Faced with the concept of living with 3 other roommates, last year I thought that I would be cooking large meals on a regular basis, and so my buying habits were skewed towards quantity and value. However, it soon became apparent that although we were all under the same roof, our dining habits were often not aligned at all, and so a lot of the time I only cooked for myself and perhaps one other person. Watching a lot of fresh produce go bad can be a traumatic experience, especially when you suddenly discover the moldy culprit a month or two down the road of decay. Not fun. So over time I've learned how to correct this.
1) Go for quality, not quantity
This is more important than you would think, especially as a college student, and it's taken me a while to reach this conclusion myself. I recently read In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, written by Michael Pollan (amazon), where Pollan makes a big case for shopping around for higher quality produce and stepping away from processed foods. Besides being a healthy option, this helps you regulate the amount of food you buy (since it's more expensive) and gets you away from those weird impulse purchases that tend to sit around and get gross.
2) The freezer is your friend
One of my roommates loves freezing things. Butter, meat, leftovers, peanut butter, et cetera. For a while I didn't really understand it, but I'm coming around. A lot of people don't really give the freezer credit - it's really great at preserving a huge variety of foods - perfect for those leftover raw meats (or veggies) that you can't use right away. Just make sure that, if you can, you let the foods thaw out naturally, rather than throw them in the microwave and zap them back to life, which can partially cook the food prematurely.
3) Dried foods: not just for camping anymore
Not that they ever were. But nuts, pasta, dried fruit, rice and beans - these are things that most likely will never go bad on you. I mean, you would have to really shun them, for a period of maybe a year or two, to see that relationship go sour. They're so forgiving and rather needless. Really, what's not to like. Sure, they can sometimes be pushovers, and you feel kind of guilty for using them so often... but it feels so good to do it! I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, besides to say that you should always have rice and beans on hand. You vegetarians already know this.
4) Plan for single meals
If you think you'll make mashed potatoes, get one russet and maybe a few reds. Do not buy that 10lb bag of Idaho potatoes just because all those brightly colored arrows saying "best value" are pointing towards it. They will sprout up like a forest before you can use half of them. This applies to fruits and veggies too. Don't go to the supermarket and buy a bag of carrots, a head of lettuce, a few bell peppers, and a bag full of tomatoes, unless you want to have salad for every meal for every day for a week. You will get sick of it, or they will go bad and you will just get plain sick. Try to pick out a few recipes you want to try in a week, plan your purchases around that, and improvise in between with simple things like pasta and leftovers.
5) Pasta, the great eliminator
Most likely, even if you plan on just cooking for yourself, you'll end up with leftoevers. Normally these will probably sit in your fridge and you'll keep putting off eating them because they don't look that appetizing sitting in that tupperware covered with a wet piece of saran-wrap. But. I can almost guarantee that whatever you made, it would probably go well in/with a pasta dish. This is why it's good to always have pasta on hand. You can mix it with whatever you have on hand, throw in a few spices, and voila. Possibly nontraditional, yes. But you'd be surprise what can taste good.
6) Tupperware in the 21st century
I don't really know much about tupperware, or the various options available now, but I really need some. And you probably do to. It's a great way to keep things fresh and is much easier to organize than the current unlabeled-freezer-bag regime that I currently have going.
7) A biased look at tofu
A recent vegetarian convert, I've become well-aware of all that tofu can do for you. For one thing, it's really easy to shop for, considering there is really only one variety (at least, in the cheap-o supermarkets I frequent). The best thing and worst thing about tofu is that it really has no flavor of its own. Whatever you cook it in, that is what the tofu will be. This makes it simultaneously very flexible and very difficult. Because unless you have a good variety of spices, you'll be sick of it pretty quickly. Some other great features of tofu:
- doesn't really spoil like other foods (to my knowledge)
- very easy to portion
- quick to prepare (in fact, often times needs no cooking)
- can be used for jenga blocks
8) Things you get in bags in the freezer are generally good This really applies only to supermarkets; I make no safety claims about anything that's been sitting in your freezer for got knows how long. Frozen veggies and fruits are great Hail Mary's that you can pretty much throw in at any point to balance out your dinner. Plus you can regulate how much you use and save the rest really easily.
One last word of advice: befriend other cooks. That way, you can still make reasonably-sized portions of recipes and have somebody else to share it with! Meals are much better as social events, and even though this blog is tailored towards telling you how to cook for yourself... if you can, try to spread the wealth. And invite us?
