FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Pre-fab meals redefining home cooking

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

The hottest trend in home cooking? Not cooking.

You see it in the number of new cookbooks focused on not-from-scratch cooking (using packaged products to create a meal with a home-cooked look), in the renewed interest in crockpot meals, in deli "meal replacement" products and in meal-in-a-box products such as Campbell's Supper Bakes and, the latest in the field, Betty Crocker's Complete Meals.

This has caused quite a buzz in the food-editor hive and has interesting implications for food coverage. Food editors, by definition, enjoy cooking, and so do the most dedicated readers of these sections. But for many younger readers, who can't recall a time before microwave ovens and Hamburger Helper and who eat out daily, cooking means something a bit different. Beverly Bundy, author of "A Century of Food," told the Los Angeles Times that, today, boiling water for pasta is considered cooking.

The food press, however passionate we are about teaching people how to create fresh-made, from-scratch food, can't ignore what's happening in the kitchen.

And what's happening in the kitchen, according to the Food Marketing Institute, is that, while 85 percent of us prepare home-cooked meals three times a week (actually an increase since 2001), half of those meals are prepared in 30 minutes or less, and half of main meals consist of one dish. Which brings us back to Complete Meals, a partnership of Betty Crocker's Bisquick line and Progresso brand soups, hitting the grocery store shelves now and selling for about $5 a box.

I tested the Chicken and Buttermilk Biscuits, meant to be a meal for five: two cans of chicken-vegetable soup (I counted 8 infant-spoon-size bits of chicken per can), a packet of seasoning mix/thickener (corn and wheat starch, dehydrated milk, fat, seasonings — in other words, a powdered white sauce) and a some Bisquick to which you add water. It took 10 minutes by the clock to put this together, including getting the utensils out of the cupboard — longer than it took to preheat the oven.

A half-hour later, the biscuits were beautifully browned and the casserole was boiling. My neighbor and my husband declared it not bad. I thought it was airline food, or school lunch on a bad day, though the biscuit topping was quite light and the chicken goop was a scary shade of yellow, like goldenrod or a '60s VW.

But what was really scary was the side of the box: 1,070 milligrams of sodium, 13 milligrams of fat (4 saturated) and 25 milligrams of cholesterol. And an ingredient list that's 2 1/2 inches long because of all the monocalcium phosphate, disodium guanylate and autolyzed yeast extract.

I don't think it's quite time to give up cooking yet.