OK, I just became single. I’m so used to cooking for two or more, suddenly I’m cooking for one. I can make the things I made before, but it’s often not practical (roast for one, anyone?)
So my question is, if you live alone, what are your favourite single person recipes? What do you cook for yourself that just seems to work in terms of being quick, easy, with little in the way of wasteage.
I don’t need necessarily need entire recipes, just thought starters please!
Thanks y’all.
M
Not really a General Question, so let’s move it to our Cafe Society where most food questions belong.
samclem GQ moderator
I’m not single, but my kids are out of the house and my husband travels a lot for business. An easy ‘lone’ dinner I like is to bake a nice-sized potato, then break it open, add a bit of butter, some grated cheese, and some canned chili with beans. Quite good, really. You could do the same thing with broccoli & cheese sauce instead of chili, if you are a broccoli-friendly person (I’m not!)
I do my own ‘pizzas’ using pitas or bagels and veggie toppings. Two veggie-covered pitas are plenty filling. I do toppings for pasta; usually made of onions, peppers, mushrooms, and/or tomatoes sauteed in some olive oil - very very tasty. I make veggie frittatas. I make chili and nachos. When I ate meat, I’d broil or bake something in my toaster oven. You can make low-fat burgers from low-fat beef or ground chicken or turkey. Buy the buns and freeze the ones you don’t use.
And quite often I’ll have something like a baked potato, a toasted tuna sandwich, and a salad. It’s easy and very tasty.
Also check your store’s meat department (if you eat meat) for single-serving sizes; some places cater to the single shopper.
You don’t have to shy away from larger meals, though. You can do things like soups and stews and eat them over several days or even freeze some to have another time. My mom used to buy a filet roast and make it - they’re tiny little things and taste great. You can buy chicken parts instead of a whole chicken. And most recipes can be cut down; haul out your calculator if you’re bad at math and divide the ingredients.
I generally hate leftovers (I’m pretty picky) but roast is one of the few things that I enjoy eating the next day. Then, the day after that, when the potatoes and carrots, the rice and the greens are gone, I get roast beef sandwiches. Mmm mmm good.
I tend to have certain things in the house at all times, like lunch meat and several cheeses. If you alternate the method and the bread, you can get a lot of good stuff out of it. One day, have a cold-cut sub. Then the next, pile up some pastrami or whatever on Texas toast and slap it on the griddle. Then maybe a regular sandwich with classic Mrs. Baird’s (or Wonder, depending on where you are) white bread.
The other thing I like about keeping a variety of lunch meat is that you can make a really good chef’s salad. Now that the weather is heating up, I like to make a sort of Italian style salad as a meal in the evening. Iceberg and Romaine lettuce, a couple of different varieties of lunch meat, torn up, green and black olives, couple of cheeses (usually one wet and one dry) and (for me personally) some of those little salad shrimp - I get mine cooked and ready to go in a bag for a very reasonable price.
The old standby of Ramen noodles can be dressed up - I make a pretty good caserole out of it, with cream of chicken, mushroom, whatever soup. I actually made myself a little Dorito’s caserole today (anytime I do this, I use those small disposable aluminum pans, sort of what you’d make a little bundt cake in.)
Depending on what level of coronary health you desire, you can always make individual Frito pies in the oven. If that’s a little much, a homemade chicken pot pie is easy, and since they sell ready-made pie crusts in the frozen section, you can just use what you need and re-freeze the rest. Can of chicken breast and a can of Veg-All, stuck in the oven till golden is VERY good.
If you want to broil a steak, get the 2 pack, and separate them before freezing. One goes to the freezer, one gets cooked. Nuke a potato until it’s done, then scrape out the meat. Add a little cheese, sour cream, and milk to the meat, stir it up really well, then place the mix back in the potato skin and stick it in the oven while your steak finishes and you’ve got a pretty quick and easy twice-baked potato. Add a slice of Texas toast and that’s a meal for one.
I also like to make a tomato and meat sauce, then divide it into single-servings and freeze them. When I want some good s’ketti, I just drop the sealed bag into the boiling pasta water to thaw it, and it’s ready to go when the pasta is.
Dunno if your tastes are similar to mine, but there’s my life.
ETA: to add to what was said above about pizzas - I get the canned biscuits and make little mini-pizzas out of them. You can scale up or down the volume to meet your needs on any particular night.
Perdue makes these ‘perfect portion’ chicken breasts. The flavouring isn’t much to speak of but the breasts are individually sealed. So they keep in your fridge much longer. For a single person, food spoilage can be a big problem.
I’ve actually thought about a Food Network show called ‘Cooking, (sigh) for One’. Just because you eat standing over the sink crying, doesn’t mean it can’t taste good.
Cooking for one is a great oportunity to cook those insanely complicated dishes. I used to do home-made raviolli all the time. When it is just for one, they take no time at all (using won-ton wrappers from the supermarket). Go for the super labour-intensive dishes. Anything is a snap when you don’t have to do it four times over.
Pasta with some fried bacon and mushroom. Plus a salad consisting of whatever’s there (lettuce, cucumber, capsicum). Quick and easy.
