With a busy work week in store, plus a vow to get our daughter Sadie on a better bath and sleep schedule, I was eager to find some dinner solutions this week that would be quick and easy. I've never been one to rely on jarred sauces, soup mixes or other prepared foods, but I found myself looking at these products on the shelves at the grocery store and wondering:

a. Just how much time they would save me

and

b. If they were as tasty as if I'd made them from scratch

I decided to give it a shot.

On Monday, even though it was 85 degrees outside, I decided to try a package of Hungarian Mushroom Soup from the gourmet mixes company North Aire Market. It couldn't be easier to prepare-just add water. The package had some recommendations to "doctor" the soup up, and the chef in me decided to sauté some leeks in the pot before adding the soup and the mix, and to pour in a generous splash of vermouth towards the end of the 30 minutes of cooking.

I don't know if I could taste either addition in the end; the soup was hearty and satisfying, although a bit too salty for my taste, and my husband, Chip, complained about its "gravylike" texture. Nonetheless, with a grilled cheese sandwich and a quick spinach salad, it made for an easy dinner that didn't require more than 15 minutes of preparation time. And, at $6.99 for the soup mix, it seemed like a bargain.

I'd had Nando's Peri Peri sauces before, and when I discovered them at our local Barbecues Galore store, I bought another bottle of the Roasted Reds Simmer Sauce. It was easy to make a delicious meal: I sautéed some leeks, chunks of chicken and broccoli, then poured the sauce over it and let it all simmer for 20 minutes or so... then served it over some amaranth that cooked in the same amount of time as the sauce. The amaranth had a strange glutinous texture, but it absorbed the sauce nicely. The sauce was also $6.99, which means that the whole meal probably cost about $15 to prepare, with the chicken and the vegetables, but it was an easy dish to prepare and didn't take me much time in the kitchen.

There are certain ethnic foods that I don't bother to attempt at home. For one thing, these dishes usually require obscure ingredients that are hard to come by, and for another, I just don't have the know-how to make it taste as good as it should. Besides, it's usually not that expensive to just get the food in a restaurant.

Thai curry is a perfect example-the few times I've attempted making it at home, it's either been inedibly hot or boringly bland. But there's a guy at my farmer's market who sells ready-to-use foil packs of curry. Mike's a former chef at Surin, one of Atlanta's best Thai restaurants, so I trust that when it comes to curry, he knows what he's doing. I always scarf down his free samples of curry sauce over rice, so on Thursday I decided to finally buy one of his curry pouches.

The company's name, Curry Simple, is certainly apropos. I sautéed some extra-firm tofu, added sliced onion, green and red pepper, and mushrooms, and dumped the sauce over. According to the package, it only needs to cook for a few minutes, but I let it simmer while I was making some rice to sop up the curry. I'd had this mysteriously creamy rice at a restaurant recently that was studded with edamame, and I was eager to try making it myself. I succeeded in making a rice cooked in coconut milk that was so good that I couldn't stop eating it right out of the pot. The rice was even better underneath the curry, where the sweetness complemented the heat of the curry. Here's the recipe--you can be the judge if it's as addictive as I think it is. Best of all, the whole meal probably cost under $10 to make, which included the $5 I paid for the curry sauce, plus another few dollars for the rice, vegetables and tofu. Plus I had enough leftovers for two lunches.

After a week of trying some of these kitchen shortcuts, I decided that for the most part, packaged sauces and mixes have definitely come a long way from the overly salty, artificially flavored, preservative-laden products I remember from way back when, especially when shopping for them at a gourmet or natural foods store. There are plenty of options that can save time in the kitchen and even make it possible to cook ambitious ethnic dishes at home...after all, I can't remember the last time I saw a Peri-Peri pepper at my local Publix. And even if I were to run into one, who knows how far it had to travel?

In My Kitchen
Every week, I tally my grocery bill, and give you a peek at what's on the dinner table at our house.

Groceries: $92.58

• Hungarian Mushroom Soup, Grilled Cheese Sandwiches, Spinach Salad
• Peri-Peri Chicken and Vegetables over Amaranth
• Red Curry with Tofu and Vegetables over Coconut Edamame Rice
• Salmon Burgers with Grilled Vanilla Cauliflower and Oven Fries