Living Alone: Cooking for Yourself
Of all the challenges that you will face when you live alone one of the biggest might be cooking for yourself.
This is not really something that people think about too much but when you do live by yourself you quickly notice how big an issue it can be.
One of the reasons that cooking for yourself can be such a challenge is that most food is packaged for more than one person and most recipes are written to feed several people.
That means that there is a pretty good chance that you are going to end up with a lot of leftovers and a lot of wasted food when you try to cook for yourself.
Certainly there are options when it comes to cooking for yourself however they will be much more limited than if you were cooking for several people.
For example it would be completely impractical to cook a pot roast for yourself, it is way too much food.
The key to learning to cook for yourself is getting used to the fact that you are going to have leftovers.
If you prepare for this ahead of time it does not need to be a problem.
Most of what you cook can be frozen so this can be a great solution to the problem.
You can then decide on what you want to eat and follow the recipe as it is written.
This will give you way more food than you can possibly eat.
However if you freeze it you can eat it over the next several weeks.
The key is to make sure that you freeze it in individual portions, if you put it all in one container once you thaw it out you can't freeze it again.
Small freezer bags can really come in handy for this.
The other option that you have if you don't want to freeze the left over food is to adjust the recipes so that they are appropriate for one person.
In some cases this is fairly easy to do, the recipe should tell you how many it serves, just divide everything by that number.
This approach will work in some cases but not all.
There will be times when you won't be able to adjust the recipe because of the ingredients that need to be used.
For example you couldn't cook a turkey dinner for one person because you can't find a turkey that small.
This is not really something that people think about too much but when you do live by yourself you quickly notice how big an issue it can be.
One of the reasons that cooking for yourself can be such a challenge is that most food is packaged for more than one person and most recipes are written to feed several people.
That means that there is a pretty good chance that you are going to end up with a lot of leftovers and a lot of wasted food when you try to cook for yourself.
Certainly there are options when it comes to cooking for yourself however they will be much more limited than if you were cooking for several people.
For example it would be completely impractical to cook a pot roast for yourself, it is way too much food.
The key to learning to cook for yourself is getting used to the fact that you are going to have leftovers.
If you prepare for this ahead of time it does not need to be a problem.
Most of what you cook can be frozen so this can be a great solution to the problem.
You can then decide on what you want to eat and follow the recipe as it is written.
This will give you way more food than you can possibly eat.
However if you freeze it you can eat it over the next several weeks.
The key is to make sure that you freeze it in individual portions, if you put it all in one container once you thaw it out you can't freeze it again.
Small freezer bags can really come in handy for this.
The other option that you have if you don't want to freeze the left over food is to adjust the recipes so that they are appropriate for one person.
In some cases this is fairly easy to do, the recipe should tell you how many it serves, just divide everything by that number.
This approach will work in some cases but not all.
There will be times when you won't be able to adjust the recipe because of the ingredients that need to be used.
For example you couldn't cook a turkey dinner for one person because you can't find a turkey that small.
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