On nights when you don't really feel like cooking, pasta is always an easy fallback. Now that people seem to be less terrified of having a few carbs in their diets, pasta is slowly returning to its position as a pantry staple. It only takes a few minutes to cook and you can make an infinite number of sauces, from 5-minute light tomato sauces to rich, slow-cooked ones. If you have an extra few minutes in your evening, it doesn't take too much more work to turn a regular bowl of pasta into a comforting baked pasta dish, with an oozy topping of cheese than gets browned and ever so slightly crusty on top. Just about any baked pasta dish is a welcome meal on a cold winter day.

Easy meal prep is hot right now. By this, I am referring to the make-and-freeze dinner businesses that are thriving all across the US. With names like Dream Dinners, Super Suppers, My Girlfriend's Kitchen, Supper Thyme USA, What's for Dinner and Dinner by Design, all appeal to the "busy family demographic, where people want to have home cooked meals but don't necessarily feel that they have the time to do it themselves. These businesses offer kitchens with lots of partially assembled meals and ingredients that you can put together in combinations that your family will like. Typically, meals are prepared for a week or two in advance and everything can be frozen. Heating instructions (and any other cooking suggestions, if needed, are included.

The trend is so popular that it is starting to spread out of the US. In London, a chain called Dinners Made is springing up and gaining popularity with those who are looking for food to make in advance and freeze, and also with those who want to entertain and don't have time (or perhaps the ability) to cook everything from scratch without some assistance. Using Dinners Made means that the recipes are included, prep is done and cleanup is taken care of, as they are at every similar easy meal prep shop. Combining the convenience of working in the store with below-restaurant prices, a flexible menu and fresh ingredients, it's not hard to see why the idea is spreading so rapidly.

Inside Prevention's Fit and Fast Meals in Minutes: Over 175 Delicious, Healthy Recipes in 30 Minutes or Less, you'll find a wide variety of meals that can all be made part of a balanced, healthy diet and a busy day. It takes no thought on your part to put them together, though, because author Linda Gassenheimer has done all the work for you. Each meal – the book covers breakfast, lunch and dinner and the recipes are usually grouped as a complete meal – comes with a shopping list of ingredients, helpful hints to save time or for substitutions, and a "countdown" timeline for making the meal. The easy-to-follow recipes also have a complete nutritional analysis to accompany them, so you know exactly what you're eating and as if that weren't enough, they are designed to have the optimal balance of proteins, complex carbohydrates and fats you need in your diet.

All the recipes make two servings, with the exception of the foods in the "entertaining" section, which serve six, so it is ideal for a single-eater who wants leftovers or four couples. As in so many other healthy living books, this one offers tips for controlling your portion sizes and making good food choices at home and at restaurants. There are four weeks' worth of recipes and a chart that suggests meals for each day, so the book could serve as a great starting place for someone who wants to begin to pursue a healthier lifestyle, as well as for those who already do.

And, for those of you interested in seeing more of Linda Gassenheimer, you can catch her column or see her at the 2006 Miami Book Fair, Nov. 12-19.

A while back, I mentioned that Starbucks had been test-marketing hot breakfast sandwiches in a few select locations. They are now selling them at quite a number of stores - 126 in the Chicago area alone - as part of their regular menu and seem to be planning to roll them out country-wide over the coming months.

The Chicago Sun-Times rounded up a panel of tasters who were willing to put the Starbucks sandwiches head-to-head with McDonald's McMuffins to give the rest of us an idea of what they're like. Two out of three said that they still preferred McDonald's, which appears to be the gold standard for quick, breakfast sandwiches. Here's what they thought of each of the offered sandwiches:

• Eggs Florentine with Baby Spinach and Havarti - A taster favorite, with lots of sauce and spinach. "It's really delicious!" declared one. 

There is a reason why Frank Bruni drove through the South and not, say, Montana, on his hunt for the best fast food in the country. It is because there is more fast food eaten in the South than in any other part of the country.

According to Scarborough Research (pdf), while the average American adult eats fast food about 5.2 times per month, residents of Birmingham, Alabama dine at fast food restaurants 6.5 times per month. Given that the examples used by the research firm were McDonald's and Subway, it seems likely that they only included major chain restaurants in their survey, too. Rounding out the top five for fast food consumption were Louisville, KY; Austin. TX; Memphis, TN and Raleigh, NC, ranging from 6.4-6.2 average visits.

The company also looked at the cities in which "sit-down" quick service restaurants, like Applebee's or TGI Friday's, were frequented. Orlando, Florida came out on top, with 4.5 visits per month. The other top cities included Cincinnati, OH; Fort Meyers, FL; Tampa, FL and Atlanta, GA.

