The risk-reward profile is not optimal for the solo home cook. No wonder fast food has become so popular. Sometimes even cooking for two can be tricky, but I dare say not as potentially unsatisfying as cooking for yourself.
Let's review the plight of the single home cook.
Scenario 1: Work all day. Come home. Assess mess of yesterday's dishes (who's going to complain?) Look in cabinet. Snack on Doritos while pondering the options. Forgo thinking (you already did that today) and meal preparation in favor of box of macaroni and cheese. Add reheated string beans or peas to make it look healthier.
Scenario 2: Find delicious looking recipe. Studiously copy down all ingredients. Go to the store and buy everything. You are now $27 poorer, and think you should have gone out to eat. Spend 1 hr cooking everything by yourself. Congratulate yourself on a job well done during your 10 min of eating. Call your mom to tell her how amazing you are, reassure her you are not starving. Spend 20 min doing dishes. Eat the same thing over and over again for the rest of the week, figuring the meal gets cheaper every time you do so. Next week: throw out all those leftover perishables from last week's recipe. Repeat.
There are other problems. Food is very social. Eating alone is not. The word "leftover" is often used to describe dinner. Not a word that sends most people running to the table. You always have to be the one that chops the onions. Entire meals can be eaten standing up and no one is around to think it uncouth. Tip of the iceburg.
The goal: One shopping list. Several meals. No repeats. Enough crossover in ingredients that you don't drop $80-100 on groceries for yourself for one week. A few nights of quick and delicious meals.
The execution: I prudently saved half of that nice pork chop from Sunday's dinner, plus some of the cooked apple slices. Reheated all that in the microwave for 2 min (put some water on the plate and cover with saran wrap). While they were reheating, I assembled my salad:
Fresh washed organic baby spinach
Sliced avocado (salted)
Crumbled blue cheese
Chickpeas that I cooked over the weekend and have hanging out in my fridge
Olive oil and vinegar
Sprinkle kosher salt (about 1/4-1/2 tsp) and copious amounts of freshly ground pepper over this mix in a large bowl and toss everything together with hands or forks once you've drizzled your oil and vinegar on top. There's nothing magical about kosher salt- it isn't more pure than regular table salt, it doesn't taste better. But the crystals are bigger, so it has a different texture in your mouth. And it won't completely dissolve in the oil-vinegar that you put on top. Salads need salt!
When the microwave stops, add the warm apples to your salad and dump it all out onto a plate. Slice the pork and arrange on top of the salad, along with a sprinkling of dried cranberries and a few roasted, salted cashews.
You'll feel special as you surf the web, watch TV, and skim a magazine while you eat your dinner, all the while talking to yourself about what a good meal you're having...
4 comments:
Armchair accounting has long needed to take up the cause of the diseconomics of cooking for one.
Are you saying this salad was the end of the $80 gourmet grocery spree? Hard to believe...
We former bachelors now with live-in mother-in-laws who have dinner hot on the table when we walk in from work are waiting with jaded breath (slightly chive-scented from this evening's dumplings) for the followup post, where you either claim success or admit that at least $29 of your original $80 went down the garbage disposal (or maybe into the compost since this is CA).
Break a leg (of lamb).
syz
First of all: grad students can't afford apartments with garbage disposals.
Let's see...$2.50 pork chop, $2 apples, $2 bag of spinach, $1 chickpeas. Blue cheese, nuts, cranberries, oil, etc. are staples, the cost of which, $27, has already been eaten, so to speak.
So, no, I'd say this is but a $5 stepping stone in the $30 lake of food bought this week. Now what else did I spend money on at the store?
Well let's see how this adds up. I think I can do the math for you:
1 grad student
1 residence in coastal California
1 trip to the grocery store
80 bucks spent
50 unaccounted for
= must have stopped by the local coffeeshop on the way home
You must have been a math major. Much as there are many sums that will yield the number 47, other equations might account for my weekly expenditures. No coffeeshop visits for me, though your proposal is easily supported by my locale...my baking hobby might be considered alternative by OB standards.
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