lighter.
So once a week, usually on Sunday afternoon, I decant one bag into small jars. It takes about ten minutes, and it turns a vague snack into a decided one.
The jars
I use five small glass jars that came with something else years ago. They each hold a little more than I want in them, which is fine: I don’t fill them to the top. Any small container works. The point is that each one is the same.
For mixed nuts and dried fruit, I put about 30 g in each jar. That’s a small handful, the kind of amount often used as an example portion on nut packets, and a figure I settled on simply because it suits me for an afternoon snack. If you’re feeding teenagers or cycling to work, you might want more. Write down whatever works for you.
I weigh the first jar and then just fill the others to the same level. After a couple of weeks you stop needing the scale at all, because you know where the line is.
My Sunday mix
Snack note · Makes 5 small jars
- 60 g almonds
- 30 g cashews
- 30 g walnut pieces
- 30 g raisins or dried cranberries
- 30 g chopped dried apricots
That’s 180 g altogether, which gives five jars of about 30 g with a little left over for testing. I mix everything in a bowl first so each jar gets a bit of everything, rather than one jar of almonds and one of raisins.
Sometimes I add a spoonful of pumpkin seeds or a few pieces of dark chocolate. If you add something, add it to the whole bowl before dividing, so the jars stay even.
Why it works for me
The jars are not about restriction. They’re about not having to think. When I want a snack, I take a jar. When the jar’s empty, that snack is finished, and I can decide whether I actually want something else or was just bored. Most of the time it was boredom.
It also means the big bag lasts as long as I expect it to. Before the jars, a bag that should have lasted a fortnight would vanish in five days, mostly into handfuls I didn’t even taste.
The same idea, elsewhere
Once you start dividing things in advance, it spreads. I do the same with:
- Breakfast oats, where I pre-weigh dry oats into small containers for the week (the overnight oats recipe uses 40 g each).
- Leftover soup, ladled into single-bowl boxes straight from the pot, as in the six-bowl lentil soup.
- Cheese, cut into pieces when I open a block, which also stops it drying out.
None of this is clever. It’s just doing the deciding once, at a quiet moment, instead of every time I open the cupboard.
A few practical notes
Nuts keep best in airtight containers away from heat and sunlight; the jars live in a cupboard, not on the windowsill. If anyone in your house has a nut allergy, keep the jars well labelled and away from shared food. And if a jar ends up with all the cashews, you probably didn’t mix the bowl properly. I speak from experience.