Cooking for One after Gray Divorce

Learning how to cook for one, especially after going through a gray divorce can be challenging. Mealtimes are often a daily reminder of the changes in your life. When decades of shopping for food, planning meals and cooking for a family have taken up a large percentage of your time, It’s tempting to rely on ready-cooked meals and neglect healthy nutrition. This is one of the worst possible times to stop eating healthily. Your body needs better nutrition more than ever during this stressful time. The good news is that cooking for one can be simpler, cheaper, and more enjoyable than you expect.

Shop wisely when you have to cook for one

After decades cooking for a family, it takes your brain a while to adjust to cooking for one. You may continue to buy and cook far too much for one person. Your refrigerator may be full of rotting produce and you may overeat with so much food around.

Helpful staples to buy include:

• Eggs
• Frozen vegetables
• Greek yogurt
• Brown rice or quinoa
• Chicken breasts or fish portions
• Canned beans
• Sweet potatoes
• Salad greens
• Oats
• Nuts and seeds
• Olive oil
• Soup ingredients

Ask yourself whether you can use an ingredient in multiple meals. Will you realistically be able to eat certain veggies before they spoil? Can an ingredient be frozen?

Don’t think that you only have to buy small portions of protein. I love roast chicken so I tend to buy a whole chicken, roast it on a Sunday and then I use the leftovers to make chicken salad or chicken wraps during the week. A roast beef also lasts the whole week and can be used in many creative ways.

You can also phase back into your diet the foods that your family members may not have enjoyed but that you love to eat.

Find recipes for one

Today it is easy to find a number of sites that offer interesting recipes for one. Jamie Oliver’s site has some great recipes for solo cooks. Many cookbooks today are also devoted to cooking for one. Going solo in the Kitchen by Jane Doerfer contains over 350 simple recipes. It also contains strategies for buying to save on wastage. She gives advice on storing foods too – cooked chicken, for example, tastes better and has better texture when stored in liquid (like a broth or a sauce).

Just because you have to cook for one does not mean you can’t use those favorite recipes you have collected over the years. You can simply reduce the ingredients by dividing. Of course, it’s easier to do this with some recipes than others. It also may seem like hard work to always have to bring out your calculator – it’s probably better to sit down one day and do all the work at once. Remember that if you divide the ingredients, you also need to adjust the cooking time (I learned this the hard way!).

Meals don’t have to be fancy to be nutritious

Some simple meals for one include:

• Soup and toast
• A baked potato with toppings
• A chicken wrap with avocado
• A grilled chicken salad
• Salmon with rice and broccoli
• Scrambled egg with cheese and spinach
• Pasta with roasted vegetables
• A simple stir-fry
• Greek yoghurt with fruit and nuts

Rather than trying to cook seven different meals a week, you can make two or three cooked meals and reinvent the leftovers into different combinations. This can save you time and money.

Make friends with your freezer

When you live alone it makes sense to use your freezer. You can buy some buy microwave-friendly containers and perhaps even a food vacuum sealing system.  This allows you to make large quantities and then freeze portions for easy meals at a later time. You can still make the lasagna or pot of soup that fed your whole family and easily divide it into smaller meals and freeze them. You’ll find that you spend less time in the kitchen, but still enjoy healthy, home-cooked meals.

It can be helpful to portion your food immediately after cooking it. Pack those extra servings into containers to freeze before you even sit down to eat. This will prevent you from mindlessly overeating which can be a common failing when going through emotional turmoil.

Foods that freeze well include:

• Soup
• Chili
• Stews
• Pasta sauce
• Cooked rice

Scale down your utensils when you cook for one

It pays to invest in some smaller pots and saucepans. A small amount of food is lost in a large pot or pan and the food is more likely to dry out or burn. Keeping a notebook in your kitchen for a while where you jot down what pots and pans you actually use could be interesting. Doing this for a week or two will help you to decide what to keep. You can always keep a larger pot or two for cooking for friends and family.

An air fryer can transform cooking for one. You can prepare small portions quickly without heating up a whole oven. Cooking a chicken schnitzel or a piece of battered fish works particularly well.

Buy small quantities of expensive ingredients

Foods, like salmon or steak, that were once too expensive to buy in quantities may suddenly be within your budget. This allows you to experiment with some great ingredients that may restore some of your desire to eat. Truffle oil, for example, will transform an omelette. 

Use more spices, herbs and condiments

Dill, chives, sage, rosemary, coriander, ginger and dry mustard can transform plain food. Using them also means that you will tend to use less salt. Items like pesto, sun-dried tomatoes or Dijon mustard can also change ordinary food like pasta, tuna, or eggs into appealing, fast meals.

Store food safely and reheat correctly

Don’t store your food in old containers. Buy certified BPA-free reusable microwavable meal prep containers with lids, label and freeze. When reheating food in the microwave, make sure you don’t leave cold spots where bacteria can thrive. Stir and rotate the food while reheating.

Take a Cooking Class

If your cooking skills have been focused for many years on cooking for a whole family where your repertoire consisted of hearty soups, stews and casseroles, it may be fun to take a cooking class. It can do a great deal to revive your interest in cooking and open you up to new tastes. I attended a cooking class where the theme for the week revolved around a specific country. One of the dishes was Ceviche which I had never eaten before and now love to make. 

A final word

You still have to make food – it’s just that the way you think about it and make it has to change. Change your mindset, plan more, buy less, cook less and you will find that it’s easy to eat healthy, nutritious meals.