I only cook when my kids are over. If they are not, I usually have frozen pizza and beer.
begbert2, you’re funny. You’re seriously imagining things are much harder than they are. Baked potato: there is no skill or judgment involved in putting a raw potato in the oven at 400F for 1 hour. That’s all there is to it. Hardboiled egg: boil water with egg in it for 10 minutes. Period. Maybe you don’t like hardboiled eggs. Hot dog: put hot dog in boiling water for 1 minute. Done. Hamburger patty - pan on stove, burner at medium, cook on 1 side for 5 min, turn over, 3 minutes more, and I always end up cutting inside to peek to see if it’s done.
Any 3rd grader can do these. Same with cooking a frozen tray of lasagne. You are building it up in your head to be something way more than it is.
And the idea that it’s not cost effective to cook for one: very wrong. But, yes, of course, if your time is more valuable to you, and you don’t mind spending the money, eat out. But the time thing: unless you’re getting fast food, you still waste time waiting for the meal to arrive. 5 minutes to cook a burger at home (cost of < $4 after bun, condiments, etc) vs an hour to eat out.
It is impossible to cook a potato for too long. All potatoes are the same. Watching water boil is interesting and keeps one’s attention. And there are so many assumptions and presumed knowns in your hamburger example that it’s not cost/effective for me to list them.
On eating out, I don’t eat out when I’m alone. It’s boring and takes forever. (Things are different when there are friends along, obviously.) Generally I subsist by warming up/thawing microwave food, which usually comes out middling okayish - and of course if I get distracted while waiting for it it doesn’t boil off or burn. Oh, and even I can open up a can of peaches. In either case, dinner is ready in four minutes or less. That’s just about nearly fast enough, almost.
But yeah, eating out is time consuming, expensive, and quite boring while alone. And even if it wasn’t, there’s a frikking pandemic on! Even if I was inclined to eat out, that would be big fat nope for the foreseeable future. There are no burgers, fries, and cold draft beers good enough to change that.
I respect people who don’t want to cook. But there is a whole class of recipes that are done by setting it up and walking off for a set amount of time. Let me introduce you to the instant pot.
And fwiw, I’m a pretty decent cook. And I agree that a lot of cooking is done by experience. I remove my cake from the oven when it smells done. I mean, I set a timer, and I test it with a toothpick. But really, I know it’s done when it smells right. And don’t get me started about the whole class of hot-sugar cooking (jelly, lemon curd, fudge, frosting, …) Yeah, if you have a high-end thermometer you can kinda sorta get away with relying in that. But really, the right way to do it is to stand there, patiently stirring forever, until suddenly it “looks right”. And the best way to learn that is to watch someone else cook it.
But that’s not how instant pot recipes work. A few of them start with sauteing stuff, which is traditional cooking. But not all. And the rest of it is “toss these measured ingredients into the pot, set it to the precise setting in this recipe. Walk away and do something else. It will beep when it’s done, but it will then keep your food warm for up to 24 hours until you turn the thing off.”
What kind of cooking are we talking about here? Because I do a lot of actual cooking, but I live in a household of 3. If I lived alone, I think I’d eat a lot of microwaved entrees, almonds, cheese, crackers, and chocolate milk. I don’t think I’d roast a chicken, or make a pot of lentils. In part because it’s a lot of work for the first meal, and in part because I don’t really want to eat lentils all week.
Putting aside the fact that that still sounds like work, I confess I’ve long been steering away from stuff that involves ‘measured ingredients’ for the same reason I no longer buy bread or milk - I’m concerned that by the time I get around to using the second half of that head of lettuce it’ll have turned technicolor.
Honestly, there are a lot of factors that have gone into my laughably poor diet, and only about half of them are the fact that I’m an impatient lazy-ass. There are various other factors that come into play when you’re feeding one and don’t feel that strategically planning out your comestibles usage is a good use of your time. (And cost-savings not being a big factor in my thinking changes things too.)
So while I appreciate your well-meaning tone, this is something of a bubble-under-the-wallpaper situation - there is an exception to every reason/excuse I might give, and often things that avoid one problem fall prey to a different problem. And any that avoid all the problems, well, I might already be eating it.
Er, unless it’s at a bar. (Gotta remember the thread topic.)
Bread freezes well. You can leave a sliced loaf in the freezer and just pull out as much as you want to eat today.
Yeah, milk is something you kinda need to use fresh. Someone once asked me how I store my gingers, because theirs always goes bad. I replied that I keep it on a shelf, next to the onions, but it doesn’t keep all that well, and if you don’t use it regularly you may as well just buy it for each time you plan to use it.
Have you tried peeling, then freezing it? Mince it first if you want, or just cleave some off the ginger hunk when you need it.
My Wife’s and my anniversary is next Sunday. 23 years. We usually go out for a nice dinner.
Now, the ski town we live close to has closed off main street to allow restaurants to set up social distance outdoor dinning. We will probably go have lunch, which will be the first time we’ve gone to a restaurant for sit down service since February (I’ve done take out a few times).
Mazel tov! Lift a toast to you both from me 
