“I came to believe that since nobody else dared feed me as I wished to be fed, I must do it myself, and with as much aplomb as I could muster. Enough of hit-or-miss suppers of tinned soup and boxed biscuits and an occasional egg just because I had failed once more to rate an invitation!”
“Dinner alone is one of life’s pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.”
That is M.F.K. Fisher and Laurie Colwin, respectively, on the importance of cooking for yourself.
When I began to cook for myself, I lived mostly on pasta with jarred sauce. I told my mother what I was eating, and she covered her eyes with her hands and said, “Oh no.”
But I came by my fondness for jarred marinara sauce on stale pasta honestly; it was what my mother served my father to woo him. At the time she had thought the dish cosmopolitan: the pasta was, glamorously, shell-shaped, unlike the prosaic tubular spaghetti she cooked for herself.
My father, just back from a year eating in the student cafés of Paris, was horrified. To save my mother from her own cooking, he fell in love with her. He taught her how to cook French food, and then together they taught themselves how to stir-fry, to cook curries, to simmer meatballs in rich, thick fresh tomato sauce. And so they raised me on nightly family dinners, well balanced and homemade.
But pasta with bottled sauce was in my blood, and when I left my parents’ house and the dormitory cafeteria behind, it was what I turned to.
My mother begged me to buy a cookbook and learn to cook, and that is how I found myself with a library of books about cooking for one.
The Pleasures of Cooking for One. What We Eat When We Eat Alone. Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant.
I did not, in fact, live alone. I lived with a friend, a biology major who spent most of her time in the lab and crept home in the wee hours of the morning to eat Chinese takeout. I did my English major reading in bed, under the covers, and ate dinner before nine every night. I did not know the pleasures of cooking for one. I did not know what I could do with an eggplant, either alone or with company. I bought the books and asked them to teach me their secrets.
Cooking for one, the books informed me, was a matter of self-respect. Didn’t I value myself as a person? Didn’t I respect myself too much to feed myself the same bland, flat-tasting pap every night? (Certain authors will admit to eating cold beans out of the can, standing over the sink. These authors always vow repentance: they will do better, they will at the very least sauté the beans with onions and eat them over hot rice, perhaps with shredded cheese.) Judith Jones, the legendary cookbook editor who discovered Julia Child, has so much self-respect that she regularly makes herself personal soufflés. She does not, you understand, make one large soufflé and dine off the deflating remnants for a week. Not she. She dusts off a personal soufflé dish, fluted, 2¾ inches high and 4 inches in diameter, and creates a single perfect serving of soufflé. This she consumes with, presumably, a fierce and unshakeable belief in her own worth as both a person and a woman.
I was taking a gender studies class and writing a number of very earnest papers about how the personal is political. I minced some garlic and made my own tomato sauce. It tasted shockingly bright after months of jarred sauce with too much sugar in it, and I felt, eating it, as glamorous as my mother had when she boiled her shell pasta.
On the other hand: cooking alone, I learned from the books, is a matter of self-indulgence. In What We Eat When We Eat Alone, Deborah Madison writes that foods for one are “very personal foods, that special category of edibles that are tailored by oneself for oneself, and they are not easily shared. They’re the foods that work for one individual in a deep and maybe even psychological way.” She describes mustard sandwiches, oyster crackers crumbled into coffee, and my favorite: “Wonder Bread, flattened, covered with butter and sugar, then frozen briefly, so it becomes a kind of sugar cookie.” I am glad she does not describe the person who dines on Wonder Bread sugar cookies—it is so personal a food, so intimate, that I am certain that if I knew anything else about the Wonder Bread eater I would see into their very soul and know all their darkest and most Freudian secrets.
Regression was all very well, but not what I was looking for. I was twenty-one and feeling sophisticated in my own apartment with my college life; I did not want to regress to the things I cooked when I had a night alone in high school (peanut butter sandwiches, mostly, or boxed macaroni mixed with frozen peas). But self-indulgence, the books informed me, does not have to mean regression. M.F.K. Fisher believed in eating both simply and snobbishly: she ate scrambled eggs when alone, but wrote, “I grew deliberately fastidious about eggs and butter: the biggest, brownest eggs were none too good, nor could any butter be too clover-sweet and fresh.” And Laurie Colwin spent her nights alone eating eggplant, fried crisp and then stewed with “garlic, tamari sauce, lemon juice and some shredded red peppers.”
