For the time-pressed and hungry, pre-prepared ingredients mean dinner's in the bag
This is Lindsay Bryant's recipe for teriyaki stir-fry: Heat pan. Open package. Transfer vegetables to pan. Pour in sauce. Saute until tender.
Gone are the days when Bryant, 28, would have poked through supermarket produce, found what looked freshest, and carried it all back to her Back Bay apartment to start washing and cutting. That was before she discovered that Trader Joe's had done it for her, with a container of pre-washed, pre-cut vegetables dubbed Asian Stir-Fry Mix. Add bottled teriyaki sauce and you practically have a meal.
Bryant, a Montessori teacher, arrives home late and cooks for one, since her husband eats dinner at work. ''I'm at school all day, then to an exercise class until 7:30, and then I don't get home till 8, and I'm exhausted, and I want to be in bed by 10," she said. ''I don't have an hour to cut up stuff."
With almost one-third of US shoppers eating at least one dinner a week at home that they did not prepare, shortcut products are occupying a constantly expanding section of market shelves. And it's not just in the produce aisles, where bagged salad mixes, already rinsed and torn, now dwarf the space devoted to whole heads of lettuce and greens. Meat departments include ever-larger selections of marinated, pounded, rolled, and cubed cuts; delis that once concentrated on cold cuts and cheeses have become ready-to-eat emporiums; and all kinds of new items promise to help home cooks jump-start their cooking -- or avoid it altogether. For many busy consumers, cooking from scratch has gone the way of vinyl records.
This is way beyond Hamburger Helper. Packaging advancements mean that many products don't need preservatives to stay fresh. And some use organic produce, naturally raised meat, and other high-quality ingredients not formerly associated with convenience.
Take Melissa's Peeled Baby Red Beets, which are pre-steamed, vacuum-packed, and sold in the refrigerated section at Trader Joe's for $2.59 for six or seven small beets, or 8 ounces. A far cry from the mushy roots that come from a can, these French beets are perfectly firm and make an earthy, sweet addition to a salad. Best of all, they save up to an hour of scrubbing, cooking, and peeling, not to mention the mess from those red-staining juices.
For a smoky-sweet time saver, California's Niman Ranch slow-cooks baby back ribs over hickory, combines them with barbecue sauce, and sells them at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods Markets for about $5.99 a pound, not much more than the cost of raw. No need to tend a fire for a few hours: The home cook simply warms them in the oven, throws them on the grill, or even pops them in the microwave.
Other products are aimed at people who don't mind cooking their own meat but are at a loss for a recipe and all the little ingredients that go into it. In test markets, Whole Foods is selling Ready to Cook kits, including one that for $10.99 includes enough peeled and deveined shrimp and scallops to serve two, plus herb paste for cooking and remoulade for dipping. At the Whole Foods in Swampscott, boneless chicken breasts that have been pounded into perfect cutlets and coated in seasoned panko flakes sell for $6.99 a pound.
Are they worth it? Stan Frankenthaler, culinary development team leader for the company's North Atlantic region, says that such a product is attractive not only to cooks who have little time, but also those who don't want to stock anything close to a full pantry. Ready-to-cook chicken, says Frankenthaler, ''is the only thing in their fridge. They don't have to buy eggs, or oil, or panko. They buy the chicken, they buy a head of broccoli or a bag of salad greens, and they go home and eat it and it's all gone, so there's no waste, and they still don't have anything in their fridge. They don't carry any inventory."
Ultimately, the proof is in the sales. While Whole Foods would not offer figures, Frankenthaler called the category's growth ''tremendous." In meat and seafood, he says, the growth of oven-ready items is outpacing that of the raw-from-scratch items. It's a similar story in produce, where regional produce director Eric Brown says the growth in pre-cut vegetables and fruit is more than double that of produce in general.
In Stop & Shop's meat cases, the emphasis is on marinated, grill-ready meats. Most are prepared by the Butcher Block Inc., a Boston company that Stop & Shop meat director Wayne Lebeuf says does ''a bang-up job.
''Time constraints are such a big part of everybody's life," he says. ''If you get off [work] at 6 o'clock, you don't have time to stop at the store and marinate the meat for long enough that the marinade can add flavor to the product. By that time you'd be eating at 9 o'clock."
According to the National Meat Case Study 2004, fresh meat and poultry's share of linear feet in markets declined by 6 percent over the preceding two years, while the share occupied by processed meats and heat-and-serve products increased by 2 percent, and ready-to-cook products gained 1 percent of space.
In produce, the convenience push started a decade ago with bagged lettuces, which now make up more than half the estimated $4 billion fresh-cut produce industry. According to
But another driving force seems to be the desire to avoid waste. In a 2004 consumer panel run by SupermarketGuru.com, 39 percent of respondents said that up to half of the fresh food in their homes went bad before it could be used. In the same panel, the overwhelming majority said the one thing that would encourage them to purchase more fruits and vegetables would be a longer period of freshness.
Manufacturers are paying attention, and packaging advancements have helped extend the shelf life of ready-cut produce. Consumers such as Laurent Rotroff, 31, have noticed the difference. Shopping at the Shaw's in the Prudential Center recently, Rotroff picked out the store's own brand of cauliflower florets and added them to her shopping cart, alongside a package of veal cutlets.
She and her fiance, both attorneys, live in the residential tower above the store, and she shops daily at Shaw's on her way home from work. ''We decide what we're going to have, a la minute, then go upstairs to cook," she said. ''Obviously, we've got a limited amount of time." If she bought a head of cauliflower, she says, half of it would probably go to waste. ''This is so much easier to manage, especially since we're just two. It's more manageable portions -- you can just deal with it better."
Just because the products are coming out of a bag doesn't mean she's not cooking. Rontroff had plans to cut the cauliflower into smaller pieces, pour over a homemade bechamel sauce, and bake it into a gratin. Then she planned to bread and pan-fry the veal and pair it with a lemon-butter sauce, francaise-style. ''I think some of the better products help you cook more rather than less," she says, ''because they can put things slightly more within your reach."
Frankenthaler agrees. Even though real home cooking has been on the decline for decades, at least something like the shrimp-and-scallop kit engages customers in the cooking process and keeps them out of the drive-through. ''You do marinate the protein yourself, and then you are on the hook for cooking it nicely and bringing it to the table in a nice way," he says. ''It's not something that you're just rewarming that someone else cooked, and it's not something that you are really just throwing in the microwave for a couple minutes."
Even teacher Lindsay Bryant's teriyaki stir-fried vegetables require some attention. The last time she made them, in fact, she poured in a little of the sauce, but there was some left, so -- what the heck -- she dumped it all in so she could recycle the bottle. ''That was not a good idea," she admits. ''It didn't taste very good."
Joe Yonan can be reached at yonan@globe.com. 
