Cooking for oneself

 Cooking for one person is not as fun as cooking for someone else, but there are advantages: you can do it whenever you want, the criticism is all yours, no one complains about the details. You can experiment, you can combine recipes and ingredients in clever and unusual ways and if you don't like it, you can toss it in the trash and have Triscuits and goat cheese for dinner, which is always a delicious meal.  If you make something really good it is sort of sad that no one is there to share it but since that happens somewhat rarely it isn't really a deterrent to solitary cooking. 

However, the one big negative about cooking for yourself is the clean-up.  If you cook for someone else, or many others, you can often wrangle someone into helping you with the mess.  Or if you leave the mess for a while, someone usually starts to feel guilty and they at least do some triage in the dirty kitchen. This NEVER happens when you cook for yourself. The mess is yours. Sure, you can ignore it for the evening and then look at it in the morning, which is so incredibly sad and disgusting that it happens rarely in my tiny home. 

Some people are neat cooks. They clean up as they go, pop things into the dishwasher (a dishwasher!  What a concept!) and get dinner on the table without the kitchen looking like a small, localized tornado ran through it.  I am not a neat cook. I am a slobby cook. Small bits of parsley or garlic or ginger are always lurking about. Those little papers from onions (I believe they are known as 'onion skins') seems to always be on my kitchen floor, with garlic papers as well. If flour is involved there are always patches of what can only be described as "scabs" on the kitchen counter, hard little rough-edged bits stuck on until one scrapes them off. My cooking top is an electro-magnetic thing, smooth as glass (because it is a kind of glass) and thus shows every tiny drop of everything, and looks pathetically sloppy once cooking (or even boiling water) begins.

Is it no wonder that I sometime opt for eating nothing for dinner, except the above mentioned Triscuits and cheese?  (I prefer the little thin ones, by the way.) Yes, there will be Triscuit crumbs and cheese detritus but it's a lot simpler to clean up that mess than wet and dry and chopped and grated and strained things. Even making a simple salad means some oil and acid will be dribbling somewhere.

There is no solution to this problem because I live alone and plan on doing so until the End of Days. However, I can see my eating habits getting whittled down the older I get.  There will be no canned soup or canned chili but there will be plenty of hard-cooked eggs on toast (with mayo) and I will bite the bullet and make batches of food, like pasta sauce and chili, soup and bread, cookies and ice cubes, and store them in freezer bags so all I need to do is thaw them out and heat and eat.  (In the case of cookies, that's not even necessary: frozen cookies are wonderfully tasty!)  Of course the ice cubes will remain frozen at all times. One must have one's cocktail before diving into the plethora of frozen goodies.  Or maybe, just maybe, a really nice restaurant will appear in my neighborhood that has good take-out and I can indulge in that now and then.

Tonight I am making a soup..... combining two recipes, using homemade chicken broth, some sort of coconut-curry-spicy-chicken soup with rice noodles, spinach and a large glass of white wine. It will be okay. It will be warming and tasty (I hope) and filling. And I will put off the cleaning until it's bedtime..... and acknowledge that solitary cooking is like solitary living: there are ups and downs, goods and bads, but these are my choices and I am sticking to them.