Published: March 20, 2008 02:06 pm      

VIDEO: Mr. Food No Fuss Meals

Among the activities that our time-compressed society has kicked to the curb is the concept of the family dinner.

The notion of people gathered around a table for genuine conversation over genuine food tends to be reserved for Thanksgiving or for Nick at Night family sitcoms. Dinner today often arrives packed in cardboard, to be consumed over the sink or on the couch and in a hurry, reduced to an element of multitasking.

Well, dinner is back, and it’s made by hand and wrapped in plastic.

The angst-ridden with overtaxed schedules have lately taken to a departure in meal preparation that owes more to the assembly line than to those lovingly fussed-over 30-minute gourmet wonders the Food Channel offers to incite homemaker guilt. It’s the outsourcing of homemade dinner, and it now happens, according to Time Magazine, about 350,000 times a month in America.

Make an appointment to book a session, visit a place like Mr. Food No-Fuss Meals in the Northtown Plaza and single-handedly follow simple instructions to prepare a large, nutritious and remarkably cost-effective family meal. Put it all in an assortment of zipper bags, carry it to your freezer and a meal in the tradition of June Cleaver or those Norman Rockwell illustrations beckons.

I tried it. It works.

“Come in, and you can put together a month’s worth of meals,” said James Kulwicki, co-owner of the franchise fronted by Mr. Food (he of the “Ooh, it’s so good” TV segments seen in the Buffalo area since 1982). “These are things you can pull out of the freezer the day before. It’ll get the family back together at the dinner table.”

Family therapy aside, the rotating menu offers 13 meals to construct, each the sort of thing you’d find in a quality restaurant. The March lineup includes chicken divan, lemon-caper tilapia and sesame chicken with mandarin glaze, and each of the ingredients is top-notch. And while the bill can seem high ($228.00 for 12 meals, for example), deconstructing it down to $3.17 a serving makes it ridiculously affordable.

All right, let’s cook dinner. I had a dinner for four pre-prepared in less than eight minutes.

This is how General Motors builds cars on an assembly line. Autoworkers add value to the product with every move, and now, so do chefs.

The customer here, of course, can add and delete according to preference and allergies, and the dinner can be split into smaller bags for portion control. But despite the quality product being created, there’s no chopping, not much measuring, no worrying, and, as Kulwicki points out, “We do all the cleanup.”

That Epicurean concept of sweating the details for an artistic experience is replaced by convenience and speed, and there is no need to examine which is more valuable in the minds of his customers.

Work is being done here, to be sure, but the atmosphere is hospitable. Kulwicki and co-owner Debbie Murphy (both longtime veterans of the local restaurant business) and manager Gwen Thomas keep things light and readily answer questions, although most of the questions seem to be coming from me. The other customers, all women, seem to know precisely where to go and how to accomplish their tasks.

For the record, I took my bags of dinner (Greek spinach pie, Shanghai pork chops and the aforementioned shrimp entrée) home and tossed them in a freezer. After a day’s thawing, each was ready to be quickly cooked in a big skillet.

The results were phenomenal. This is good, satisfying food, however artlessly it was assembled. It required no other spices or additives, and offered no opportunities to lament how it should have been prepared differently. For the price-per-serving of a trip to McDonalds, a real meal was on my table, the kind of product you see in restaurant commercials, with minimal complication and effort.

The No-Fuss Meal franchise, the first of at least three planned for Western New York, aspires to provide low-cost, nutritionally correct and properly composed meals that actually look and taste like traditional dinners, but with an eye toward conserving this society’s only non-renewable resource — time. It admirably hits the target. The meals were quickly assembled and prepared, and dinner time actually turned into an old-school gathering around the table.

I know a few things about cooking, and plenty about eating. The time-strapped among us, with obligations that include feeding a family, will welcome this modern concept of visiting someone else’s kitchen to accomplish the hard parts of meal preparation.

Just be prepared to replace everything you know about stirring with kneading.

Contact Kenmore-based freelancer Ed Adamczyk at niagaraliving@gnnewspaper.com.

pared in less than eight minutes.

This is how General Motors builds cars on an assembly line. Autoworkers add value to the product with every move, and now, so do chefs.

The customer here, of course, can add and delete according to preference and allergies, and the dinner can be split into smaller bags for portion control. But despite the quality product being created, there’s no chopping, not much measuring, no worrying, and, as Kulwicki points out, “We do all the cleanup.”

Work is being done here, to be sure, but the atmosphere is hospitable. Kulwicki and co-owner Debbie Murphy (both longtime veterans of the local restaurant business) and manager Gwen Thomas keep things light and readily answer questions, although most of the questions seem to be coming from me. The other customers, all women, seem to know precisely where to go and how to accomplish their tasks.

For the record, I took my bags of dinner (Greek spinach pie, Shanghai pork chops and the aforementioned shrimp entrée) home and tossed them in a freezer. After a day’s thawing, each was ready to be quickly cooked in a big skillet.

The results were phenomenal. This is good, satisfying food, however artlessly it was assembled. It required no other spices or additives, and offered no opportunities to lament how it should have been prepared differently. For the price-per-serving of a trip to McDonalds, a real meal was on my table, the kind of product you see in restaurant commercials, with minimal complication and effort.

The No-Fuss Meal franchise, the first of at least three planned for Western New York, aspires to provide low-cost, nutritionally correct and properly composed meals that actually look and taste like traditional dinners, but with an eye toward conserving this society’s only non-renewable resource — time. It admirably hits the target. The meals were quickly assembled and prepared, and dinner time actually turned into an old-school gathering around the table.

I know a few things about cooking, and plenty about eating. The time-strapped among us, with obligations that include feeding a family, will welcome this modern concept of visiting someone else’s kitchen to accomplish the hard parts of meal preparation.

Contact reporter

Ed Adamczyk at niagaraliving@

gnnewspaper.com.