If you live alone, have you solved the problem of cooking for one?

Cook a lot on Saturday/Sunday and there’s something for dinner most nights.

Salads are great, especially this time of year, and not too much trouble.

I don’t live alone, but if I did cooking would be almost non-existant.

Baked potato with salsa, scrambled eggs with salsa, salsa and raw veggies.

Salad with a hard-boiled egg, or ½ can salmon or tuna. I hard-boil 4 eggs at a time and buy organic mesclun in vast quantities at the farmer’s market.

Corn (microwaved with no butter or salt), fresh tomatoes with sliced mozzarella, basil and a light vinaigrette.

Spaghetti squash or whole-wheat pasta with a high-end organic pasta sauce (with mushrooms, peppers, basil,) and home-grated pecorini/parmesan cheese.

Cook a pot of brown rice or barley and then add various things each day such as:

Pistachios and dried cranberries
Thinly sliced zucchini, smal florets broccoli or cauliflower, diced tomatoes, carrots,

Watermelon, canteloupe, sliced peaches, nectarines, all the summer berries.

In the winter I buy lots of home-made vegetarian soups at our farmers’ market.

I go on cooking binges and then eat leftovers until they run out or get manky.

I cook for the whole week on Saturday or Sunday. Then portion it out and either refrigerate or freeze until ready to use. Usually paired with some fresh fruit or salad.

I usually plan the weeks menu around what ever meat is on sale.

This blogger did great with one chicken and $25.86.

@WestRiverrat: The blogger was clever and funny, but his chicken weighed 7 lbs. I call that a really big bird (or maybe a small turkey).

What can I say @gailcalled, size does matter sometimes.

I’d count my blessings I didn’t have to cook for 4 every night!

@Cruiser I would rather cook for 4 than for one. Most recipes are sized to feed 4–6.

If I lived alone, I would probably cook only ⅓ the time. I would order out a lot.
Hey, Bob Evans makes a lot of their food from scratch and you can get a large portion enough for two nights if you don’t eat a lot. Their menu has a lot of typical homemade meals.

@Cruiser Not only are recipes formulated for 4–6, but so are food products. You can’t buy the 5 leaves of lettuce you need for your salad, only the entire head. You can buy milk by the pint, but it’s crazy expensive, and often cheaper in every way to just buy the quart or half gallon. A lot of food goes to waste. Once you start cooking for 3 or more, the cost of food per person goes down quite a bit.

I used to make a lot of stews and freeze leftovers in 1-cup plastic food storage containers. Stews are delicious! And they freeze better than just about anything. Just put the frozen stuff in the refrigerator the night before you want it for dinner. Also, you can boil some egg noodles (or make homemade spaetzle) to make a hearty meal.

If you want to get really fancy you can make single-serving shepherd’s pies by putting some stew at the bottom of soufle dishes and topping them with mashed potatoes. Then wrap them in plastic and foil and freeze them; just bake them in the oven straight out of the freezer.

Empanadas or single-serving pot pies are even fancier but of course can be quite tricky. One of my favorite things evar are pork tinga empanadas; they freeze well and defrost and bake easy. But the recipe is ridiculously complicated.

@Qingu Last month I made three batches of handpies. Two with a chicken pot pit filling and one with spinach and feta. I frickin’ love a dinner that fits in my hand.

I house sit a lot, so I’ve learned to cook bigger portions of things that can be frozen, like chili and soup, and muffins, lasagna and enchiladas. Get yourself some single serving sized tupperware and freezer safe zip lock bags. Soup and chili is good, because you can freeze it flat (instead of in a big blob) and just stack it. It takes up a lot less space and then thaws out faster, when it’s flat.

I also like salads so I’ll get one of those bags of baby greens and a few other veggies and just kind of mix it up every day for a week.

If you’re like me (but I suspect that you aren’t or you wouldn’t be asking this question LOL) I love to make a normal sized batch of something and then share it with my neighbors. One in partiuclar who doesn’t cook, absolutely loves everything I make and she kind of thinks I’m some kind of genius gourmet cook. I’m not by any stretch of the imagination, but she has been thrilled to sample my cold noodle salad, my hummus, my 3 bean chili and my raw kale salad with root vegetables.

I live with my folks, so I’ll often make up some type of salad, like potato salad, or curried egg salad, or pasta salad, and leave some for the folks and take some with me.

I’ve found out that there are plenty of prepared foods that freeze pretty well, like pasta sauce and baked beans, to name a couple of my staples.

