It's another dinner option -- a meal that's home-cooked by you, with someone else buying the groceries, chopping the veggies, slicing the meat and cleaning up afterward.

You can serve Molasses Glazed Pork Medallions Monday night, Beefcake au Poivre on Tuesday night and Indira's Bombay Chicken with Rice on Wednesday, without messing up your own kitchen.

Welcome to My Girlfriend's Kitchen and My Secret Chef, two local businesses that help fill the gap between meals from scratch and restaurant takeout.

Both work on the same principle: You choose from a list of entrees and sign up for a "cooking" session (really more of an "assembly" session) at a commercial-style kitchen. Each assembly station has the recipe posted with all the ingredients ready and waiting. It's just a matter of following the directions. In two hours' time, home cooks have 12 different dinners to take home and freeze, packaged and labeled with cooking instructions.

The price of these make-and-take meals may sound steep -- for 12 dinners with 4-6 servings each, My Secret Chef charges $178. My Girlfriend's Kitchen charges $189. (You can order meals already assembled for a higher fee.)

"But a lot of people tell me they're saving money because it's gotten them out of the rut of fast food or eating out," said Elizabeth Hatch, co-owner of My Secret Chef in Bountiful.

It also saves money because people can try different foods and flavors without wasting a lot of ingredients, said Marcia Hales, co- owner of My Girlfriend's Kitchen. "We try to bring ingredients that the average family would either not try or not buy, because they're unusual or overly expensive in the retail market, for example, artichoke hearts or roasted red peppers," she said. "A lot of people won't cook with curry because they aren't going to commit to a bottle of curry that will sit in their cabinet."

Hales and co-owner Jennifer Jackenthal opened My Girlfriend's Kitchen in 2003. Now there are franchises in Fort Union, Sugar House, Layton, South Dakota and Virginia. Another is opening this month in South Jordan. (Hatch said before opening My Secret Chef, she and her sister, Jennifer Cardinal, were customers of My Girlfriend's Kitchen and a similar company called Secret Dinners, which went out of business.)