Cooking out, eating in

In a small strip mall, behind an ordinary storefront and sandwiched between a tanning salon and a dollar store, lies an answer to a conundrum that vexes busy parents every night: What to feed the family. The company is called Dream Dinners and, like more than a hundred similar outfits across the country, it functions as a sort of communal kitchen where moms and dads whip up a few weeks' worth of freezer-ready meals in just two hours. It's home cooking - without the home.

It works like this: Customers use a website to select a time and date along with the meals they'd like to prepare - herb-crusted flank steak, perhaps, or chicken mirabella. When they arrive at the session, ingredients have been carefully doled out into stainless steel containers.

The would-be chefs simply mix and season, prepping meats and fish and pizza for the oven. The prepared - but uncooked - meals are then bundled into freezer bags and aluminum containers. Cooking instructions are affixed and the trove is tucked into a cooler for the ride home, where each customer will stockpile a dozen ready-to-cook meals.

Even for a country schooled in takeout and delivery, there's something enduring about all that the home-cooked dinner conjures. Americans may be losing touch with the art of cooking, but not the desire for the comfort of homemade food.

"I think every woman and every cook faces the 'what do I make for dinner?' dilemma. And I think these Dream Dinners are certainly filling that need," says Carole Counihan, a food anthropologist at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. "You don't have to shop, you don't have to plan, but you get, in a sense, to take credit for the cooking."

Started in 2002 by two women in a Seattle suburb, Dream Dinners was the first company to specialize in "meal assembly." Since then, others with names such as Dinner by Design, Let's Dish!, and Super Suppers have followed the smell of their success. Dream Dinners now has 115 stores in 19states, with more than 400 franchise applications coming in each week. The Milford, Mass., branch opened last year and is one of two franchises in the Boston area.

It's 7 p.m. here on this Thursday as customers trickle in. First Leslie and Jon Varney, newlyweds with a gift certificate. Then two regulars: Candace McDonnell and Trisha Tokarz. Ms. Tokarz, who wears a Dream Dinners T-shirt, drove an hour from Fitchburg, Mass. Kathy Donohue and her adult daughter, Megan, walk in next. Finally, Diane Sills. Before the newcomers have even donned their black aprons, before they've been inducted by owner Ann Marie Parness, Ms. Sills has already assembled her first dinner. (A set of 12 doesn't take her longer than an hour and a half - most people average closer to two hours.)

The kitchen is tidy. Metal shelves with bins of dried pasta and flour, spices and sauces line a wall painted brick-red. An industrial refrigerator glows near the door. Three cheerful employees scurry around, interpreting instructions, topping off containers, cleaning spills. "That's our job," chides one, as a customer attempts to wipe a countertop.

Tonight's clients include two nurses, a teacher, and a mom who home-schools her young children. They are busy, each one, and each says this makes mealtime a little easier.

The process unfolds like a TV cooking show. "It's cooking with everything laid out for you - makes it a heck of a lot easier," says Mr. Varney, his wife beside him reading directions off a laminated sheet and offering encouragement as he readies a deep-dish pizza that calls for biscuit-dough crust.

It is the iconic ritual of family dinner, as much as the food itself, that Dream Dinners is marketing: "We're about home and community, family and friends," reads one brochure. "We're about getting kids off to school or soccer, making time for the PTA and church gatherings. Food and families lie at the heart of everything we do."

The company estimates that 80 percent of its customers are busy mothers. The concept that "a mother's love means home cooking - an idea that has really gone back centuries in American culture - is still alive and thriving," says Sherrie Inness, whose book, "Secret Ingredients: Race, Gender, and Class at the Dinner Table," comes out this year.

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