5 Secrets to cooking for one

Ohh, a Sunday breakfast of French toast!

Cooking for one person is harsh. It requires zip and a ton of imagination to make the process remotely sparkly. In my perennial quest to avoid severe hunger pangs at 5 p.m. and a complete lack of ideas, I have identified five main methods of figuring out what’s for dinner.

# 1, Inspiration

Waiting for divine inspiration to reveal what to cook for dinner is unreliable. Often that bolt of lightning just doesn’t come. However, it’s successful often enough that I keep hoping I can make the magic happen more often. On a fine day, I open my eyes and know what I’m cooking for supper. Yay! It comes in a flash: quinoa salad with balsamic roasted garlic dressing, plus shrimp, scallions, radishes, and possibly a couple of other vegetables unearthed from my crisper drawer.

Without a doubt, this method of getting hit by cooking lightning is the most fun.

# 2, Fridge clean

Fridge cleaning is, of course, a much more reliable method of meal planning. What needs to be used up? My dear friend down the road described his method. Hmm, the sour cream’s got a spot of mould. Quick, scrape it off. Throw what’s left into a sauce and invite the neighbours for dinner. I laughed and thought, this person is a kindred spirit.

In my experience, when it comes to fridges, vegetables lurk. They hide from me: I think I have nothing to cook, but the truth of the matter is, I can’t find what I have.

I can hear my daughter say, Mom, that is such a first world problem. Which is true. And I apologize to the lonely white turnip meant for roasting that hasn’t happened.  Maybe I could rescue it and that bit of zucchini from last week, and see what would like to join them on the barbecue. Toss them with a bit of marinade, smarten them up.

And look, here’s pico de gallo sauce that really needs to be used up, made in a fit of culinary madness several days ago.

Sometimes this method of pulling together a meal works extremely well. Other times it’s, Meh.

The New Yorker

#3, Tried and true, a.k.a. boring oldies

These are the meals that my imagination defaults to, suppers I’ve cooked so many times that I’m bored stiff, like a nice homemade spaghetti sauce. Ahh, run and hide!

How about mac and cheese? Maybe, if I use a box of Annie’s gluten-free and add extra cheese.

What about organic sausages and a baked potato? I could handle one sausage and freeze the rest.

Pizza? Some other night.

Eggs?

If I’m to avoid eating toast for supper, something has to be done fast. I’m hungry and everything I can think of sounds not nice.

The New Yorker

#4, Try a new recipe

Once upon a time, I had three shelves of cookbooks. I’m now down to one shelf, which I might as well not have bothered with, as if I want to find a new recipe, I’ll just google “best recipe for chicken saag.” Or somesuch. If I leave meal prep until the last minute, using a recipe I haven’t tried before can be a problem. If I don’t have all the ingredients, the likelihood I’ll go shopping at 5 p.m. is around the same probability that the Big One, the earthquake all coastal BCers dread, will happen in the next hour.

Ocean spray

#5, Cook for a cast of thousands

Of course, I’m exaggerating, but when I made a batch of borsch a couple of months ago, according to a recipe I’ve been happy with for years, I looked at the amount of my finished product in horror. How

was it possible I hadn’t remembered what a vast quantity it made? No one I knew was sick or had an operation and needed to be helped out with generous quantity of homemade soup. Well then.

Slowly, one and a quarter cup at a time, I froze the borscht in an assortment of containers. Once the soup was solid, I popped them out like oversized ice cubes and wrapped them in parchment paper. Four of these blocks fill a Ziploc bag. One and a quarter cups is a perfect serving size.

By my calculations, I had enough borsch to last for the next half-century.  Fortunately, I also had chicken noodle soup, French Canadian pea soup and a couple of others so I could vary my lunch menu.

French onion soup for supper—still have some in the freezer!

The freeze-ahead method works well with something the size of a quiche. Then I can get three dinners from it, freeze the rest and end up with a delightful bag of made-ahead dinners. This is the goal, to have a go-to bag of easy meals. Of course, fresh-made food really is best, but cooking for one? It doesn’t happen as often as it used to.

And now and then, if it’s 5 p.m., I’m starving, have no inspiration, nothing in the fridge wants to be made into dinner, I’ve exhausted my repertoire of boring oldies and eaten homemade soup four times this week, it’s frankly just easier to admit defeat. If there was a restaurant within walking distance, I’d be there. But I live on Pender Island. How about toast and tea for supper?

What’s your experience around cooking these days?

Why is cooking dessert so much easier?