Quick and easy -- if not exactly haute cuisine -- convenience foods in those brightly colored packages started dazzling housewives during the 1940s. From TV dinners and Jiffy-Pop to Jell-O and Velveeta, these precursors to fast food were welcomed by too-busy-to-cook women as another indispensable mother's little helper that freed them from kitchen drudgery. Just Heat It 'n' Eat It surveys these fascinating concoctions that became staples of millions of American homes -- and remain so today -- along with the post-war, space-age culture that created them.