That was no elaborate soufflé, but it wasn’t frozen sugared Wonder Bread either. I could cook the eggplant in between pages of Paradise Lost, and eat the fresh scrambled eggs between paragraphs of close analysis of Durkheim. And it was proper adult food. You could tell by the pile of dishes it produced: the frying pan glazed with dried egg remnants, the cutting board coated with eggplant seeds and pepper trimmings. Cooking food that produced dishes was something that adults did. It meant you respected yourself enough to treat yourself like an adult.
Now I’m out of school. I live with a vegan and refuse to give up my animal products, so I still mostly cook for myself. On nights when I come home tired and broke, I still sometimes turn to pasta and jarred sauce. But most nights I remember the books and I make myself take out a pan.
Well. I still mostly turn to pasta. But as an adult I have discovered a fondness for the greens I hated as a child. My mother liked them barely cooked, just wilted a little in the pan so that they crunched between your teeth and released a stream of acrid juices on your tongue. I believed they were poisonous and refused to eat them, but the books taught me to cook them slowly and gently, with plenty of olive oil and alliums, and to toss them with some form of carbohydrates at the end to cut the bitterness. Now it is what I eat when I am cooking for myself and feeling like a grown up.
Pasta for a Grown-Ass Lady:
First slice an onion thin and sweat it in good olive oil. Mince a few cloves of garlic and throw them in with the onion. While the alliums slowly begin to turn translucent, grab yourself a bunch of greens. I am fond of kale, but I will admit that this is very Brooklyn of me; use spinach or collards or something else if you want. You do you. Trim off the stems and discard them, and when the alliums smell like they’re about halfway done cooking, throw the greens in with them. Drizzle a little more olive oil on top and sprinkle on some salt.
In the meantime, get a pot of salted water boiling and throw in some pasta. I think whole-wheat spaghetti is best at standing up to the assertive flavors of the greens, but what have we learned from all this? You do you.
If you want, you can add some protein to the greens now. This is not the place for chicken or tofu: you want something salty and oily to cut through the bitter. A can of tuna, maybe, or pancetta if you’re feeling fancy. Vegetarians in the room can use chickpeas. Just chuck it on top of the greens and give it a stir. The greens are done when they are a color that gratifies your eye and when the corner of a leaf produces a pleasing texture when crushed between your teeth. I like my kale cooked down into submission, so for me that’s fifteen minutes of slow heat.
Drain the pasta and toss it with the greens. If you think they need some more moisture you can add a bit of the pasta water, but I never do. Shower the whole thing with Parmesan and freshly ground pepper. (Yes, vegans, you can use your godforsaken nutritional yeast if you must.)
Consume with a fierce and unshakeable belief in your own worth as a person.
Tags: constance grady, cooking, feminism sort of!, food, recipes
I discovered how to make a basic tomato sauce and now I very rarely eat jarred. I cook myself a puttanesca, or something else simple. I work from home, so it helps break up my day and make me feel capable.
It’s hard to underestimate the importance of the capable feeling! Putting together something very simple for yourself can make you feel so accomplished and put together. And puttanesca is so simple and cheap and delicious.
I can and will never eat jarred/non-homemade vodka sauce again after learning to make my own tomato sauce base (“red sauuwce”). I just can’t do it. Regular jarred sauce, sure, okay, once in a while, but something about jarred vodka sauce is just dreadful after having the real thing and knowing how easy it is to make.
Lovely. I love cooking, and these days I mostly do it by myself for myself. I get a box of CSA vegetables once every two weeks, so I usually cook gigantic one-pot meals that use up my veg quickly and can be divided up into work lunches during the week. I’m more practical than proficient in the kitchen, but sometimes the simplest dishes are the most elegant, and make me feel like a rich and pampered woman when I serve them to myself with a glass of wine and a good book.
At this point in the summer my favorite thing is pesto. I keep an inexpensive brand of shredded parm and sliced almonds around all June just in case. Big bunch of parsley in the CSA box? Parsley pesto. Big bunch of carrots with tops or a huge leafy fennel? Carrot or fennel leaf pesto. Then I can spread it on a slice of bread or toss it with pasta when I get home from work hungry enough to eat the whole world.
I need to start doing the pesto thing–I have great plans tonight with last week’s arugula and other assorted greens.
Pesto is a brilliant plan. I am currently food processor-less (I know, I know, it’s a Key Kitchen Utensil, etc), but I need to pick one up just for the pesto possibilities.
I suggest a mini-prep! (Or whatever they’re calling the tiny, inexpensive food processors these days.) It’s the perfect size to make pesto, hummus, etc. for 1 or 2 people, and using it is not A Dishwashing Event the way that pulling out the full-sized food processor can be.
