When you add up all the hours it takes to plan meals, shop for groceries, and do the prep work, the numbers tell us what we already suspected; there just aren't enough hours in the day. The advent of food delivery services such as Fresh Direct has made it easier for some of us to keep our fridges and pantries stocked, but somebody still has to do all the chopping and sautéing.

We'd all like to dig in to a delicious, home-cooked dinner at the end of the day, but not everyone has the time, the energy, or the inclination to actually do the cooking. I love the concept behind the slow food movement, but the reality is that fast track moms and dads and stressed-out single parents are still falling back on fast food to get dinner on the table.

But if you're fed up with feeding your family a steady diet of frozen pizzas and chicken chow mein, there's a new option that falls somewhere in between relying on take-out and spending hours in the kitchen: Super Suppers.

Super Suppers is a nationwide chain of “meal-assembly stores,” where customers spend two hours preparing several weeks' worth of entrees, at a cost of about $3 a serving. Launched in 2004 in Fort Worth, Texas, the chain just opened its 100th franchise, its first on Long Island, and is set to open another 94 stores in the next six to eight months.

It's a clever concept; the pre-prepped ingredients are provided at salad bar-style work stations, along with the recipes. Customers assemble the components for, say, Lemon-Dijon Tilapia, or Stuffed Shells Marinara, put the meals in a bag or pan, slap a sticker on them with cooking directions, and take them home to pop in the freezer.

Super Suppers offers consumers an economical and efficient way to serve more wholesome, home-style cooked meals, but how do the entrees taste? Newsday's Erica Marcus sampled a number of Super Supper meals and rated them “pretty good,” overall. Some dishes were clearly better than others, but they're all an improvement over take-out and frozen foods.

If cooking meals from scratch is a luxury you don't have time for, Super Supper's assembly-line, almost home-cooked dinners might be the next best thing.