Few minutes needed to shop for and prepare four tasty dinners

Once upon a time, most homemakers dutifully made long grocery lists and even longer trips to the supermarket, not stopping until their shopping carts bulged with every morsel of food they'd need for the upcoming week.

Not so today, when a new style of grocery shopping has emerged for many. I call it serial shopping, and it consists of quick trips to the supermarket to pick up just enough ingredients for that night's dinner.

Ron Kane, manager of Homeland supermarket in Wichita, Kan., says as many as half of his customers make multiple visits during the week.

Supermarkets cater to this clientele, putting rotisserie chickens, deli items and other foods that require little or no preparation near the entrance where they can be snatched up in a hurry.

As one of the worst offenders (I average about six trips weekly), I have a few ideas about what's fueling this trend.

For many individuals and families, weeknights are packed with more activities than ever. Will there be one, two or five for dinner? Will we eat at 5, 6 or 9?

Will we cook, eat out or take out? Flexibility rules.

Then there's that segment of the population that just can't decide what to cook and eat until inspiration hits.

For us, serial shopping is a little like the daily trips to the village market, baker or fish stall so romanticized by food writers (although not quite as quaint).

Of course, by any rational assessment you can save time and money by getting all your shopping done once a week. But for all those serial shoppers out there, or anybody who needs to put together a meal in a pinch, we offer these recipes.

They are taken or adapted from a new cookbook by Aviva Goldfarb called "The Six O'Clock Scramble" (St. Martin's Griffin, $17.95).