Dream Dinners: Turn Dinner Time into Family Time with 100 Assemble-and-Freeze Meals »

Two busy working mothers trying to balance professional and home lives, Stephanie Allen and Tina Kuna founded Dream Dinners in 2002. Today there are hundreds of Dream Dinners stores across the nation. Stephanie and Tina have revolutionized dinnertime in America, providing an inexpensive alternative to takeout and bringing families together around the table. Dream Dinners has been featured in the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Time, among others. Stephanie and Tina live in Snohomish, Washington.

"What's for dinner?"

If the sound of those three words sends you reeling or, worse, straight to the nearest fast-food chain or take-out joint, then relax. Dream Dinners will change all that forever.

With their new cookbook, Stephanie Allen and Tina Kuna, founders of Dream Dinners, bring the successful philosophy behind their hundreds of assemble-and-freeze-meal stores across America into home kitchens. Dream Dinners offers up one hundred recipes for flavorful meals made with easy-to-find ingredients.

The premise is simple: Scoop or pour ingredients into baking pans or plastic bags, then store the uncooked dishes in the freezer. Later in the week or month, when dinnertime rolls around, just pop one of the frozen meals into the oven. Each recipe is provided two ways: One, prepare just one meal for the night, or two, prepare enough for three meals and freeze the other two. Dinner after sports practice, music lessons, and play rehearsals has never been easier!

In addition to recipes for hearty, family-pleasing classics such as Baked Pesto Ravioli with Chicken, Beef and Zucchini Casserole, and Cider-Braised Pork Loin Chops, Stephanie and Tina give a wealth of time-saving shopping tips and cooking pointers. More than for convenience, eating dinner together provides benefits for the whole family. Study after study shows that mealtime matters. Families who dine together form stronger bonds, and kids get better grades and develop lifelong healthful eating habits. Dream Dinners makes it easy for families to gather around the dinner table and share the ups and downs of the day.

With Dream Dinners, you will spend less time stressing in the kitchen and more time connecting with family and friends.

Library Journal

Allen and Kuna's Dream Dinners franchise now has more than 150 shops across the country. Shoppers can sign up for sessions in which they put together prepared ingredients for that month's main-dish recipes, then take them home to freeze for cooking later. Their cookbook is based on the same idea, with easy recipes for all courses of a meal. Each recipe lists the ingredients needed for just one dish to serve six and those needed to make three batches, one to serve that night and two to freeze for later. The recipes are fairly pedestrian and, overall, seem rather dated; many of them rely on convenience foods, e.g., canned cream soup. Buy for demand only. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.