And I’ve found out that Boboli now makes individual sized pizza crusts, that come in 2 packs. So I’ll make one single sized pizza, usually in the toaster oven, and then I’ll freeze the other one for later use. I also freeze tortillas and bread so I always have some on hand. You can pull them out the night before and defrost them, or else you can just pop them in the microwave or heat them in a skillet for grilled cheese, or quesadillas.

I found out that most hard cheeses, like jack and cheddar, can be purcheased in bulk, like at Costco or other warehouse stores, for a lot less money, then it can be cut up into smaller portions, wrapped in plastic wrap or small ziplocks and then put into a bigger freezer ziplock bag. You’ll have cheese for a year! Just pull out one of the small sized portions and stick it in the fridge over night so it will thaw out.

We also buy nuts (especially almonds, pecans and walnuts) in bulk and keep them in freezer ziplocks in the freezer. You don’t even need to “thaw” them out. The oil in the nuts keeps them from actually freezing but it keeps them from going rancid, which can happen if you keep too many nuts in the pantry for mor than about a month.

Turns out that you can also freeze butter and tub margarine (we use one called Smart Balance that has no trans fats, plus it has cholesterol lowering plant sterols).

If you don’t already have a toaster oven, these things are great for making small pizzas, or toasted sandwiches and quesadillas so that you don’t have to heat up your big oven or your whole house, if you’re just making a meal for one.

Learn to think ahead of time, before you shop. If you want some mushrooms on your pizza, think of other things that you can fix in a 5 day span, where you can use mushrooms in other dishes (spaghetti sauce, omelet, mixed into ground beef for a sloppy joe, grilled shrooms on the barbecue, sauteed shrooms as a side dish with a piece of steak and a baked potato)

Turns out that steamed (in the microwave) small Yukon Gold potatoes, are really delicious. They taste pretty much like baked taters, but you don’t have to turn on your oven and wait an hour for them to cook. More like less than 2 minutes in a bowl with a lid over it, or even a plate over the bowl. Then add a little bit of sour cream, or non fat plain yogurt and some chives, or you can use some butter and a sprinkle of lemon pepper, or some Parmesan cheese, or some salsa, or even some of that chili that you froze and thawed out, knowing full well that you were going to fix potatoes!

When you buy veggies, if you don’t think you can eat a whole bag of carrots before they go bad, buy them individually. Do that with beets, and Brussels sprouts and corn on the cob and celery, and tomatoes etc. With the veggies (except for the tomatoes, which are better at room temperature) wash and cut up the veggies right after you get home from the store, and then put them in ziplock bags in the fridge (don’t buy more than you can eat in a week, unless you plan to fix something out of them that you can freeze). That way, you can just grab a hand full of raw veggies to throw in your lunch or to put into your sautee pan, or to steam in the microwave for a nice side dish for dinner.

Of course, most grocery stores have some good single portion meals these days. But try to make sure that you find brands that are more healthy (meaning less sodium, less un-natural ingredients). Amy’s, which is a vegetarian brand, makes really good stuff! Whole Foods Market usually has a bunch of really tasty options, it can be pricey, but if you buy it when it’s on sale, get more than one of the kinds of things that you really like.

I love having breakfast for dinner (as well as for breakfast) so I always have multi-grain frozen waffles in my freezer, and I love cereal too. Add a fried or scrambled egg and voila! You’ve got dinner!

If you like sandwiches, that’s a single person’s bonanza. One day you hard cook 2 eggs and make egg salad, next day you have peanut butter and marmalade, next day you have sliced turkey and cheese, next day you have chicken salad or tuna salad (you can get those small cans of tuna and chicken for this purpose) or you can buy one of those already cooked rotissere chickens and make chicken salad one day, chicken enchiladas (some of which you can freeze) the next day, or you can add chicken to your soup or salad, and you can make chicken burritos. One item, several ways for one week.

And last, but not least, find someone special and invite them over to share a meal with you ; – P

@Kardamom : Wonderful answer!

Freezer plus microwave. I usually cook large amounts of mince, curry soup etc and freeze most of it. I then boil up fresh rice, potatoes, pasta as required and microwave the pre cooked meal to go with it. It is cheap, it is healthy and it requires minimal effort.

@Aethelflaed I agree with you that the potential cost per meal may be higher but there are was around that. I don’t drink milk but you can freeze the excess milk for later use. And you can buy salads in a bag which are perfect for a couple decent salads with 0 waste. Might cost more but you are not tossing out spoiled lettuce.

My point is the cooking aspect. You can either cook 5 servings and freeze the leftovers or cook a single meal and for me I can cook almost all my meals in one pan and that is HUGE for cleanup instead of the 3–4 pans it might take for a dinner for 4. Single meals are faster and easier to cook. Bingo bango and chow time.