Dinner for One: Grocery shopping and cooking for the single grad student

Last time, I discussed some of my favorite meals to make (including pizza toast; new this year – pizza quesadillas). This time, I’ll talk about some of the skills and things you should learn when cooking and grocery shopping for you, yourself, and you.

First, you should learn how to cut onions into sixths (or any other fruit or vegetable into any unintuitive fraction). My current meal schedule involves a lot of cereal for breakfast, a lot of sandwiches for lunch, and dinner on a three-day rotation, meaning that I eat the same dinner for three days in a row, then switch to a different dinner for the next three days. Sometimes I cook all three portions at the same time, or if it’s a quick meal, I cook each night. If I’m only cooking one portion, I sometimes only need 1/6 of an onion. 1/6 is a third of 1/2, which divides the onion up nicely to fit in my meal schedule.

Next, get used to knowing exactly how many cups of milk and slices of bread you have. Unless you want to make multiple trips to the grocery store every week, that’s got to last you until the end of the week. Additionally, you are solely responsible for consuming any food you buy; nobody’s going to take care of those leftovers for you. On the flip side, at least nobody’s going to eat your cookies when you’re not looking. But on the other hand, if you decide it’s a good idea to try the new broccoli flavored Oreos, nobody’s going to eat those for you when you’re not looking.

On a related note, after some time tracking your bread and milk consumption, you will probably also be able to give a full inventory of the contents of your fridge. [At this moment of writing: 2 cups of milk, 1 stick of butter, 9 eggs, 1/4 of a batch of bread pudding (3 pieces), a can of Sprite, a can of Coke, an old apple, ~1/2 pound of baby carrots, ~1/2 jar of jam, canned wine, a bottle of cherry soda, 9(?)/16 of a pan of pumpkin cranberry bread, 3/8 of a block of cheese, wrinkly grapes, leftover pumpkin, 2 dinners worth of leftover baked chicken/broccoli/carrots/onion/potatoes, and assorted sauces/condiments (ketchup, chili, siracha mustard, Italian dressing, fake hoisin sauce, bbq sauce, and mayonnaise).]

When you go grocery shopping, you should buy family-sized packages of food because it’s (usually) cheaper by ounce, you’ll eventually eat it all, and after all, you are a family. Of one.

Since grocery shopping is also your social activity for the weekend and nobody is waiting for you at home to go to a movie or be driven to a soccer game, feel free to spend some time deliberating in the aisle whether saving 1.24 cents per ounce on generic orange juice is worth it to you. Other things to consider: Is paying 50 cents extra for Frozen-themed cheese sticks a good deal if they amuse you when you pack them in your lunches? Should you buy a Hot Wheels car so you can tell everyone you finally bought a car? How much peanut butter is too much for a single person to have?

Finally, eat ice cream directly from the carton. Because you can.

Bonus: If you also don’t have a car, avoid buying any liquids (bottled water, milk, soda, juice, coffee, alcohol) if possible, because liquids are dense and thus, heavy. Any groceries you buy, you carry.

Bonus 2: In the same vein, shop for pasta by which kind has the highest packing fraction. Space is valuable in your backpack/grocery bag/whatever you’re using to haul all your food home. Shells, penne, and anything spiral shaped takes up too much space. Macaroni is pretty good. You get a higher packing fraction from spaghetti, but spaghetti is harder to eat and doesn’t adhere to sauces well.

Winter

Back in Ann Arbor, winter was creeping into the city when I returned to work. I stayed in Michigan through Christmas and New Year’s; there was snow, sleet, ice, and a day of negative 40 wind chill; I trekked through the Arboretum in the middle of a snowstorm, in single digit weather, and while the entire thing was a giant ice slick; then one day we woke up, the snow was gone, the weather was warm(ish), and spring had arrived. That actually sums up all of December, January, and February pretty well. Michigan did get some snow, but the roads stayed clear and the temperatures (mostly) high enough that I ended up biking to band a couple times in January and February, which was not the case last year. At the end of January/beginning of February, the university declared classes cancelled for two days for extreme cold. Air temperatures were in the single digits with wind chills of negative 30 to negative 40. I agreed with the first day of no classes because a significant number of students have to travel to campus, wait for buses, walk to class, etc. The second day was cold, but not that cold. Cornell semi-regularly got down to negative 30 wind chill and their response was to send out a mass email telling people to wear layers and be careful when walking to class. This time, I did, however, wear my winter jacket for the first time in four or five years.

The Arboretum in a snowstorm

In the middle of January, I returned to Hill Auditorium to see the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra play Mozart, including the Requiem accompanied by local high school and community choruses. A week later, Ann Arbor was hit by a snow storm. Naturally, I thought that was a great time to go to the Arboretum to get some pictures. It was a fantastic time to go to the Arboretum. The only other people dumb, I mean hearty, enough to be there were runners and other photographers. The next day, in 11-degree temperatures, I returned to the Arboretum for more pictures. Funnily enough, I only saw about 11 other living things there – five cross country skiers, two snowshoers, some people walking, and two dogs. I made one last winter trip to the Arboretum near the end of February, when the snow was packed down and had gone through several freeze/thaw cycles so all the paths were pretty slick. Not dangerously icy (and still better than the sidewalk outside of my apartment that spawns black ice every time it sleets, or rains and freezes, or snows and melts and refreezes), but I wouldn’t have recommended it for children, the elderly, or anyone who hasn’t had to run for the school bus at six thirty am on partially shoveled frozen sidewalks.

