How do you cook for one?

Recipes are mostly written for a crowded table; in a one-person kitchen that comes down to too much food and too much washing-up every evening. The answer is not to halve the recipe but to set the whole routine up for one person from the start.

Where does the difficulty come from?

In cooking for one, the workload does not drop along with the number of people. The counter still has to be cleared, the pot still has to be washed, the preparation still has to be done. The same effort is divided across far fewer meals.

The ingredient side strains you in a similar way. Packages at the store are usually sized for a crowd, and in a one-person kitchen the remainder waits. Ingredients that wait usually spoil.

The third difficulty is wanting variety. You do not want to eat the same dish every evening, but cooking a different dish every evening is not sustainable either. The balance is struck between those two.

Which dishes are cooked in batches?

Dishes whose texture does not suffer from reheating suit batch cooking. Soups, dishes with legumes and vegetable stews are in this group. They are cooked once and divided across several meals.

These dishes are portioned on the day they are cooked and put into separate containers. That way the pot is washed once and every meal becomes a separate option. The details of the method are in batch-cooking soup and dividing it.

Dried legumes give you a separate convenience. Boiled and divided once, they go straight into dishes on the following days. How that step is set up is explained in boiling dried legumes in advance.

Which are made on the spot?

Dishes where freshness decides things are cooked at the moment. An omelet, sautéed vegetables and a grilled piece of meat can be made in a short time and in a single-person amount. Cooking these in batches brings no gain.

For dishes made on the spot, one pan and one plate are enough. Because the preparation is short, they can be managed even on a tired evening. Used together with a batch-cooked dish, they balance the week.

Salads and mezes fall into this group as well. When their ingredients are ready, they are put together in a few minutes. A dressing prepared in advance shortens that step even further.

The balance of the week comes out of the mix of these two groups. While one batch-cooked pot covers a few evenings, the on-the-spot dishes that come in between break the sense of repetition. That way you neither cook every evening nor eat the same dish several days in a row.

How do you choose ingredients?

In a one-person kitchen it matters that an ingredient goes into more than one dish. If the same vegetable goes into both the soup and the sauté, the package is finished without waiting. A shared ingredient increases variety while reducing waste.

Products that can be divided take priority too. Meat suitable for the freezer, bought in portions, does not have to be used all at once. The same principle holds for bread and greens.

A large package, meanwhile, is usually not a gain in a one-person kitchen. Even if it lowers the unit price, the part that goes unused is lost. How that calculation works out is set out in buying large packages.

How often you shop is part of this arrangement as well. In a one-person kitchen, frequent small shops usually produce less waste than rare large ones. Fresh products get used up within that week, and dry ones can wait anyway.

What should you expect?

This arrangement shortens the time spent in the kitchen but does not do away with cooking. What it does is take a one-person kitchen out of a mold made for a crowd. The expectation is set accordingly.

It also takes a few weeks for the arrangement to settle. In the first attempts you cook too much or too little; how many meals a dish comes to is found over time. That number changes from person to person as well.

The expectation of cooking every evening is not part of this arrangement either. In a one-person kitchen it is ordinary for several evenings of the week to pass without cooking, and that does not count as a failure. What matters is that on an evening without cooking there is a ready option.

How the content of the meals should be balanced is a question for a dietitian. The arrangement here lightens the cooking load, not the content; the two are separate questions and one does not take the place of the other.