DigsMagazine.com | nourish: COOKING FOR ONE

make your stomach happy

a home + living guide for the post-college, pre-parenthood, quasi-adult generation

05.22.2000

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cooking for
one kitchen tips for
the solo life | 1 2 3

Seems like more and more people I know these days are discovering the supreme bliss of living solo – no messy housemates to deal with, no bugging your delinquent roomie to pay up his/her share of the rent, nobody eating up all your pop-tarts before you’ve had a chance to get to them … in short, the perfect peace and freedom that true privacy brings. But there’s one aspect of living alone that can be definitely be difficult: cooking for one.

Anyone who’s ever lived alone knows the frustration of trying to scale recipes geared towards a family of four down to single serving portions, the inevitable waste that occurs when you can’t use up your fresh fruit, veggies, or bread before they begin to go bad, and the occasional (okay frequent) temptation to avoid cooking altogether because there just doesn’t seem any point in expending the energy to make a nice meal, when there’s no one around to appreciate your efforts besides yourself. The cookbooks, the grocery stores – all seem ignorant of the fact that not everyone who cooks is cooking for a hubby/wife and two kids. So what to do when you’re a single-serving-size cook living in a family-serving-size world?

A few suggestions for solutions to the most common problems, to keep the solo chef cooking frequently and happily …

problem #1: All the recipes in my cookbooks feed four, and it’s kind of a pain to scale back the measurements to single serving portions!
the solution: Make the full recipe, freezing surplus portions.
As long as you’re going to the effort of making a more involved dish, why not make the full portion? You’ll want to divide up the portions immediately, then freeze all but one (I stress immediately, because otherwise, you’ll probably end up eating much more than you should, at least from my experience. We’re so weak: if the food tastes good, we’ll keep eating, even when our bodies are clearly telling us we’re full.)

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