I’ve been using a $15 one of those for like eight years. It’s tiny and I just stuff it in a cabinet when not using it. Recommended!
Ooo! I didn’t know you could do anything w carrot tops! This is great to know.
One time I had a homemade dinner of fried sweet potatos and carrot top pesto, and it was one of the most delicious dinners in recent memory.
Loads of things! Carrot leaves taste like carrots, mostly. If they are tender you can put them in a salad. If they are tougher you can chop them up and use them like parsley in a soup or similar. If I do not eat them outright, I put them into my veggie stock or chicken stock.
Also EVERYONE I am sorry to be hogging this thread like a threadhog but I have a lot of feelings about cooking, solitude, and solitary cooking. I will try to reign it in but forgive me one tiny link to my blog, where I talk a lot about using up CSA vegetables.
Then when you get a ton of tomatoes from a neighbor, you can chop them up, mix them with soft cheese, and add pesto (and salami!) for a salad I could eat every day.
We are cooking/food prep twins.
I was garbage at cooking for myself. Luckily my boyfriend moved in and now cooks on weeknights or else I’d eat only microwave popcorn until I died of malnutrition. 🙁
I moved into a new apartment this weekend and broke in the kitchen with a massive pot of risotto. I have got to learn to scale my recipes but hot damn, is it good. (onions, mushrooms, garlic, jalapeno, peas.)
Risotto is always the solution. And if you start to get sick of it (like some kind of sick non-risotto eater), you can make risotto cakes! You form the risotto into little cakes, using a beaten egg to help them keep their shape, and then you fry them. It’s like regular risotto, but crispy and fried, so even better.
I am INTRIGUED.
i made these a few wks ago bc I also do not know how to scale for risotto. They were GLORIOUS
Apparently, although I have not tried this myself, it is fairly easy to put hunks of cheese inside your leftover risotto cakes, making them into possibly the perfect food.
Why scale? Leftover risotto is delicious. : D
I recently went from splitting a weekly farmshare to having a whole biweekly share to myself. When I split a share, we’d sometimes cook difficult-to-split things together but then I’d take home, like, 5 kale fronds and 2 sweet potatoes and similar quantities of a dozen different vegetables. I’d get a lot of meals out of this, sometimes throwing together easy dinner when I got home from work and sometimes cooking up a bunch of different things on the weekend. BUT! Now that I have the whole haul but less often, I’m cooking larger quantities but less frequently. I greatly prefer this. Everyone’s mileage may very, but I feel that I have more free time now.
You make a valid point re: leftover risotto. I just had some for lunch. DELICIOUS.
I’ve lived on my own for 6 years now and while I love cooking and am reasonably good at it, I do still have nights when I eat an entire chocolate orange for dinner because I can’t be bothered to cook. I find I go in cycles and I have to be honest with myself when I am shopping, because if I’m in a no-cooking mood, however much I buy LovelyFreshThings and pretend I will be inspired when I’m hungry and there’s nothing instant in the house, I know I’ll just order pizza and watch the contents of the fridge rot. I seem to be in a cooking mood this week though!
Yes, there is nothing so depressing as watching the beautiful fresh vegetables you were sure you would cook slowly disintegrate in your fridge. Chocolate orange nights are good too, though! And you need them every once in awhile if you don’t want to drive yourself nuts.
Ahhh I just moved out after a breakup and am LOVING cooking for myself again!
I love the fact that I can make a big pot of something and it does me for two or even three days, rather than being all used up between two people on the night I make it. Also my ex was much more keen on meat than me – I don’t really buy raw meat to cook myself very often at all so I have been going crazy on the chickpeas, although the other day I had a craving for steak and just went out and bought a big steak and cooked it just the way I like it. Sweet, sweet independence.
Yesss the independence is so sweet.
Yeeeeesss, CHICKPEAS! Easy, cheap, and tasty!
Cooking for one is dangerous, because it can lead down that slippery slope to baking for one. I am temporarily alone in the house and made a cherry-pistachio nut crumble at breakfast time because jet lag got me up at 5am. Now, hopped on sugar since it was impossible to stop eating at a reasonable amount and I had to be a little unreasonable – it was too good!!
Yesss. I was really slow to get into baking–I thought it was too complicated with too many rules, and I even tried to make it a point of honor, like a left-brained/right-brained thing (“oh I’m too spontaneous for baking”).
But then I realized that if I kept a few inexpensive staples around the house, I could have cookies whenever I want.
A friend’s wife makes and freezes a variety of rolled balls of cookie dough in bags with a note indicating at what temperature and for how long to bake the contents. Result: Fresh cookies at about ten minutes’ notice. It doesn’t work with, say, meringues, but chocolate chip or shortbread or anything in that family? Life-changing.
