Cooking for one (or two) without the waste or the boredom

There is a particular tiredness that hits at six in the evening when you live alone, or when it is just the two of you and one of you doesn’t much care. You know you should cook. You also know it means a pan, a board, a plate and a lot of washing-up for a meal that takes eight minutes to eat. Toast starts to look reasonable.

This is not a failure of willpower. It is a design problem, and design problems have fixes.

Stop cooking one meal at a time

The most useful change is to stop thinking of dinner as something you make fresh, every night, from scratch. Age UK’s healthy eating guide gives the standard advice — make “extra portions of meals and freezing them so you can have them later in the week” — and it is standard because it works.

Once or twice a week, when you have the energy, cook a big pot of something that freezes well: chilli, a bean or lentil stew, a curry, bolognese, a soup with pulses in it. Eat one portion and freeze the rest in single-serving containers, labelled with the name and date. (You will not remember what the unlabelled brown thing is. Nobody does.)

You now have several dinners ten minutes from the table. On the tired nights, the easy option is a good meal.

The component approach

Batch-cooking whole meals has one drawback: chilli on Monday, chilli on Wednesday, chilli on Friday. The fix is to batch-cook components and assemble them differently each time.

Suppose on Sunday you cook a pot of brown rice, roast a tray of vegetables, boil half a dozen eggs, cook a pan of lentils, and grill a few chicken thighs or bake a piece of salmon. That is an hour’s work, most of it unattended. Across the week those become:

• Rice, roast veg and chicken with yoghurt and chilli sauce.
• Lentils warmed through with a tin of tomatoes, an egg on top.
• A salad of the veg, lentils and flaked salmon with oil and lemon.
• Fried rice with the leftover chicken, an egg and frozen peas.
• The roast veg blitzed into soup, with cheese on toast.

Same ingredients, five meals that feel different. And each carries a proper protein portion, which — as the US guidance for older adults says — belongs at “each meal”, not just dinner. See Protein after 50: how much, when, and the easy ways to get it.

Staples that make a meal from nothing

A small kitchen runs on its stores. The BDA counts frozen, tinned and dried fruit and vegetables towards your five a day, so you are not cutting corners.

Freezer: peas, spinach, mixed vegetables, a bag of frozen berries, sliced bread, fish fillets, chicken thighs, and your own batch-cooked portions.

Cupboard: tinned tomatoes, tinned beans and chickpeas, tinned sardines, mackerel and tuna, red lentils, oats, rice, pasta, stock cubes, olive oil, a few spices you actually use.

Fridge: eggs, milk, Greek yoghurt, a hard cheese, butter, and something sharp — mustard, chilli sauce, pickles — to wake a plain meal up.

With that in the house you can always make a meal: eggs and beans on toast; sardines on toast with tomatoes; lentil and tomato soup; pasta with tinned tuna, peas and lemon. None takes more than fifteen minutes or more than one pan.

One-pan meals

Washing-up is the real enemy of cooking for one, so learn a few things that happen in a single pan or tray.

A traybake is the easiest: chicken thighs or a fish fillet, chopped vegetables, oil, seasoning, into a hot oven, and forty minutes later dinner is done with the tray as the only casualty. Make two portions and the second is tomorrow’s lunch.

A one-pot grain dish — rice or pearl barley simmered in stock with whatever vegetables are around, an egg cracked on top for the last few minutes — is the second. A frittata is the third: leftover vegetables and potatoes in a frying pan, beaten eggs poured over, finished under the grill. Good hot, good cold.

A shopping list that works

Shopping for one goes wrong in two ways: buying fresh things in family quantities that go off, or buying nothing and living on the bread bin.

The fix is a standing list of your ten or fifteen staples, kept where you will see it. Shop from it to restock, and add only what this week’s batch-cook needs. Buy fresh vegetables for three or four days and lean on frozen for the rest. Where money matters, the cheapest things on that list — eggs, pulses, oats, tinned fish, frozen veg — are also the most useful.

Eating with other people

Food is better with company. If you live alone, batch-cooking makes it easy to invite someone: you have made a big pot anyway. Take a portion to a neighbour. Set up a rotating supper with two or three friends, each hosting once a month. Look for a community lunch club, a café with a fixed-price weekday lunch, or a cookery class at the local college. If you are a carer, a shared meal is one of the few things that is good for both of you at once.

If you would like all of this — batch days, component lists, staple shopping lists and a month of assembled meals — set out week by week, our Eat Strong kitchen planner does exactly that. For the nutrition behind it, start with Eating well after 50: the complete, no-fad guide.

This week

• Batch-cook once and freeze the extra in single portions.
• Write your staples list and pin it up.
• Cook a traybake; notice how little washing-up there is.
• Share one meal with someone.