By Adam Stewart
From the Newsroom
Since I wrote my last column, Michelle went on a multi-day girls’ trip with my mom and aunts. I was on my own at home for about five days, and I will admit that after almost six years, I had forgotten how much of a chore cooking for one is.
It isn’t simply that you are cooking by yourself and don’t have someone who can stir something while you chop vegetables. Every step from meal planning to cleanup is better with another person.
It doesn’t take multiple people to plan meals, but planning to feed one person requires extra questions, because recipes mostly aren’t written to make one or two servings. That’s especially true of the family recipes that have been passed along to us. I grew up in a home with four people at the dinner table routinely, and Michelle grew up with an even larger family. Even with two of us, we sometimes scale down recipes designed for larger families. The first time we made one particular soup recipe, we called up neighbors to take leftovers; otherwise, we were going to have chicken and wild rice soup for most of a week.
So “Can I scale this recipe down to one or two servings?” and “Do I want to eat leftovers of this for multiple days?” become important questions.
And whether you can scale a recipe down depends in part on whether you can either buy ingredients in small enough quantities or dependably save them for later, which is partly a hassle for meal planning and partly a hassle for grocery shopping.
Besides ingredient quantities, grocery shopping for one isn’t too bad. I’m used to going grocery shopping by myself while Michelle tackles other chores, so I have a pretty good idea where to find things.
Cooking alone is another matter, though. Michelle and I have become a pretty good team in the kitchen, and together, we are able and willing to cook some recipes that are much more involved than either of us would want to tackle alone. And even for relatively easy recipes, cooking is more enjoyable with someone else (not applicable to all cooks; I know some people want to be left alone while cooking).
Eating isn’t any more difficult alone, but meals are better when shared with people you love, accompanied by good conversations. There are fewer serving dishes to wash after eating alone, but there are the same number of pots and pans to clean and nobody to dry things while you wash or vice versa.
For all of these reasons, I found myself getting takeout more than usual while Michelle was traveling. But to find a silver lining, I did take the opportunity to get a pizza with exactly what I wanted on it, since Michelle doesn’t like black olives or mushrooms on pizza.
Adam Stewart is the assistant news editor of The Hutchinson Tribune. He can be reached at adam@hutchtribune.com.