Cooking For One -- A Three Part System
I lived alone for several years, and was broke enough that nightly take-out wasn’t really an option. This is how I survived without defaulting to peanut butter toast 4 nights per week.
It basically comes down to this:
Prep Proteins once a month.
Prep Veggies once a week.
Cook Starches once a day.
This style of cooking is meant to allow you to have dinner on the table for yourself in 5-20 minutes on most nights, without a ton of repeats, and keeps things pretty healthy. Usually the most difficult part will be boiling pasta or cooking rice.
Protein Once A Month:
What I would do was I would spend one Saturday afternoon each month, and I’d pre-cook, and portion out a bunch of individual servings of meat and beans. I’d cook each thing seasoned very very basically (a salt/buttermilk brined chicken, ground beef with salt/pepper/onion/garlic), so that when I pulled out my individual serving of meat, it would give me lots of different cuisines it would work for.
You can put roast chicken into a chicken burrito, or a pasta with pesto, or a quinoa grain bowl, or a Caesar salad, or any number of other things. Prepping the protein portion of my dinners gave me the flexibility to be able to go in whatever direction I wanted each night, based on what sounded good, without locking me into an hour in the kitchen.
Recipes:
(note, I usually use the same recipe, but just do a sheet pan full of thighs and breasts, instead of a whole chicken.)
Tips:
Chicken - Always do a buttermilk or yogurt brine the day before you intend to cook chicken. This will make your chicken moist, tender, resistant to over cooking, flavorful, and help it survive freezing and reheating.
Bake or grill a batch of chicken, chop into bite sized pieces, portion into individual serving size baggies or containers, and freeze.
Take out in the morning and put into the fridge to thaw if you intend to eat it cold on a salad, or reheat from frozen in a skillet with a little sauce/oil, or in the toaster oven (3-5 minutes).
Note: If you don’t want to cook the chicken yourself, grabbing a couple rotisserie chickens, pulling the meat off the bones, and portioning them out to freeze is also very viable.
Ground Beef - cook with salt, pepper, garlic, and finely diced onions in a skillet until browned. Do not drain the fat. Portion out into individual serving size baggies or containers and freeze.
Reheat from frozen in a skillet (3-5 minutes)
Put on a potato roll with cheese, mustard, and onions and have a Crumpled Up Burger
Add cumin, oregano, chili powder, hot sauce to have taco meat for burritos/tacos/taco salad
Add Italian seasoning and spaghetti sauce to make a quick meat sauce for pasta
Add baharat, hot pepper, pine nuts, and olive oil to add over hummus
Meatballs/Meatloaves:
Freeze individual meatballs/loaves, and reheat in the oven (usually 30 minutes), or in a skillet with a little fat (usually 10 minutes). Make it into a sandwich, pair with potatoes or rice, or chop it into a hash with home fries and top with an egg.
You can pair with many different sauces, depending on the cuisine. Red sauce for Italian, teriyaki, barbeque, etc etc.
Veggies Once a Week:
Assuming that you’re grocery shopping once per week, one of the biggest gifts you can give yourself is to have a big easy salad prepped and ready in the fridge at a moment’s notice.
For salads, wash, *dry very well* chop, and store lettuces in a Freshworks Tupperware in the fridge. This makes it incredibly easy to add toppings and have a meal, and keeps the lettuces fresh and crisp for up to a week.
For salad toppings choose drier ingredients like carrots and radishes -- chop, and store in a small container as an easy veggie medley to add to salads. (Wet ingredients like tomatoes or cucumbers need to be chopped and added on the day)
This will allow you to make a big dinner salad (topped with one of your pre-prepped proteins) in a snap, or grab a handful as a side salad any night you don’t want to actually cook a veggie side dish.
The biggest problem I had with veggies when I was cooking for one, was eating them before they got wilty. One thing I learned to do was to eat my delicate veggies like baby spinach at the start of the week, and heartier ones like broccoli at the end.
Cruciferous veggies (cauliflower, brussels sprouts, broccoli) stay good in the crisper drawer for up to 2 weeks, so they're good because you rarely have to waste them if you don't end up cooking right away.
If you notice delicate greens like baby spinach or spring mix starting to wilt or go bad, and they don't appeal to you as a salad any more, chop them finely and add them to Pantry Pasta, or a soup. You can consume a TON of wilty/shriveled veggies by turning it into a sauce for Pantry Pasta.
Another way to consume wilty veggies like tomatoes, bell peppers, and cilantro is to make salsa.
If Mexican food is your jam, having a container of sautéed onions-and-peppers in your fridge ready to add to tacos/burritos/fajitas is really great. They stay good for up to a week in the fridge.
Starches Once a Day:
I generally like most of my starches to be fresh the day I’m eating it, but that is just a personal preference. Most are okay for at least a couple days in the fridge.
Rice -- good as leftovers if you add a fat (ghee, coconut oil, etc) and re-fry it in a skillet. Okay in the fridge for 4 days.
Quinoa -- stays good for 4-5 days in the fridge
Pasta -- if well oiled, will stay good for a week in the fridge (as long as it isn't sauced)
Potatoes -- inedible as leftovers (in my opinion). If baked or boiled, you can chop them up and fry them as a hash. If mashed, you can add an egg and cheese and fry them as potato pancakes.
Bread -- if you have bread that goes stale, turn it into bread crumbs and store in the freezer for use in recipes like meatballs.
And that’s it! That’s basically how I cooked the entire time I lived alone, without eating out all the time, or repeating the same casserole 6 days in a row. It worked really well for me, and I hope at least some of these tips helped you.