Cooking for One–It’s Not As Terrifying As You Think

“It’s too much work to learn how to cook since I’ll just be making food for myself.”

I gotta level with you.

As much as I brag about getting a home-cooked meal on the table every day, 99% of what I make is eaten by only one person–me.

Don’t get me wrong, I love sitting around the table with friends and family and sharing an epic meal, but that rarely happens in my busy life.

Dinner, lunch, (and sometimes breakfast) are usually eaten alone–or at best with people who have brought or ordered their own food.

One of the most common excuses people have for not learning how to cook is that they think it will be too much work if they’ll only be making food for themselves.

But I’ve found over the years that this just isn’t true.

When done right, you can cook all your meals for yourself alone and end up actually saving time, money, and energy.

Learn the Basics

It used to be that if you wanted to learn how to cook you just asked your mother (or grandmother) to teach you.

Not anymore.

This cultural chain of knowledge has been broken as we have switched from eating real food prepared at home to eating Food Products™.

As a result, if most of us want to learn how to cook, we’re going to have to look a little harder for somewhere to learn it.

That’s why I created this site–to help you learn how to cook even if no one around you knows how to. Thanks to the series of tubes known as the internet, learning new skills is becoming easier every day.

As I’ve mentioned before, cooking involves just two skills:

1. Learning how to use a knife to cut up food.
2. Learning how to use heat to cook food.

Learning the basics of cutting and heating is easier than you’d think, and results in you being able to throw a healthy and tasty meal together no matter what you have on hand.

Make What YOU Love

The best thing about cooking for yourself?

You get to make exactly what you want.

No need to go easy on the spices because one of your family members doesn’t like strongly flavored food. No need to swap beef for chicken because your significant other is on some wack low-fat diet.

When you can cook what you want, you can be sure that what you’re putting in your mouth is both tasty and healthy.

If you’re interested in eating healthy, I suggest you make fresh meat and veggies the bulk of your diet, minimizing stuff like sugar, flour, and seed oils that have taken over the human diet.

If you are cooking for yourself alone, you can easily stick with these guidelines without having to worry that someone else won’t be down with your style.

Cook In Bulk

The biggest sin I see repeated over and over again in recipes for one is that they are simply scaled-down versions of normal-sized dishes.

The problem is it takes you the same amount of time to cook a dish small enough for one as it does a dish big enough for four.

Look, I get it. You want to eat something completely new at each and every meal during the week. That’s the way our culture works, and I used to be the exact same way.

But it’s time for a little tough love: the key to being successful at cooking for one is learning to love leftovers.

The ability to eat something completely different for every meal is taken for granted by most, but it is a recent phenomenon, and it’s completely unnecessary.

In fact, this transformation of food from something that is consumed for survival into something that is eaten for entertainment may very well be contributing to the “food reward overload” that is likely contributing to the obesity epidemic.

If you can kick this habit, you’ll be much better off. Just follow these three steps:

1. Figure out a dozen or so go-to meals that you could eat over and over again.
2. Learn how to make them, one at a time, until you no longer need to look at the recipe and can substitute ingredients in and out without a sweat.
3. Make it a habit to cook everything in bulk. Refrigerate or freeze leftovers for later.

Make It Happen

The world has changed, and our cultural attitudes toward food have changed with it.

We once sat down with friends and family at least once a day for a shared meal. Now we make our own dinner (or order out), and don’t always eat with others.

We once learned how to cook from our elders, and learned how to make large feasts for several people. Now we make single-serving meals.

These cultural shifts have led many to believe that learning how to cook is simply not worth it. With all the time and effort required to make a solid meal, the return on investment can seem insignificant.

Bullshit!

Learning how to cook is more important now than ever, as our culture slowly forgets this once-essential skill and turns to factory-made foods for our victuals (and become more unhealthy and out of shape in the process).

Most people don’t have anyone preparing their food for them regularly, so learning how to fend for yourself is even more important than ever.

Cooking for yourself is a crucial skill to learn, and is far easier than the haters would have you believe. Especially if you are cooking for one.

Photo