For a while, after my girlfriend, E, and I left Manhattan and moved to a house in New Orleans with an actual kitchen, I became interested in cooking. What a novelty! I used to order from the pasta place across the street rather than boil my own, and here I was chopping garlic and everything.

Then I got over it. The store? Garlic chopping? Hassle and tedium. The refrigerator started going empty, as E and I debated how to proceed. Although there was no pasta place across the street, we could have searched for other options, but what we really wanted was someone to show up with bags of food and do all the work for us. This, it turns out, is doable -- with a personal chef.

Using two Websites, hirea-chef.com and personalchefs-network.com, I found two contenders in New Orleans. I had no idea how it would work, but the basic deal is this: The chef does not move into the servants' quarters and remain on call to whip up a salmon mousse whenever you get the craving. Instead he comes over for a single daylong binge of cooking, preparing a week's worth of meals and packing up the fridge and freezer to the gills. It's sort of like outsourcing the dinner hour.

First up was Kevin Saragusa, a quiet guy with a big, round face. Kevin came over on Monday, a day before cooking, to help us choose the menu. He was armed with several booklets of meal options from the U.S. Personal Chef Association, of which he is a member. Kevin is basically a guy who loved to cook, got a job at a local restaurant, took some classes on the way to getting USPCA-certified, and hung out his shingle a year ago; he is extremely eager to please. We liked that. When he came back the next day, he wore not only a white chef's coat but a toque, or chef's hat, as well. We loved that.

After busting his hump for six hours, Kevin left us mountains of food. That night we had salmon. The next night we had Indian-style lamb with peas (there was enough for guests), then Moroccan lemon chicken. With some trepidation we thawed out a frozen lasagna -- it rocked! With even greater trepidation, we realized we were close to having eaten through all of Kevin's food.

Happily, Frank Keller showed up to save us. We'd gone through a similar "interview" process with him (no mushrooms, Frank, okay?), and again we turned over our kitchen for the day. Frank, whose clients include one of the New Orleans Saints, did not wear a toque, which was a letdown, but he had a lot of equipment. At one point I wandered in and found a cooked chicken splayed in a pan with two little fans blowing air on it. I didn't ask any questions. Frank also had a vacuum-packing device, which he used to seal up the pork tenderloin in apple-cranberry-onion sauce. He charged us about $450, groceries included, for meals for two weeks, though we helped inflate that by demanding some extras -- like a phenomenal peach cobbler. Kevin, charging startup prices to get established, cost about $200 for a week's worth of food.

The interesting thing is that the services are like an assembly-line version of luxury. You don't have some Jeeves-like minion you can boss around, and we had to spend ten minutes or so getting each meal reheated and onto the table. On the other hand, we weren't looking forward to doing our own hunting and gathering again, especially as we polished off Frank's succotash and wolfed down the last of his cobbler. It's amazing how quickly an indulgence becomes a necessity. Now, where's the grocery store again?