Looking for single-serving cookbooks

So I’ve decided recently to try my hand at cooking, but one of the problems I always run into is the fact that cookbooks generally have recipies with 6-10 servings. I’m just cooking for myself, and don’t have a lot of room to store leftovers. Are there any good cookbooks with single-serving recipies? Is it realistic to reduce an 8-serving recipie by 7/8ths to make a single serving? Also, I’m a vegetarian, so that limits the types of food I can make. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Gestalt

A friend of mine is wild about Vegan Cooking for One.

The more specialized a cookbook is, the worse the recipes are. I find the best cookbooks for vegetarians arn’t the cookbooks that are specifically vegetarian. Those tend to lean towards absurd “healthy” substitutions (instead of olive oil, just add a dash of apple sauce!), bizarre watered down fake ethnic food and gross flavorless stuff that gives vegetarians a bad name (tofu-nut loaf with okra!).

I’m betting that the best cookbooks for one are probably also regular cookbooks with the recipes scaled down.

I can’t recommend How to Cook Everything enough for people learning how to cook. The cookbook is full of clear simple recipes for everything you could ever think of. The recipes are basic and don’t have huge lists of ingredients. But the best thing about the book is that the author teaches readers how to improvise, substitute, and develop their own recipes from the basics. It doesn’t just teach you how to cook a few things, it teaches you how to be a cook. There is enough here for vegetarians to stay busy for months and the recipes are simple enough that most of them could scale pretty easily.

The only vegetarian cookbook I’ve ever been happy with is Madhur Jaffrey’s World of the East Vegetarian. It deals with most of Asia and the Middle East with a very heavy Indian slant. The recipes are a little more complex, but she really nailed that fine line between authenticity and simplicity. She doesn’t dumb down recipes or make up fake pseudo-ethnic recipes and wierd things-only-a-treehugger-would-eat rabbit food. Instead, she presents us with the simple hearty recipes that the people who run your local Asian restraunts probably make for their family in their own homes. The recipes are scaled for four, but I’ve never had any problems making them for two and I’m sure most would be fine for one.

One of the major cooking magazine – Gourmet – routinely has a feature called Dinner for One Their recipe are collected online at www.epicurious.com (click the link above).

Here’s an example of one such recipe:
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/recipe_views/views/231513

But I can’t figure out to pull out only "recipes for one from the site.

Ugh. preview is my friend. Sorry for the horrible post. My point was, you can’t select single servings by searching, but you can see “dinners for one” by clicking the link.

Also, the recipes at Allrecipe.com can be scaled to any serving size.

Also her World Vegetarian. I love this book to death. Common-sense advice, logical instructions for substituting unusual ingredients, great stories on the origins of the recipes, easy variations, and just plain yummy vegetarian food. The recipes aren’t designed for one, but they are easy to scale down, and besides, leftovers are your friend.