Cooking daily for one

End of story

Back in the day, some married women prided themselves on maintaining a tiny waist and dust-free furniture while continuing to be All Things To All People. Maybe some still do. When I was married, I prided myself on feeding my family of four on $450 a month. I was the sole breadwinner and also the one who planned and prepared nearly all the meals for two parents and two kids. I would design a menu for an entire month, both breakfasts and dinners, make a list of the ingredients for those meals, and head to the stores the first Saturday after payday to load up. I didn’t buy anything extra - no chips, no juice, no snack cakes. 

Each night after work I’d drag myself home, sometimes after picking up kids from various events, and cook dinner. Once the kitchen was clean again, I’d check my menu and pull out the ingredients for the next night. If I planned on a crock pot meal, I’d set the measuring cups and utensils and all the cans of whatever next to the crock pot, ready to assemble in the morning before school. If something large like a roast needed defrosting, I’d better be on the freaking ball.

On Sunday afternoons I cooked a full set of breakfasts for everyone for the coming week: these rotated between breakfast burritos,  sausage-egg-cheese biscuits, and pancakes. They’d be frozen in stacks for easy retrieval and nuking. 

Breakfast burrito stack ready for the freezer. If you’re going to try this, put slips of plastic wrap between the layers or they will glue themselves together.

I left my marriage in 2021. My two children were mostly out of the house and I was left to my own devices…to cook for a single. My impressive planning and execution skills to care for four, as it turned out, were insufficient to care for one. Part of it was me, needing to adjust. Part of it, though, was the recipes.

You don’t think twice about all those recipes in cookbooks or online that say “feeds the whole family!” until you have to divide one of them in half or worse, into quarters! What to do with that half a desiccated onion rolling around in your crisper drawer for a week,¹ or the remainder of the tomato paste in that tiny can on your refrigerator shelf? It dries up and cracks after a few days, did you know that?² Gross. And forget about salads. Half head of lettuce is not your friend once you’ve used the rest for your one-person apple walnut salad.³

Can I throw these extras away? No, I cannot. I am the granddaughter of a Depression-era single mother who would choose to spend hours making ice cream rather than buy a half gallon of Breyer’s. I do not throw food out unless it is inedible, and if it is, it’s my fault that it got that way. Did I mention she was also a Baptist?

Facebook post from 2020. I’ve been struggling with this for some time but also apparently a little prideful of my dedication to the cause.

I know what you’re thinking: make the whole batch and have leftovers! Eat or freeze them and save yourself work later on! I must share at this time that I am not a leftovers person beyond one day: it’s a hard rule. You’ll know why if you’ve ever looked carefully at the watery residue in the bottom of the potatoes au gratin pan. And, I never eat stuff I’ve frozen. Too much freezer burn in a past life. So don’t go telling me to do that because believe me, I know all about it. And I won’t do it. 

On top of all this, because of my lengthy tenure as a from-scratch cook (also see granddaughter etc., above), I am not about to buy a bunch of pre-made or processed stuff. Expensive. Not to mention there is ample evidence out there about the horrific effects of processed food on our bodies. Go ahead and scare yourself with your favorite search engine, but don’t email me in the middle of the night when you’re clutching your covers in horror and considering driving yourself to the ER just in case.

So, I thought I’d write my own cookbook. I’d create a publication for people like me, people who need guidance on dividing recipes and what to do with those weird partial ingredient situations. I thought I might do photo shoots of my meals, started making notations on my existing recipes, and considered how, in my book, I could invent a  cross referencing system: the user could match half-cans of coconut milk with other recipes requiring half-cans of coconut milk and thereby avoid the remnant fridging for a month. I like my gadgets for sure and I decided to invest in half-size versions of everything: crockpot, air fryer, instant pot. I’d call my cookbook Cooking Daily for One, End of Story. I had dreams.

I posted about this on my favorite social media site. I was very excited about my new project, and several (mostly also single) people commented that they would totally buy my book. Problem-solving and money-making in one enterprise, my favorite! 

Here is the phenomenal cookbook that destroyed my dreams of becoming a cookbook author.

Then one day, I received a wonderful, unexpected gift in the mail from a wise friend. This cookbook, called Cooking for One, literally says on the inside,

Cooking for one isn’t without its challenges, from avoiding a fridge full of half-used ingredients to ending up with leftovers that become boring after the third reheat. And scaling down recipes yourself often involves awkward and complicated math. 

It’s like someone harvested my thoughts right out of my head and put them in print before I even had a chance to think them. Or like maybe my ideas weren’t that original to begin with, although I don’t know who reheats leftovers THREE TIMES. They even included a cross-referencing section on how to use up partial ingredients and information on how to store others (coconut milk is in there!).

I will say that my title options were somewhat more interesting than Cooking for One. Aside from my better primary title, I wrote some some subtitle options.

• Subtitle possibility: “I spent two decades cooking from scratch every day for a whole family but now it’s just me and I can’t figure out what to do about the other 8 oz of condensed cream of mushroom soup in my fridge.”

• Other subtitle possibility: “How to cook for one when your tolerance for leftovers is 24 hours.”

• Other subtitle possibility: “Dining solo after your Ubereats budget is depleted.”

• Other subtitle possibility: “Which kitchen gadgets come in single size options and how to employ them.”

So that’s it, that’s the end of my story. Buy the cookbook if you need it - I’ve tried three or four recipes and they are pretty damn good. I didn’t write my own but I am still making notations because though Cooking for One is solid, it doesn't include some of my favorites including taco soup or the beef stroganoff I've come to love. I do recommend small-size gadgets. Except for the instant pot,⁴ you just put less of whatever in it.

And I will say too, if you haven’t learned to cook much in your lifetime, it is never too late to start! Pick a few things you like to eat whether it's chickpeas or queso or a slab of salmon, and find a recipe to try. Whatever you do, don't buy pre-made food if you can avoid it. My grandmother would be very disappointed in you.

If you have been reading the footnotes, you’ll know I’ve identified several solutions to my own problems that you can also benefit from. I was more interested in airing the frustrations here, but do you have additional solutions? That’s what the comments section is for. Have at it!

1. Don’t be so lazy, Anna! Chop the rest up and throw it in the freezer for the next time you have to cook with onion. It’s mushy but retains flavor.

2. I know about the tubes of tomato paste and I buy them now. Problem solved.

3. Solution here: salad in a jar.

4. Here’s a helpful resource for how to manage instant pot scale-downs.