I do that! It makes me feel like a WIZARD.
YES I do this, it is magical and impresses everyone. Also: frozen cookie dough balls!
YES they are like little frozen gifts from past me to future me
HELLO YES THIS IS MY LIFE
If you have leftovers that you don’t want to be responsible for consuming, I would recommend making friends with the crew at your favorite local business. Most of my test baking (lately: lemon bars, caramel brownies) goes to my comic shop. They like me a lot. This also works with some workplaces, and of course pawning things off to friends, family, and admirers.
I bloody love baking. My friends and family also bloody love that I love baking.
Despite years of reasonable kitchen-y competence, I only ever make 2 meals for myself: Every Vegetable In This Fridge Stew With Rice And Tomatoes, and Something Involving Eggs. If I’m taking a walk on the wild side, the former will also Involve Eggs.
Have you met shakshuka? (eggs poached in spicy tomato sauce, can probably accommodate most fridge vegetables too)
THANK YOU.
Yes, but those are the best two meals ON THE PLANET.
Oh, this is perfect. My roomie and I usually cook separately and there is something lovely about the nights when I do have the energy to actually cook for myself and do it exactly to my tastes.
Yes! Cooking for yourself is fking FANTASTIC. I love elaborate meals that are perfectly suited for my taste alone because I Am Every Woman / Hear Me Roar / Etc.! I am the only one in my house who eats red meat and sometimes I’ll just make a huge steak in a cast iron grill pan w an herb butter and drink a glass of red wine and feel like the rest of the world is bowing at my feet.
I don’t eat tomatoes, so my pasta nights usually turn into macaroni and cheese.
I’ve been living by myself for almost eight months now and I still haven’t gotten the hang of cooking for one. I can’t figure out the right proportions or how many vegetables and then I just end up making kale chips because the whole bunch is about to go off.
I’m much better at baking/desserting, as nobody seems to mind leftover ice cream.
I’ve gotten REAL big on making a half-ass spinach cream sauce. Just saute some garlic and spinach (maybe two or three handfuls chopped up), then add a few tablespoons of half & half, some parmesan and a little pasta water to make it slightly more saucy.
Spinach is my go-to vegetable because it cooks down so much it is very difficult to make too much.
Spinach is one of the few I can actually manage to use up before it goes rotty! There’s a (surprise) pasta dish I make with red wine vinegar and spinach and red bell pepper and it always comes out nice, but only if I’m serving like 20 people.
That sounds delicious, though, and I’m gonna file that one away in the “try this shit!” pile. 😀 I always have heavy cream because I make so damn much ice cream and it’s always nice to not waste the last few tablespoons.
When I was living on my own, a favorite was generously called ‘eggplant lasagna’, but essentially was thinly sliced eggplant layered with tomato sauce (from the terrible jar) and goat cheese. Baked 350 for a half hour? forty minutes? Whenever I remembered it was done. Kept beautifully in the fridge and made me feel virtuous.
I cook for myself almost exclusively and have done for years. To be honest I am at a stage where I am resentful of how much time I spend in the kitchen or thinking about/shopping for food. Not enough to give up, but definitely to get stuck in a rut of simple but unsatisfying meals. Sigh.
My problem is that my schedule is too inconsistent for me to really keep fresh ingredients in the house without them going to waste. If I’m meeting up with friends after work, that means grabbing something to eat nearby rather than traveling all the way home to cook. If I’m working until 7pm, that means I’m going to want to do something simple. My solution is to keep lots of frozen vegetables, canned beans, and pastas/rices handy and then buy fresh ingredients when I have time/effort. I am sure that these cookbook authors would be horrified by how often I consume frozen/canned goods, but I promise I have *some* self-respect.
My go-to is fried frozen veggies with an egg, ginger, garlic, and cayenne tossed with rice & coated generously with sriracha.
Frozen and canned foods are staples! Like, maybe some foodies would be more approving if we did all our own freezing and canning ourselves, but preserved food of one kind or another is more or less essential to living in a bunch of climates where humans now live. Barbara Kingsolver even says as much in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, so there are some hardcore locavores on the side of frozen goods. I’d say you’re golden.
I don’t mind cooking for one, but I hate supermarket shopping for one, and also washing up for one.
I do like to think of myself as someone who cooks, but in reality I live on pasta pesto…
Gnocci with blanched broccoli, pesto, and capers.
