Cooking for one

If you're like most Singaporeans, you're not interested in making a habit out of meal planning and preparation. And honestly you don't have to. The simple reason is: you can easily get food within walking distance and available 24/7. These days, it is not surprising that most Singaporean are not used to cooking for themselves. Cooking can present a special challenge for a few people, when they are living abroad and suddently find food is not as easily available as if like turning on a tap at home.Unless you are motivated to cook and eat healthier food at home, you probably lived on takeaways. The challenge is how do you eat a varied, healthy diet without relying on the takeaways. And the answer to the challenge is to learn some basic economical cooking. Economical cooking for yourself calls for careful planning so that you do not have tons of leftovers and having to throw away food. But what about number of meals? Portion sizes? Freezing factors? Large versus small portion purchase? It can all boil down to frugality.


What has worked well for us is to double the portion of what we cook but divide it into two smaller portions after it is cooked. Eat one right away and wrap and freeze the other (well labeled, of course). In that way you have already cooked for lunch or dinner for another day. Think about cooking once and eating twice whenever you are cooking. In order that the energy or fuel for cooking is not wasted, we carefully plan our meal, for example, if roasting our meat, we try to cook a pudding or cake at the same time so that the oven is fully used. Or have a 2-3 hours cooking session, which should give us food for two ar three days and thus save us time, trouble and fuel. Furthermore, you may just be able not to cook everyday in the kitchen, if you are really efficient!