Cities like Syracuse, NY and Philadelphia, PA were towards the bottom of the fast food visit rankings, with only 4 visits per adult per month, and Honolulu, HI, Buffalo, NY and Spokane, WA had the fewest "sit-down" visits, at 3, 2.9 and 2.5, respectively.

The full title of this new Rachael Ray book is Express Lane Meals: What To Keep on Hand, What To Buy Fresh for the Easiest-Ever 30-Minute Meals. Quite a mouthful, wouldn't you say? But in almost the time that it takes to say the name of the book, you can have a meal on the table because Rachael Ray is that fast.

This book has a great premise. At the beginning of the book, Rachael gives her readers a list of pantry ingredients that they should always keep in their home, including various spices, flour, milk, fresh fruits and vegetable, pasta and assorted canned goods. Once you've taken the list to the store and stocked up, you will have all you need (except the actual cooking equipment, which you might need to make another trip for) to fix every recipe in the book. All the recipes call for ten items or less - hence the name of the book - and there is a backup shopping list with each one, so you can be doubly sure that you have everything you need before you start. Sticking with her easy-to-read style, the recipes are not intimidating and should be a good start for a beginning cook or a good starting point for a more experienced cook who is short on time.

Health magazine put together their list of what they considered to be the "best foods for busy women." What they clearly meant to say was the "best pre-packaged meals/snacks for busy women". There isn't anything necessarily wrong with this sort of meal, but I would hardly go so far as to say it is the "best," since my definition of "best" does not generally include a lot of shelf-stable pre-packaged meals. Nevertheless, here are their picks:

Breakfast
South Beach Diet Denver-Style Breakfast Wrap
Post Raisin Bran Cereal Bars

Lunch
Starkist Albacore Lemon & Cracked Pepper Tuna Fillet
Thai Kitchen Thai Peanut Noodle Car

Dinner
Lean Cuisine Dinnertime Selections Chicken Portobello
Uncle Ben's Ready Rice Whole Grain Brown

Snack
Kettle Brand Bakes Hickory Honey BBQ

Dessert
Edy's/Dreyer's Slow Churned Light Ice Cream French Silk
100 Percent Whole Grain Chips Ahoy! Cookies

Papa John's is planning to roll out pizza to consumers in 10 minutes or less! The third largest pizza delivery chain in the United States is releasing what will be the fastest made-to-order pizza ever. Guaranteed.

Basically, Papa John's is promising that its Papa's 10 Minute Carry-out Customer Guarantee will have your pizza made-to-order and completely ready for handoff in not more than 10 minutes or it will be free. The offer will apply only to carry-out orders during lunchtime, but a company spokesperson said that they are in the process of upgrading their ovens in one third of their stores, cutting total pizza baking time from 6 to 4 minutes. The company is currently missing the 10-minute mark less than 1% of the time at its test stores. The move is designed to allow thechain to compete with fast food establishments like Jack in the Box and Wendy's, where customers can spend an average of 10 minutes in line at the drive-through. 

A Pizza Hut spokeswoman said "In our experience, freshly baked, high-quality pizza takes more than four minutes. And we think it's worth waiting for." If the Papa John's promotion fails, it could be costly for the company. If customers don't perceive a change in the quality of their pizzas, though, this could en enough to make other pizza companies reevaluate their timing, too.

With drive-thru service now accounting for up to 70% of fast food sales, the mind boggles to hear that companies are trying to speed up their drive thru service. One method of speeding up service is to route calls to call centers - instead of simply receiving them inside the restaurant over a speaker or radio - to increase accuracy. Companies have found this to be relatively effective, particularly in areas where their employees have limited English skills. The call centers enter the menu items onto a central computer, which transmits the order directly into the restaurant's computers. Another strategy is to replace the traditional written menu board with a photo illustrated or digital one, hoping that tempting food imagery will help customers choose their food faster. There are even computer programs that average how much food needs to be cooking at any given moment.

There was an interview conducted recently with a self proclaimed autotroph. In the context of plants, an autotroph is an organism that gets its energy from the sun--basically, a producer with respect to other organisms that eat the produce from the earth itself. However, in the context of humans, its a person that lives without eating food or drinking water. There have been records of fasts that last hundreds of days, but this particular women who was interviewed claimed she had not eaten or drank anything in the past four years.

She claimed her weight started out at about 90 kilos, which is now down to 74 kilos. Also, she says her lungs have adapted to getting water from the atmosphere. Besides brushing her teeth and taking showers, she gets no other water intake.

I can maybe (just maybe) believe the lack of food intake. But no water for four years? This has to be a hoax. Right?