Assembly-line cooking

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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 Web site to select a time and date along with the meals they would like to prepare -- herb-crusted flank steak, perhaps, or chicken mirabella. When they arrive at the session, ingredients have been doled out carefully 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 with 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 Dream Dinners' success.

Dream Dinners has 115 stores in 19 states, 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 come 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 even have donned their black aprons, before they have been inducted by owner Ann Marie Parness, Ms. Sills already has assembled her first dinner. (A set of 12 doesn't take her longer than 1 hours -- most people average closer to two hours.)