Cooking for One

Cooking for one person isn’t a lot of fun.

Unless you really like cooking, I suppose.  Which I do not.  I don’t hate it, but it’s not something I’m going to do just for fun.

And let’s not even talk about the “fun” of cleaning up the kitchen.

Still, I’m trying to make my diet more well rounded and less “grilled chicken breast, steamed veggies in the microwave, baked sweet potato.”  Which is pretty much my default meal.  It’s nutritionally sound, I suppose, but oh so very boring.

I’ve been getting a Blue Apron box every other week for the past few weeks, which has been working out well.  The two person box means that I get at least six meals out of every box, sometimes more, depending on how big the servings are.  And the food is pretty good, though I probably should be bulking it up with more veggies.   That would allow me to stretch the meals even further, now that I think about it.

This is what happens when I forget to bring a real fork to work and end up having to use the child’s fork I keep at my desk. Why I don’t keep a real fork at my desk, I do not know

Because I workout after work, I’ve discovered that the best way for me to plan my meals is to have my biggest meal after lunch.  After a hard workout, the last thing I want to do is eat a big meal, so I often have a green smoothie with some toast or cottage cheese or something along those lines.

So on the evenings that I have a lighter workout, I’m often cooking and packaging up meals for lunch for the next two days.  The other option is bigger batch cooking on the weekends, which does happen, but then I end up freezing things, and not everything I’m cooking does well after having been in the freezer.  When I’m really on my game, I batch cook some soups or stews and freeze them in individual portions so that when I run out of time, I can just grab something for lunch that day.

But lately, I’ve just been eating out on those days.  Thankfully, I have a lot of great healthy options in the area, but it’s not been great for my wallet, that’s for sure.

I’m always looking for tips on the best way to handle cooking for one person and how others handle eating healthy while not eating the same thing every day all the time.  Services like Blue Apron certainly help (and I’ll likely try out Hello Fresh again in the next few months – I used them early in their existence and it was terrible).  What works best for you?