What I’m having tonight - Some whitefish (cod in this case), rub with olive oil and salt and pepper, place on a sheet of foil. Add any veggies you like (slivered onions, sliced green olives, artichoke hearts, some spinach leaves, grape tomato halves) and seal it up. Bake at 400F for 10-12 minutes.
Slice open the foil and slide the whole thing onto a plate. Low fat and delicious. Just don’t let the steam burn you when opening the foil. 10 minutes prep time and 10 minutes cooking time.
The variation on this theme that I wanted to post is Italian sausage, mushrooms, pasta and a bit of fresh spinach. You can throw in a little tomato if you want. And you’ll doll that up with olive oil, garlic, and black pepper.
Sprinkle with parmesan cheese if you so desire. So fucking awesome!
Now that you’ve got a Trader Joe’s just down the road in Newport News, you ought to check out some of their frozen dinner bowls. I especially recommend the Massaman Chicken and the Lemongrass Chicken.
That won’t help the OP, since there’s no TJ’s Down Under, but no reason for you not to benefit. 
Egg salad sandwiches! That’s what I’ve been having twice a week since I discovered how tasty they are.
I tend to do pasta with red or pesto sauces, rice with stir-fried veg, rice and beans with smoked or spicy sausage, and big-ass salads with either a bit of meat or cheese on them. I’ve got a bunch of cook books, and am also gradually going through them and trying stuff out. Like Sapo said, it’s a good chance to try out complicated dishes, assuming one is not exhausted from the travails of the day. If that’s the case, what the hell: I just throw some Maruchan Yakisoba in the microwave.
Cook up a lot of rice. It has so many uses (in my kitchen, anyway).
Breakfast: Fry the cooked rice in butter until crispy but not burned. In a separate pan scramble 2 eggs and top with Bacos chips. Add salt, pepper, ketchup, and enjoy.
Lunch: Fry the cooked rice in butter until crispy but not burned. (Notice a pattern?) Microwave an equal amount of Bush’s veggie baked beans, pour onto crispy rice, and chow down.
Dinner: Lentil beans and the above-mentioned rice with lots of salt.
Later: Beer & pizza.
Paradise, man.
I get a 2-person packet of fresh pasta, a can of tuna in water, and a can of Italian-style tomatoes. Cook the pasta (only takes a few minutes), pour the tuna and tomatoes into the saucepan and mash them up with the hot pasta, season to taste (I put chili paste in) and you’re done. Does two meals.
My favorite meal to make is taco salad and it only takes 5 minutes to make; 3 minutes to brown the meat, then mix in the seasoning, add cheese and lettuce, doritos and whatever else you want to mix in.
I only cook things that take less time to prepare than to eat, when it’s for myself anyway.
Grilled Cheese Sandwiches, especially on the George Foreman Grill. I toast the bread in the toaster while I throw some lunchmeat or chicken on the grill. When the toast pops, I assemble the sandwich with cheese, bread, and meat and throw it back on the grill to melt together. Yum. No dishes if you eat it out of a paper napkin.
I’m not single, but my husband works nights and we don’t have many meals at home.
Omelets, or scrambled eggs if you’re clumsy with the spatula like me. Keep some grated cheese in a bag on hand (it keeps forever) and add whatever else sounds good.
I’ve been making grilled cheese sandwiches with English Muffin bread – it gets toastier than regular bread.
Roast a chicken (or buy a roasted chicken). Use it for sandwiches, salads, pasta dishes, and stir-frys.
In the summer, bread salad. A hearty sourdough bread, some chopped tomatoes from the garden, and Italian dressing, or just olive oil. Maybe some chopped onions and olives too.
About once every 2 weeks I make a pot of chili. That’s one meal per day for a week or so.
Another staple is chicken quesadillas. I’ll buy some sliced roasted chicken from a deli, and put that and shredded cheese in a large (burrito size) tortilla folded over (you could use 2 tortillas, but that’s more room for melted cheese to ooze out). Heat it up on a large flat pan until the cheese is melted and the the tortilla is browned. Use whatever salsa you prefer.
You can still cook a roast, or another hunk of meat. Hungry Jack instant mashed potatoes are the closest you’ll find to real mashed potatoes, and you can make 1 (2, technically, according to their instructions) servings at a time. Add about half a can of the vegetable of your choice, and it’s almost like Sunday dinner.
You can make a batch of spaghetti sauce, and then just boil a single serving of spaghetti noodles when you need it.
Tuna salad sandwiches is another staple of mine.
Sometimes my mommy will bring over leftovers, but that doesn’t help you much.
I’ll be watching this thread for better ideas than mine.
I’ve got to question you about this. The smallest packs of ground beef that I can find in grocery stores are 1 - 1.5 lbs, and that’s enough to make a weeks worth of chili. Do you know where to buy ground beef in single size portions, or do you buy large amounts and repackage them when you get home? Please explain how you can brown a single-serving of ground beef in 3 minutes. (It takes me a lot longer than that, but again, I’m doing 1+ lbs at a time, and I’m really anal about getting all of the fat out.)
Now that I think about it, I used to sometimes cook a single-serving package of fish that was purchased shrink-wrapped in a bag with cooking instructions (in oven with lemon juice, IIRC). I never bought fresh fish because I didn’t know how to cook it. Any advice on how to cook fresh fish would be appreciated.