I don't have time for fine dining. When supper time rolls around at my house these days, we opt for quick over cuisine.

I'm not quite sure how we did it when the kids were home, but now that they're both on their own, making supper for just my wife and me seems to have become more complicated. We have an unwritten rule that the first one home from work starts cooking. I'm fine with this rule, but I'm starting to suspect that my wife parks around the corner and reads the paper until she sees me pull into the driveway.

Whatever her strategy is, it's working for her. She knows when I get home, I'm hungry. So, she knows one of two things will happen: Either I'll set out chips and salsa, or I'll start dinner. It's a win-win situation for her.

On the other hand, she knows that if I cook, I'm perfectly satisfied with ingredients that can all be purchased at the Chevron station snack shop. We usually compromise with one of the now ubiquitous frozen meals-for-two that fill the freezer aisle at Vons. These are actually pretty good, but I can only take so many of them.

We can always throw a steak or a chicken breast on the barbecue, and that helps vary the menu, but the fundamental problem remains the same; we want to eat, we want it fast and we don't have a lot of time to fool around with it.

Apparently, we are not alone. Tara Parker-Pope recently discussed the situation in her Wall Street Journal health column. She titled the column: "The Myth of Convenience: Why Instant Foods Don't Save Time." She reports that convenience foods take about the same time to prepare as the simple meals most people eat on a regular basis, but that they give the illusion of a more elaborate, if salt-laden, meal.

Her point was, a simple homemade meal is preferable to a salt- and preservative-heavy frozen meal of fancier fare and both take about the same amount of time to prepare. My point is, she has missed the point of convenience food.

I've been around enough to know that chicken parmigiana is a dish better served on a checkered tablecloth along with candlelight and a nice Chianti than it is from a frozen brick thawed then heated in a microwave and eaten over the sink.

But in reality, after a long day of work, throwing dinner in the microwave while I go through the mail, change clothes and open up the house to remove some of the day's stuffiness does save time.

But there's no getting around the fact that frozen food just isn't the same as fresh, although today's frozen meals are light-years ahead of the infamous TV Dinners my mom served while I was growing up.

I can still remember the compartmented tin trays covered with industrial strength tin foil. Each dinner was a little like buying a lottery ticket; you didn't know if what was inside would resemble the photo on the box and it was almost a sure bet that the food in one of the compartments would be either over-done or still frozen.

The meals are fancier now, easier to prepare and, if you follow the directions, almost always properly cooked. Are they as good as homemade? No. But they do save me time — and stress — so I think that's about as convenient as you can get unless my wife gets home first.

— Contact Star columnist Bill Nash at bnash805@aol.com.