The Latest in "Home Cooking"

The New York Times has an interesting article on "meal assembly centers," where time-crunched moms and dads can prepare a couple weeks' worth of meals in a couple of hours.

The customer chooses menus online in advance and arrives to find all the ingredients chopped and organized; after preparing all the meals, they're then taken home and frozen until cooked. For a couple hundred dollars, someone else does the shopping, prep work, and cleanup. The centers provide simple recipes and advice which are helpful to those without much cooking experience who are interested in providing their families with more nutritious meals.

Cooking historian Laura Shapiro, author of SOMETHING FROM THE OVEN, says "The incredible popularity of cooking shows on TV shows that people are hungry to cook, hungry to be in the kitchen."