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.