STRANGER THAN FICTION: CONFESSIONS OF A PREPARED-FOOD JUNKIE

Most working women take a few shortcuts in preparing meals for their families. Maybe more than a few.

Take my husband's aunt, who uses canned chicken and cut-up, store-bought tortillas in her chicken and "dumplings." Another friend has a lasagna recipe that doesn't require boiling the noodles. And what working mother hasn't popped the top off a jar of Ragu?

But I'm beyond just using shortcuts. There's no sizzle of pan frying or merry bubbling from a steaming pot in my kitchen.

There is, however, the sound of packaging being ripped apart and the penetrating beep of a microwave oven.

Let's face it. I'm a prepared-food junkie.

On Sunday night, I defrosted some store-bought barbecue, warmed up a few scoops of it in the microwave and dumped lettuce from a bag into a bowl. Voila! Barbecue sandwiches with a tossed salad on the side.

On Monday, I boiled some water, dumped frozen ravioli into it, heated sauce in the microwave and was sharing a hot meal with The Other Half in minutes.

Like every other troubled person, I'm blaming my mother for this.

With a husband and five kids gathered around the dinner table every night, she had to be practical. California-grilled, gourmet pizzas weren't going to cut it.

What DID cut it were dishes that fed a lot of people but didn't take long to make. They weren't particularly delicious, but they kept us alive.

For example, we ate a lot of goulash. The first definition for that word in Webster's is "a stew of beef or veal and vegetables, seasoned with paprika." I'm thinking what we ate matched the second definition -- "hodgepodge, jumble."

Our goulash had bell pepper, onion, canned tomatoes, ground beef and macaroni. We kids greeted it with the enthusiasm of Boris Yeltsin at a Temperance Society meeting.

And we had a clean plate policy at our house, which meant we weren't going anywhere until we ate our dinners. The family dogs secretly helped us out a little with that.

(Did you know dachshunds won't eat canned tomatoes? They just lick the beef flavoring off.)

But here I am, a couple of decades later, lacking the motivation to so much as saut the onions and pepper for goulash. I completely tune out any recipes that don't start with: "First, you go to the frozen food department."

I was reminded of my problem Sunday at my grandmother-in-law's house. She'd made chicken and dumplings for a church supper REAL dumplings. No tortillas. No canned biscuits pressed into dumpling shapes.

She offered The Other Half and me some leftovers. We commented on how wonderful they were.

"It's really easy," she said. "I just make them with some flour and shortening."

Flour? Shortening? What the heck?

It's like the time a dear friend, off work for maternity leave, explained how she made these great sandwiches with meat and cheese stuffed inside, a favorite at parties.

"You've GOT to give me the recipe, Susan," I insisted.

She grabbed a piece of paper to write it down. "It's really easy," she said. "First, you make the dough."

Make the dough? I immediately tuned her out and tossed the recipe when I got home.

The only dough I make is in the form of a bi-monthly paycheck. And I spend it in the frozen food section.

Heidi Hall is the managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.