One day later.  Eleven degrees at the Arboretum

The last of my winter adventures were a walk at the Barton Nature Area with a family from church and a bike ride on the Border to Border trail to Gallup Park on the first moderately warm/clear day in March. I’d never been to the Barton Nature Area because it’s in one of those areas of Ann Arbor that’s a pain in the neck to get to without a car. It’s next to Bird Hills Nature Area, which I also still haven’t been to, and has some unpaved trails and a dam. The Border to Border trail, on the other hand, is fairly accessible. I get on the trail about halfway along its path through Ann Arbor, and on this occasion, I biked in the Gallup Park direction. It was in the low forties, with sun, and unfortunately I wasn’t the only one taking advantage of the break in the weather. Most of the time the pedestrians and bikers are decent at staying to the right, giving signals and/or space when passing, and generally not running each other over, but not this day. There were multiple people walking straight down the middle of the trail, stepping into my path, and weaving back and forth.

Top: Melting Arboretum.  Bottom left: Barton Dam.

Bottom right: The Huron River from Gallup Park on the Border to Border Trail.

So that was winter. Research, questionable outdoor activity, and I also TA’d, again, possibly for the last time. I might write more about my teaching experience, or I might post another five hundred words on the contents of my refrigerator. If you’re really fortunate, you might get both.

Food, Glorious Food, and Denouement [Singapore 2018]

Besides family and tourism, the other aspect of a trip to Singapore is the food. We ate out a lot, because the cost of prepared food isn’t that high compared to the cost of groceries, and there are numerous dishes that you can’t get in America. Or at least you can’t get good versions of them in America. While Ann Arbor has a bar for every day of the month (at least), it’s surprisingly lacking in Chinese food. There’s one place off North Campus that’s good, then a couple American-Chinese restaurants around town, and a Panda Express at the commons. So this was my opportunity to get some decent Chinese food, plus a mix of Singaporean/Malaysian/Indian food, plus the kind of weird stuff.

We had satay a couple times. I like the meat, but as you may have guessed based on the three hundred peanut butter and jam sandwiches I eat every year, I’m really in it for the peanut sauce. One night we met up with some of my father’s friends for dinner at a Peranakan place and got chicken curry. Another night we had dinner with a couple of my aunt’s and one of my mother’s cousins and had dim sum and duck. There was a lunch with family friends where we just got dim sum. We had variations on noodles, bao, chicken rice, porridge, kaya toast, egg tarts, pineapple tarts, Pop-Tarts – wait, not that last one. There was a lot of food.

Clockwise from top left: Duck, dimsum, satay, curry

And then there were green worms, tentacles, and the obligatory I-went-to-a-tropical-place coconut. The green worms are pandan-flavored noodles, and are part of cendol, shaved ice topped with coconut milk and palm sugar syrup served with the noodles. You can also add other ingredients, like red beans, durian, corn (. . . why?). It’s good. Then probably the most unusual thing I ate was the tentacles (cuttlefish). Tasted fine to me. But the first time I ate blue cheese I didn’t realize it was blue cheese until three-quarters through the meal, and I’ve had the assorted-body-parts-and-fungus-soup at Chinese restaurants, which was also fine. The coconut was a coconut.

Clockwise from top left: Cuttlefish, cendol, crab*, and coconut

*Soft shell, dry ice for theatrical effect

Now, to end this series of posts. To summarize, we went to the following:
Day 5: Singapore Botanic Garden (with National Orchid Garden) and Southern Ridges
Day 6: Gardens by the Bay
Day 7: Sentosa – Trick Eye Museum and S.E.A. Aquarium
Day 8: Jurong Bird Park and Night Safari
Day 11: Asian Civilisations Museum
Day 12: Sentosa – Fort Siloso
Day 13: Singapore Zoo and River Safari
Day 15: Bukit Timah Hill
Day 17: Singapore National Museum (same link as the Asian Civilisations Museum)
Day 20: Hong Kong

There’s nothing we saw that I would categorically tell people to avoid, but your enjoyment may vary depending on your idea of fun. For example, if you hate sweating, Singapore is the wrong country for you, but if you find yourself there anyway, you may not want to haul yourself up Bukit Timah Hill. Or if you have a phobia of coral, the aquarium is probably not the right place for you. But if you like flamingos, go to the bird park.

Within a little over two weeks, I managed to see ~85% of my extended family, including 13 out of the 14 great-grandchildren on both sides of the family; eat a slightly ridiculous variety and quantity of food; and visit over a dozen quality tourist attractions. I’m glad I made the trip when I did. It’s been awhile since I had a big vacation, and it was a good time to go. Grad school vacation days are probably more flexible than real job vacation days. Hopefully it’s less than eleven years until I see my relatives again.

With that, we return to regularly scheduled posts about the Revolution (new season, same old losing record¹), grad student life (why do I have one-sixth of an onion and two dozen eggs in the fridge?), what I’m reading/watching (we got Netflix), and Ann Arbor in winter. Because if you guessed that snowstorms, negative thirty windchills, single digit temperatures, and black ice were absolutely no deterrent to me going to work, grocery shopping, or trekking through the Arboretum, you’re right.

Singapore skyline at sunset

¹Except, unbelievably(?), worse than usual.