I love making chicken soup from scratch, and it starts with boneless, skinless chicken legs, trimmed of all the fat and broiled with chunked garlic and onion. I pour off the juices and let cool before refrigerating. There’s still fat that rises to the top, (!) which is easy to scrape off and toss. Result: pure chicken deliciousness as a base for a lovely soup for yourself. Toss any veg in, so good. I like bean thread noodles (mung bean or silver noodles) as they cook fast and slurp well without pasta agony.
I’ve also boiled the bones from store-bought roasted chicken. I’m no one to turn down free food!
Grown-up food is most definitely identifiable by the volume of dishes it produces! Or so I tell myself when I eat my granola out of one bowl and my yogurt out of another.
1. Where do I find that Judith Jones recipe for a souffle for one, please?
2. Cook’s Illustrated has a “Cooking for Two” series that I really like. Yes, I’m left with a leftover meal (occasionally two), but I love leftovers, but not seven servings of leftovers.
Found it! http://www.culinate.com/books/collections/all_boo…
What is this miraculous website? I need to use it all the time now.
“When I began to cook for myself, I lived mostly on pasta with jarred sauce.”
Y halo thar me of the entire past decade. D:
Now, baking for one, on the other hand, I am a master at.
Cooking for one always reminds me of the classic comedy sketch Dinner for One.
Well, your father must have done a great job, since, before your parents’ wedding, your mother made us (best man and maid of honor) a really delicious meal highlighted by shrimp bordelaise, whose handwritten recipe I still have in my old notebook.
But I also agree – when you’re eating alone, 8 oz. of linguini with half a jar of Newman’s Own marinara sauce and plenty of parmesan cheese definitely hits the spot!
He was a good teacher, David!
“Yes, vegans, you can use your godforsaken nutritional yeast if you must.”
I WILL, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
Hey, I gave you that nutritional yeast. You and your nutritional yeast go with god.
This sounds like broke and/or stoner cooking as well.
I’m back to cooking for one after six months of living with my parents and mostly eating/cooking family meals. The year before that I lived with friends and we did a weekly cooking schedule, where each person would only be responsible for dinner once or twice a week, but we got to eat a home-cooked meal almost every day. Cooking for six was so much fun and I got to experiment a lot, but now I’m cooking for one again and I forgot how hard it is to keep it fresh.
I'm back to cooking for one after six months of living with my parents and mostly eating/cooking family meals. The year before that I lived with friends and we did a weekly cooking schedule, where each person would only be responsible for dinner once or twice a week, but we got to eat a home-cooked meal almost every day. Cooking for six was so much fun and I got to experiment a lot, but now I'm cooking for one again and I forgot how hard it is to keep it fresh.
I've been using a $15 one of those for like eight years. It's tiny and I just stuff it in a cabinet when not using it. Recommended!
Invite people over!
Alternately: invite yourself over by promising you'll cook for someone.
Oh, how I miss cooking for myself! Now I have to consider the bland tastes of my children and the Handsome Sidekick (who, to his credit, thoroughly enjoys any curry I wish to make but draws the line at any dish with ‘too many vegetables’). On the rare occasion that they’re all having leftovers and I can cook what I like, it’s SO MUCH FUN! The kitchen is my oyster (no oysters, though, ick), and I make pasta puttanesca, or laksa, or some elaborate omelette, or baked rice pudding with stewed rhubarb… secretly, I fantasize about when everyone has moved out, and how I’ll be able to spend a whole day cooking whatever I like and the freezer will be full of delicious meals that only I will eat.
Oh, how I miss cooking for myself! Now I have to consider the bland tastes of my children and the Handsome Sidekick (who, to his credit, thoroughly enjoys any curry I wish to make but draws the line at any dish with 'too many vegetables'). On the rare occasion that they're all having leftovers and I can cook what I like, it's SO MUCH FUN! The kitchen is my oyster (no oysters, though, ick), and I make pasta puttanesca, or laksa, or some elaborate omelette, or baked rice pudding with stewed rhubarb… secretly, I fantasize about when everyone has moved out, and how I'll be able to spend a whole day cooking whatever I like and the freezer will be full of delicious meals that only I will eat.
Work is crazy busy and stressful for the next few months, but I’ve managed to wrangle myself some time on two afternoons to just prep and cook and it is the best. I love everything about cooking for just myself: finding new recipes, meal planning, grocery shopping and then cooking.
If I can manage to do a load of laundry (or two) and actually put the clean clothes away, that day is won.
Also good options:
-Israeli couscous is so fast/easy and I think heats up better as leftovers (compared to pasta).
-Adding a poached/fried egg to the top of an grain/salad instantly makes it feel more decadent/legitimate as a meal.