Question

Is it possible to use jQuery’s .load and stick the loaded content into a variable so I can use the variable and append it to something else later on?

Answer 1

You can, but this is unnecessary. Use the $.get method to directly access the response instead.

$.get("foo.php",function(response){
    console.log(response);
});

If you want to do both, (i.e. load the response into a div and use the returned data), you can use the callback on the $.load method similarly.