Nothing says good home cooking like packaged foods.

Or so goes the message from the latest batch of cookbooks aiming to satisfy Americans' desire to produce more and better meals by spending less and less time in the kitchen.

Not that turning to cans and boxes is revolutionary. It's really more a case of going around and coming around.

When processed foods became the rage by the 1950s, fashionable cooking was all about doing less. The inevitable backlash to those processed food years now seems to be fading.

It started with the 30-minute and five-ingredient crazes, which produced streams of cookbooks that quietly relied on the magic of packaged foods to transform a handful of ingredients into dinner.

The latest incarnation of the trend is a bit more brazen, not just turning to processed foods, but bragging about it.

Thus we have "Fast Fixes With Mixes" from the editors of Taste of Home magazine and Nancy Silverton's forthcoming "A Twist of the Wrist," a not-so-subtle play on the opening of jars and cans.

Since those represent the extremes, we'll start with those.

Taste of Home, a hugely popular brand of folksy magazines and cookbooks that publish readers' recipes, is a natural for this category. Its recipes generally skew to the cream-of-mushroom-soup-casserole crowd.

And truth be told, people who read Cook's Illustrated or Gourmet magazines are likely to roll their eyes at recipes such as the ham and macaroni salad, which combines a box of macaroni and cheese with cubed ham and mayonnaise.

Which is why "Fast Fixes With Mixes" (Reader's Digest, 2006, $15.95) isn't the book to turn to for your next dinner party, no matter how pressed for time you are. But for easy weeknight comfort food, it's worth at least a look.

The recipe for hearty hamburger casserole is about as un-Gourmet as it gets. Combine a pound of ground beef with stuffing mix, a can of vegetable soup and cheese, then bake. This is not pretty food, but it was embarrassingly tasty.

At the other end is Silverton's "A Twist of the Wrist" (Knopf, March 2007, $29.95), which tries to cement its "real cooking" street cred with a blurb for the author's previous book by artisanal-food queen Alice Waters.

The press release says Silverton has crafted 137 quick and easy recipes "using the best and most delicious ingredients available in cans and jars." Stop laughing.

Thanks to the natural-foods revolution, it is possible to get phenomenal prepared products that combine ease with whatever natural, organic, artisanal or gourmet philosophy guides your food choices.

This is a world away from cans of soup. And so Silverton can give us seared beef filet with white beans, bitter greens and black-olive tapenade (the beans and tapenade are the packaged items).

Or lamb chops with ratatouille, in which the ratatouille is made almost entirely from canned and jarred goods, including onions, tomatoes and eggplant. This is shortcut cooking for people who still love and want to cook.

Somewhere between Silverton and Taste of Home is "Homemade in Half the Time" (Rodale, 2006, $19.95), which was edited by Shea Waggoner. She blends Silverton's philosophy with a Taste of Home aesthetic.

Hence, she creates peanut butter, banana and raisin waffle sandwiches fashioned from frozen whole-grain waffles, and white clam pizzas with parmesan cheese that rely on refrigerated pizza dough, canned clams and jarred garlic.

It's not a bad approach, and Waggoner provides helpful chapters on make-ahead meals, recipes for slow cookers and grilling. She also provides somewhat humorously exacting time estimates (the baked brie takes 32 minutes).

Here's a recipe from Taste of Home's "Fast Fixes With Mixes," (Reader's Digest, 2006, $15.95).

HEARTY HAMBURGER CASSEROLE