Generally, I’m not crazy about food gimmicks. I’m suspicious of miraculous shortcuts involving cake mixes, coffee cans or cooking breakfast under the hood of your car. 

Social media is ripe with this stuff. There are cookies made out of noodles, no-calorie macaroni and cheese that contains neither mac nor cheese, 30-minute brisket, all recipes that are simply too good to be edible. 

But I think I recently developed a hairline fracture in my cynical bone when I tried salad in a jar. 

The first time I saw this idea was two years ago. I know this because that’s when I pinned it on one of my Pinterest boards. Pinterest is a social media site that offers users the chance to collect and share photographs that are usually links to cool things they’ve discovered online. It’s a happy place for you and all your crazy, digital-scrapbooking friends. 

I love it, actually. Not only does it deal in pictures, my favorite mode of communication, but it allows me to quench my collecting/hoarding thirst without filling my house with things that ultimately will have to be dusted. 

The salad-in-a-jar concept is a simple one: Build a salad, layer by layer, in a Mason jar, starting with the dressing at the bottom, followed by the firmest ingredients and finishing with the lettuce on top. The promise is that all the ingredients will stay fresh so you can make a week’s worth of salads on Sunday and enjoy healthy lunches all week long, without the 7 a.m. chopping. 

Various posters and sites claim that the salads will stay fresh in the refrigerator and will taste as delicious as the day you made them for anywhere from three to seven days. 

This is very appealing to me. I love salads. They taste good. They fill me up. And perhaps best of all, eating all those raw vegetables as my primary workday fuel makes me feel righteous. But I can’t chop in the morning. I can drink coffee in the morning, but that’s about it. 

So I gave it a try. I started with a simple, slightly spicy vinaigrette made with 2 parts olive oil, 1 part harissa oil, 3 parts maple balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper — did I mention that stores that sell fancy oils and vinegars are among my favorite places to splurge? 

Then, following the instructions, I layered in my firmest vegetables: celery, apples, carrots, radishes and sliced red cabbage. Next came some crumbled blue cheese, some toasted walnuts, a few sunflower and some leftover pomegranate seeds, followed by some thinly sliced red onion and, finally, a mix of red leaf and romaine lettuce. 

I made four identical salads and I ate one that night for dinner at my desk. I dumped it into a bowl, stirred it around and dug in. It was delicious. No real surprise there. 

I sent two to work with my husband. He ate one the next day and reported back that it was still very good. When he came home 36 hours later, he brought his uneaten second salad back with him (he claims he’d packed too much food, but I suspect take-out Chinese food was involved), so that left me with the remaining two. 

I ate the third salad three days after making it, and the fourth on day four. 

They were all delicious. By day three, the apples and celery had soaked up some of the dressing and as a result were tinged with the color of the balsamic vinegar, but both were still crisp and tasty. In fact, all of the ingredients, from blue cheese to lettuce, were terrific. 

By George, I think we’ve got something here. 

My greatest disappointment was that I had made identical salads. By the time I was faced with eating the fourth one, I was hankering for variety. Other than that, it worked just as promised. 

Now, you’ll notice that I avoided ingredients that wouldn’t hold up that long under any circumstances. No avocado. No chopped tomato, although you certainly could include whole cherry tomatoes in the mix. No croutons — they’d get very soggy in that jar. But you could pack those things and add them right before eating. 

Next time, I’m going to put the onions down closer to the dressing so they’ll pickle a bit over time. And I think if you put some fresh mushrooms down there, too, when you eat the salads later, you just might have something very close to marinated mushrooms. In fact, you could use a pool of marinated mushrooms at the bottom in lieu of dressing. The possibilities are endless. 

So go forth, layer yourself a salad in a jar, and feel righteous about your lunch. 

Enjoy! 

Jill Blanchette is the multiplatform production manager at The Day. Share comments and recipes with her at j.blanchette@theday.com.