So you love dinner parties. But there's a part of you that stifles sighs at the thought of the hours of work in the kitchen that come along with them - from dicing the onions to cleaning up cutting boards and washing mixing bowls. Enter a relatively new concept in dinner preparation - kind of like a culinary assembly line - that will let you show your friends how much you love them without resorting to a caterer or finding yourself still in the kitchen after midnight. Melanie Thomas, a 58-year-old project manager, found Simply Dinners on the northwest corner of Broadway and Pantano Road shortly after it opened in the spring. There, and at Dream Dinners on the Northwest Side, customers can choose from more than a dozen menu items, head to work stations and follow recipes to assemble the dishes in minutes, using pre-prepped ingredients. Staff does the cleanup. Now, Thomas can cook. But she was so impressed with Simply Dinners' stuffed chicken breasts that when she went to her daughter's house in Phoenix for a dinner party for eight, she made up a batch. It's not so easy preparing food away from home in someone else's kitchen, but in this case, she said, all she had to do was pop the dinners in the oven. She hasn't, technically, cooked a meal for guests since finding the new service. "I work. I work a lot, so it just allows you to divvy up your day better. You can keep your hair appointment or do the errands you have to run." Simply Dinners' owner Maureen Yueh said she's tested her recipes out on her own dinner parties. "It allows people to focus on other parts of the dinner. They can put more energy into appetizers or fancy drinks or make a special dessert. Plus, it relieves the burden of coming up with the main dish." For formal parties, the stuffed chicken breasts are a hit, she said. This month, for example, the breasts are filled with artichokes and goat cheese and doused in a light lemony sauce. For informal parties, casseroles are more popular options. A dinner for 20 at Simply Dinners, with a meal for four costing $20, runs about $100. It's a little cheaper for casseroles because a meal can be stretched to serve six. ● Contact reporter Rhonda Bodfield Bloom at rbloom@azstarnet.com or at 807-8031.