Flavor to go

Somewhere between the thriftiness-but-toil of eating in and the expense-but-ease of eating out lies carryout. More and more, it won't surprise you to know, people are opting for the latter. According to a survey by the scary-sounding Institute of Food Technologists, in 2006 less than a third of Americans were cooking their evening meals from scratch, and their numbers were falling. Although 75 percent were indeed eating supper at home, nearly half those meals were fast food, delivered or takeout.

Up to the plate steps Fou d'Amour, serving not only comfort-food casseroles to take home and warm up but whole dinners, from salad to meat. You can eat said dinner inside the sweet little shop, on a real plate, seated on a pillow-strewn, coral-colored banquette, but most customers opt to take away.

Complete dinners are just on Wednesdays, though. Here's the drill: On Monday, receive an e-mail from co-owner Darcy Towns announcing the Wednesday dinner and the Tuesday through Saturday casseroles, a meat one and a meatless each week. Call or e-mail back to reserve yours.

When you come to pick it up, decide whether to add dessert in the form of cookies, cupcakes, scones, croissants, palmiers, brownies or raspberry bars baked that day on the premises.

The 800-square-foot place began as a bakery, but Towns says she got tired of the impersonality of simply shipping scones to wholesale customers. "I like to make food for people and see them pick it up," she said. Though Fou d'Amour means "madly in love," Towns points out that the French phrase sounds like "food amour" — food love.

So she dropped the wholesale and added the Wednesday night dinners and, just this year, the casseroles. Her e-mail list numbers more than 1,300.

But sugar-glazed scones are still among the most popular items sold by Towns and fellow owner Michele Makowski. They include lemon currant, chocolate toffee, white chocolate coconut, cranberry apricot (the most popular) and, in the fall, pumpkin pecan and orange walnut.

I happen to like my scones unglazed, in the traditional British fashion, but I have to admit there is something appealingly over-the-top about chicken salad on a frosted scone, one of the more popular lunch sandwiches. (I've heard that humans have actually eaten hamburgers where the bread is two doughnuts. ...)

The unglazed lemon scone is less sweet — and my favorite, followed by raspberry, which contains a house-made sauce of fresh fruit. The scones are thick and bready and come in happy shapes: flowers, hearts, stars, circles, butterflies.

> Email Jane Slaughter