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Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Dec. 29, 2005 / 28 Kislev, 5766

Cooking up relief for busy moms

By Lenore Skenazy


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | You can bet June Cleaver had a home-cooked meal on the table every night, which is why Wally and Beaver never became crackheads. After all, dinner is supposedly the "anti-drug."


But what are today's moms supposed to do — come home, ditch the pumps, help with the homework, kiss the hubby hello, pick up a kid or two from basketball and still somehow manage to cook a Cleaverian capon?


No can do, Bub! This revolution is missing a cog! Tonight's supper is macaroni with steamed mom — same as last night.


Or at least, that was pretty much the menu chez most working moms until a second revolution started taking off — the one that might finally make the first revolution work.


It's called fresh meal assembly, or easy meal preparation — evolving terms for a slew of new out-of-home kitchens that women are opening up all over America — more than 500 to date, up from just 100 of them in 2003 and zero in 1998.


They haven't reached New York City yet, probably because the rent here is prohibitive and the takeout plentiful. But the rest of the country is becoming very familiar with these storefronts, each equipped with about a dozen counters and, at every counter, all the preshopped, prechopped ingredients necessary to make the recipe sitting right there in front of you: cinnamon pork tenderloin, say, or coconut shrimp.


Most easy meal kitchens run two-hour sessions during which customers assemble 12 freezer-ready meals, which each feed a family of six. The price is about $200, or less than $3 a serving. And the fact that these meals actually get cooked at home, suffusing the kitchen with Cleaver-era aromas? Priceless.


"To be honest," admits Westchester mom of twins Nancy Beard, "we did a lot of takeout and, G0d help us, Lean Cuisine." That was before she discovered One Two Three Dinner in Briarcliff Manor. Now she arranges to meet friends there, and together they make dinners and socialize while they do it. "We just did five meals in an hour and a half," she beams.


It's the conviviality as much as the convenience that makes these public kitchens so compelling. When women joined the workforce, they not only lost the time to cook, they also lost the time to chat. These out-of-home kitchens give ladies (and the occasional guy) a chance to socialize while still being productive. Meanwhile, the husbands are so grateful for non-nugget meals that they often volunteer to baby-sit. Talk about win-win.


"I've never seen anything quite like this, that's bubbled up from the ground up and so fundamentally solves problem," says Bert Vermeulen, president of the Easy Meal Preparation Association. If dinner is the anti-drug and working moms are, for better or worse, still expected to make that dinner happen, easy meal prep is the missing link. Now when working dads start getting together for playgroups, we'll be all set.

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JWR contributor Lenore Skenazy is a columnist for The New York Daily News. Comment by clicking here.

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© 2005, NY Daily News

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